Marvel Comics - The Untold Story
danGP
Posts: 65
"Marvel Comics The Untold Story" is published later this month. Here's the Amazon blurb. Sounds interesting.
From a tiny office on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s, a struggling company named "Marvel Comics" introduced a series of bright-costumed superhero characters distinguished by smart banter and compellingly human flaws. "Spider-Man", "The Fantastic Four", "Captain America", "The Incredible Hulk"," The Avengers", "Iron Man", "Thor"," The X-Men", "Daredevil" - these superheroes quickly won children's hearts and sparked the imagination of pop artists, public intellectuals, and campus radicals. Over the course of half a century, Marvel's epic universe would become the most elaborate fictional narrative in history and serve as a modern American mythology for millions of readers. Interweaving history, anecdotes, and analysis, Sean Howe traces Marvel's decades - long rise to a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, revealing how it weathered "Wall Street" machinations, Hollywood failures, legal battles, and the collapse of the comic book market. He shows how Marvel's identity has continually shifted, careening between scrappy underdog and corporate behemoth. He also introduces the men behind the magic, including self-made publisher Martin Goodman, energetic editor Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby, the WWII veteran and co-creator of many of the company's marquee characters. A story of fertile imaginations, lifelong friendships, action-packed fistfights, reformed criminals, unlikely alliances, and third-act betrayals that incorporates more than one hundred original interviews with Marvel insiders then and now, "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" is a gripping narrative of one of the most dominant pop cultural forces in contemporary America.
Here's a link to the author Sean Howe's tumblr page - http://seanhowe.tumblr.com/. It's well worth a look.
From a tiny office on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s, a struggling company named "Marvel Comics" introduced a series of bright-costumed superhero characters distinguished by smart banter and compellingly human flaws. "Spider-Man", "The Fantastic Four", "Captain America", "The Incredible Hulk"," The Avengers", "Iron Man", "Thor"," The X-Men", "Daredevil" - these superheroes quickly won children's hearts and sparked the imagination of pop artists, public intellectuals, and campus radicals. Over the course of half a century, Marvel's epic universe would become the most elaborate fictional narrative in history and serve as a modern American mythology for millions of readers. Interweaving history, anecdotes, and analysis, Sean Howe traces Marvel's decades - long rise to a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, revealing how it weathered "Wall Street" machinations, Hollywood failures, legal battles, and the collapse of the comic book market. He shows how Marvel's identity has continually shifted, careening between scrappy underdog and corporate behemoth. He also introduces the men behind the magic, including self-made publisher Martin Goodman, energetic editor Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby, the WWII veteran and co-creator of many of the company's marquee characters. A story of fertile imaginations, lifelong friendships, action-packed fistfights, reformed criminals, unlikely alliances, and third-act betrayals that incorporates more than one hundred original interviews with Marvel insiders then and now, "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" is a gripping narrative of one of the most dominant pop cultural forces in contemporary America.
Here's a link to the author Sean Howe's tumblr page - http://seanhowe.tumblr.com/. It's well worth a look.
Comments
Hopefully now that my wife is done with the 50 Shades Trilogy I'll get the iPad back and will be able to read this!
3:-O
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8433000/an-excerpt-sean-howe-marvel-comics-untold-story
Dynamite stuff! :-O
The Gwen Stacy bit was interesting. I had heard the cover story that Conway mentioned (Stan not knowing about her death in advance). My manager at the comic store that I worked at had heard something similar (Stan said that he was in Europe at the time the decision was made, and that he was furious to find out what had happened when he returned.) Not sure where he got that version, but I know he met him in 1982 or so.
Are you saying that the distribution failures had nothing to do with the cultural problems comics were having in the early 50s? They were an entirely separate matter? Or are you parsing the difference between the Code and the Wertham/subcommittee troubles?
I'm not asking rhetorically- and I haven't independently researched this, so I am very curious how you came to feel this way.
Correlation does not equal causation. There was also an assertion the comics that weren't approved by the code weren't distributed and this is simply false. Dell didn't subscribe to the code and was BY FAR the best selling comics company. Not even close, and Walt Disney's Comics and Stories sold 3 - 5 MILLION copies a month during the mid 50's.
It was the collapse of distribution. EC was killed by the bankruptcy of Leader News (and poor subject matter choices...M.D? Psychoanalysis?), as were many other smaller publishers. The two top distributor American News and Independent News didn't need or want the smaller publishers, especially since ALL publications aimed at younger readers were dropping rapidly as TV started to become ubiquitous. Why BUY entertainment for your kids when they could get it for free on TV? Comics were low end, with a tiny profit margin. Same for the pulps. Why sell a 25 cent pulp or a 10 cent comic when you could sell a 50 cent slick magazine, double (or 5 times) the profit in the same shelf space.
American News had Atlas (Goodman's self distribution fell apart around 1955 IIRC) and Dell, so they didn't need or want other comics publishers, and Independent News was owned by the same company as National Periodicals (DC). MAD got a reprieve because it was selling VERY well, but when Leader went under, they returned bundles of comics to publishers unsold, causing them to just quit selling comics. Fawcett, if you recall, gave up comics in 1953 due to falling sales, long before Wertham published his book...they stuck with puzzle magazines and paperback books until they got their hands on Dennis the Menace, at which point they published comics again.
When American News went under in 1957, Dell went out on their own, although some sources say they went on their own before things got bad simply because they felt they could do a better job with their magazines (many still survive as Penny Press magazines). This pretty much killed what was left of the pulps, and comics were down to next to nothing.
Wethem had as much to do with sales of comics collapsing as Tipper Gore had to do with record sales dropping, or southern preachers telling people to burn their rock and roll records in the 50's because they promoted race mixing.
My assertion, and that of people a hell of a lot more versed in this than me is: Wertham caused headaches, but distribution, profit margins and shifting tastes killed EC, Toby Press, and the other publishers. For us to keep blaming Wertham for comics sales going into a tailspin and holding him up as this all-powerful villain is just inaccurate.
St. John Publishing was another company that was doing pretty well in the early ’50s. Then the publisher, Archer St. John, died in 1955, and his son took over and ran the business into the ground through a series of bad decisions.
It's also hard to say how much his disastrous testimony before Congress rattled him. He said in a number of interviews that for the second half of his testimony, he was coming down from the pills and went back to his office thinking he'd just put everyone there out of work.
Still, if he would have kept up with the titles, they loom large in history, but the books sold around 300k to 400k at their peak, and the horror trend was fading fast. MAD sold much more by the last issue, but I don't remember its numbers. Once Leader News died, they probably would have gone away, as the "Picto-Fiction" magazines were pretty much stillborn because of the Leader News collapse.
Mad had some imitators as well, but not nearly as many. Its real savior was Kurtzman forcing Gaines to switch Mad to the magazine format in 1955, which allowed it to keep a strong presence at newstands thanks to its increased cover price.
However, I don't know that I would go as far as you do in the comparisons to the ultimately ineffective attacks on the music industry. If there was one thing that I feel Hajdu made a compelling case for in 10 Cent Plague, it was a reminder of how soft and easy of a target the comics medium was at the point when it was targeted. By contrast, when Tipper Gore took on the music industry, she was taking on an enormous, connected, monied industry. Run by powerful people with friends. People who were already successfully selling their wares to adults. Record companies had lobbyists, industry groups, more ways to fight back. And, more to the point, they already had a huge and influential place in the culture. I think comparisons between music and comics as industries are always pretty fraught. Because even in their heyday of millions of dimes spent, comics have never had an influence in the culture to the scale of music. If it is hard to believe that a small group of hysteria creating individuals could do great damage to comics as an industry, I think the context to keep in mind is that the comics industry, in the 1950s, was barely that. They were a very soft target with little respect, clout, or organization. Perhaps the first, most organized thing that American comics ever did as an industry was to come together and write the Code in such a way as to try to run some of the competition out of town.
Even if I see your point that a distribution cliff was already looming for comics in the 1950s, I think the Code did end up changing the comics that survived the economic woes. Not only because the writers of the Code got the opportunity to strike a blow to EC and Crime Doesn't Pay, but also because the fallout made comics more conservative and narrow in genre.
Now. . . maybe sales pressures would have ended up doing the same thing, without the headlines and the witch hunts. Maybe. It is hard to argue such a hypothetical. But the fact remains that the Code (clearly in concert with the changes in distribution) changed what got published in American comics. The industry seemed to do a good job of letting itself get scared into a self-regulation that narrowed the scope of what was considered safe enough to put in a comic. And that change lasted decades and took a long time to undo.
I agree that correlation does not prove causation. But I also don't know that the correlating facts around distribution so completely invalidate the role that Wertham, the subcommittee, and the many people that jumped on that story played in changing comics in America. I can see your desire for Wertham et all to not be seen as the sole cause. That makes sense to me-- that there would be a narrative bias to try to make it that simple.
But I think they were A cause. At least in having a chilling effect in what got published. And to disincentivizing trying to test boundaries and publish for adults, particularly in the genres of crime and horror. I think that had a lasting effect. And while I think it is wise to not overassign blame, I think it we should also be careful to not underestimate the effect that Wertham and the subcommittee had either.
I am about halfway through the book and will have a LOT to say about it, but Bob Greenberger has some issues with the book. I disagree with him on how the book should have treated the things done at DC, but I do agree with him on what I have read so far, and even if you don't agree, it's interesting to see the perspective of someone who was there for some of what is being written about.