IN THE EARLY DAYS of Marvel, Stan Lee hadn't been quite so protective of the characters as he would later become. I believe, even in 1962 and 1963, he saw Marvel as no different to Atlas. It was just comic books, not the great American novel. But by the end of 1963, that was beginning to change. In the last entry in this blog, I included a table showing how Stan had farmed out the script-writing of the early (B-team) Marvel stories to diverse hands , including his brother Larry Lieber, Ernie Hart, Robert Bernstein and the great Jerry Siegel - but was less than satisfied with the results. I say "B-team" here, but it's worth noting that Stan didn't assign the Western and Millie scripting to anyone else. I can only guess, but I'd suggest that the super-hero revival was very much in its early days, and Stan didn't want to entrust proven money-makers to writers unfamiliar with the established Marvel house style. Also, Stan had been burned a couple of times in...
IT'S PROBABLY hard for younger fans to understand just how slim the pickings were for those of us who followed comic book superheroes back in the 1960s. As early as 1966, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman had licensed the rights to his Marvel characters to television. The Marvel Superheroes cartoon show was made in colour, though no one had colour televisions back in 1966. And, yes, we really did sit that close to the tv set back then. The screens were so small you couldn't see anything unless you were no more than three feet away. Pretty sure all those cathode rays fried my brain ... Even Goodman didn't realise what he had, and seemed content to let the producers of the Marvel Superheroes cartoon show do pretty much what they wanted in return for almost no money. The big return would come, reasoned Marty, when the cartoons propelled the sales of his comic books into the stratosphere, just the way the Batman tv show had done for DC's Batman and Detective Comics . But...