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Bullpen Bulletins: Stan Gets Political

BACK IN THE MID 1960s, just as I was in the process of becoming the Marvel Fanboy I remain to this day, we didn't have comics websites, or YouTube videos or even mimeographed comics fanzines to tell us what was going on. All we had was Stan Lee's ingenious "Marvel Bullpen Bulletins", giving us glimpses inside the Marvel offices and snippets of information about what we could expect to see this and next month from Marvel. The very first published Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page, from Journey into Mystery 122 (Nov 1965). At the time, Stan was making announcements about various Marvel Comics in text boxes, often yellow, on the various letters pages. This would be replaced by the Bullpen page, but the earliest examples appeared to be a mix of the two. The Bullpen page made its debut in Journey into Mystery 122 (Nov 1965), which was on sale on 2 Sep 1965. This was a week before the December issues of Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man , often cited (wrongly) as carryin...

Marvel at the Oscars - an interlude

I WAS WATCHING THE OSCARS a few nights ago and was delighted to witness four Academy Awards go to Marvel Studios movies. In addition, Black Panther (2018) and Avengers: Infinity War (2018) gathered a further five nominations between them. That's bonanza year for Marvel - nine nominations and four Awards - and a record for comic book-based movies. Marvel Productions' Black Panther racked up a formidable seven nominations at this year's Oscars, winning in an unprecedented three categories. It's a great achievement for Stan and Jack, but I wish Don MacGregor had been given more credit for creating the bulk of the storyline. There was a time, a few years back when the term "comic book movie" was an insult that the Hollywood establishment hurled around when a movie they hated was successful. Not any more ... It appears to me that big studio pictures based on comic books are undergoing the same transformation that science fiction and fantasy movies underwent fro...

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From Horrors to Heroes

AS THE DAYS of Marty Goodman's Atlas Comics drew to a close in the late 1950s, the publisher was casting around for the Next Big Thing. Locked in to a draconian distribution contract with arch rivals DC Comics, Goodman was limited to a tight eight titles per month and if he needed to launch a new title, he was forced to cancel an existing one. So, feeling that mystery and science fiction was the coming trend Goodman decided to launch three new comics to complement the existing Journey into Mystery, World of Fantasy and Strange Tales titles. The new books were Strange Worlds , beginning in December 1958 and replacing the cancelled Navy Combat , and Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish , both debuting in January 1959, replacing the cancelled Homer the Happy Ghost and Miss America . Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales had been around since the twilight of the Golden Age and changed in content according to Martin Goodman's take on his customers' tastes. So they bega...

Marvel Masterwork Pin-ups

AT THE DAWN OF MARVEL COMICS , back in 1961, Editor Stan Lee must have known he had a big hill to climb. He presided over a comic line that had once been the largest in the business, and was now one of the smallest. This wasn't due to Lee's poor handling of the comics, but a direct result of publisher Martin Goodman's unsound business decisions. In 1957, Goodman had decided to close down his own Atlas magazine distribution company and  strike a deal with the third party distributor American News to get his publications to the stands. Just months later, American News went out of business, leaving Goodman's magazines, including the comics, with no route to the newsstands. In the end, Goodman was able to do a deal with arch-rivals Independent News (distributors of DC Comics), but was forced to accept an eight titles per month cap on his comics line. At the beginning of 1959, the old Atlas Comics company was limping along, using the few artists who'd stuck with Stan thr...

Separated at Birth 2 - another comic covers interlude

HERE'S SOMETHING A LITTLE MORE LIGHT-HEARTED than my more recent posts ... another look at the many tropes, cliches and chestnuts that show up over and over again in the cover designs of our favourite comics. I'd barely scratched the surface of this subject on one of my very early entries in this blog, so I'm giving the subject another outing. I should clarify that Marvel and DC comics took quite a different approach to how they created their covers. DC had always traditionally created their covers first, often using the idea behind a "grabby" cover to drive the plot of the story inside the comic. Both Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz took this approach with the DC books they edited. Marvel, though, did exactly the opposite, creating their covers after the interior art was completed. This meant that Marvel would often create symbolic covers that might not illustrate a scene from the story inside. But you'll see what I'm getting at as we go along ... IDE...