Marvel
Worldwide, Inc., commonly referred to as Marvel Comics and formerly
Marvel Publishing, Inc. and Marvel Comics Group, is an American
company that publishes comic books and related media. In 2009, The
Walt Disney Company acquired Marvel Entertainment, Marvel Worldwide's
parent company, for $4.24 billion.
Marvel started in 1939 as
Timely Publications, and by the early 1950s had generally become
known as Atlas Comics. Marvel's modern incarnation dates from 1961,
with the company later that year launching Fantastic Four and other
superhero titles created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others.
Marvel counts among its
characters such well-known properties as Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron
Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Thor and Captain America;
antagonists such as Doctor Doom, the Green Goblin, Magneto, Galactus,
and the Red Skull; and others. Most of Marvel's fictional characters
operate in a single reality known as the Marvel Universe, with
locales set in real-life cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Timely
Martin
Goodman founded the company later known as Marvel Comics under the
name Timely Publications in 1939, publishing comic books under the
imprint Timely Comics. Goodman, a pulp magazine publisher who had
started with a Western pulp in 1933, was expanding into the emerging,
and by then already highly popular new medium of comic books.
Launching his new line from his existing company's offices at 330
West 42nd Street, New York City, New York, he officially held the
titles of editor, managing editor, and business manager, with Abraham
Goodman officially listed as publisher.
Timely's
first publication, Marvel Comics #1 (cover dated Oct. 1939),
included the first appearance of Carl Burgos' android superhero the
Human Torch, and the first generally available appearance of Bill
Everett's anti-hero Namor the Sub-Mariner, among other features. The
issue was a great success, with it and a second printing the
following month selling, combined, nearly 900,000 copies. While its
contents came from an outside packager, Funnies, Inc., Timely by the
following year had its own staff in place.
The company's first true
editor, writer-artist Joe Simon, teamed with imminent industry-legend
Jack Kirby to create one of the first patriotically themed
superheroes, Captain America, in Captain America Comics #1. (March
1941) It, too, proved a major sales hit, with sales of nearly one million.
While
no other Timely character would achieve the success of these
"big three", some notable heroes, many of which continue to
appear in modern-day retcon appearances and flashbacks include the
Whizzer, Miss America, the Destroyer, the original Vision, and the
Angel. Timely also published one of humor cartoonist Basil
Wolverton's best-known features, "Powerhouse Pepper", as
well as a line of children's funny-animal comics featuring popular
characters like Super Rabbit and the duo Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal.
Goodman
hired his wife's cousin, Stanley Lieber, as a general office
assistant in 1939. When editor Simon left the company in late 1941,
Goodman made Lieber, by then writing pseudonymously as "Stan
Lee" interim editor of the comics line, a position Lee kept for
decades except for three years during his military service in World
War II. Lee wrote extensively for Timely, contributing to a number of
different titles.
As the late 1940s went on,
Timely branched out into new genres, notably romance, Western and
crime. Goodman's business strategy involved having his various
magazines and comic books published by a number of corporations all
operating out of the same office and with the same staff. One of
these shell companies through which Timely Comics was published was
named Marvel Comics by at least Marvel Mystery Comics #55 (May 1944).
As well, some comics' covers, such as All Surprise Comics #12 (Winter
1946-47), were labeled "A Marvel Magazine" many years
before Goodman would formally adopt the name in 1961.
Atlas Comics
The
post-war American comic market saw superheroes falling out of
fashion. Goodman's comic book line dropped them for the most part and
expanded into a wider variety of genres than even Timely had
published, featuring horror, Westerns, humor, funny animal, men's
adventure-drama, giant monster, crime, and war comics, and later
adding jungle books, romance titles, espionage, and even medieval
adventure, Bible stories and sports. Like other publishers, Goodman
also courted female readers with mostly humorous comics about models
and career women.
Goodman began using the
globe logo of Atlas, a newsstand-distribution company he owned, on
comics cover-dated November 1951. This united a line put out by the
same publisher, staff, and freelancers through 59 shell companies,
from Animirth Comics to Zenith Publications, under the umbrella name
Atlas Comics.
Atlas also published a
plethora of children's and teen humor titles, including Dan DeCarlo's
Homer the Happy Ghost (à la Casper the Friendly Ghost) and
Homer Hooper (à la Archie Andrews). Atlas unsuccessfully
attempted to revive superheroes from late 1953 to mid-1954, with the
Human Torch (art by Syd Shores and Dick Ayers, variously), the
Sub-Mariner (drawn and most stories written by Bill Everett), and
Captain America (writer Stan Lee, artist John Romita Sr.).
Untitled
Marvel
The
first modern comic books under the Marvel Comics brand were the
science-fiction anthology Journey into Mystery #69 and the teen-humor
title Patsy Walker #95 (both cover dated June 1961), which each
displayed an "MC" box on its cover. Then, in the wake of DC
Comics' success in reviving superheroes in the late 1950s and early
1960s, particularly with the Flash, Green Lantern, and other members
of the team the Justice League of America, Marvel followed suit. The
introduction of modern Marvel's first superhero team, in The
Fantastic Four #1, (Nov. 1961), began establishing the company's
reputation. The majority of its superhero stories were written by
editor-in-chief Stan Lee. The company continued to publish a
smattering of Western comics such as Rawhide Kid, humor comics such
as Millie the Model, and romance comics such as Love Romances, and
added the war comic Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos.
Editor-writer
Lee and freelance artist Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four, reminiscent of
the non-superpowered adventuring quartet the Challengers of the
Unknown that Kirby had created for DC in 1957, originated in a Cold
War culture that led their creators to revise the superhero
conventions of previous eras to better reflect the psychological
spirit of their age. Eschewing such comic book tropes as secret
identities and even costumes at first, having a monster as one of the
heroes, and having its characters bicker and complain in what was
later called a "superheroes in the real world" approach,
the series represented a change that proved to be a great success.
Marvel began publishing further superhero titles featuring such
heroes and antiheroes as the Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, Ant-Man, Iron
Man, the X-Men, and Daredevil, and such memorable antagonists as
Doctor Doom, Magneto, Galactus, the Green Goblin, and Doctor Octopus.
Lee and Steve Ditko generated the most successful new series in The
Amazing Spider-Man. Marvel even lampooned itself and other comics
companies in a parody comic, Not Brand Echh (a play on Marvel's
dubbing of other companies as "Brand Echh", à la the
then-common phrase "Brand X").
Marvel's
comics had a reputation for focusing on characterization to a
greater extent than most superhero comics before them. This applied
to The Amazing Spider-Man in particular. Its young hero suffered from
self-doubt and mundane problems like any other teenager. Marvel often
presents flawed superheroes, freaks, and misfits—unlike the
perfect, handsome, athletic heroes found in previous traditional
comic books. Some Marvel heroes looked like villains and monsters. In
time, this non-traditional approach would revolutionize comic books.
Writer Geoff Boucher in 2009 reflected that, "Superman and DC
Comics instantly seemed like boring old Pat Boone; Marvel felt like
The Beatles and the British Invasion. It was Kirby's artwork with its
tension and psychedelia that made it perfect for the times, or was it
Lee's bravado and melodrama, which was somehow insecure and brash at
the same time?"
Lee,
with his charming personality and relentless salesmanship of the
company, became one of the best-known names in comics. His sense of
humor and generally lighthearted manner became the "voice"
that permeated the stories, the letters and news-pages, and the
hyperbolic house ads of that era's Marvel Comics. He fostered a
clubby fan-following with Lee's exaggerated depiction of the Bullpen
(Lee's name for the staff) as one big, happy family. This included
printed kudos to the artists, who eventually co-plotted the stories
based on the busy Lee's rough synopses or even simple spoken
concepts, in what became known as the Marvel Method, and contributed
greatly to Marvel's product and success. Kirby in particular is
generally credited for many of the cosmic ideas and characters of
Fantastic Four and The Mighty Thor, such as the Watcher, the Silver
Surfer and Ego the Living Planet, while Steve Ditko is recognized as
the driving artistic force behind the moody atmosphere and
street-level naturalism of The Amazing Spider-Man and the surreal
atmosphere of the Strange Tales mystical feature "Doctor
Strange". Lee, however, continues to receive credit for his
well-honed skills at dialogue and sense of storytelling, for his keen
hand at choosing and motivating artists and assembling creative
teams, and for his uncanny ability to connect with the
readers—not least through the nickname endearments he bestowed
in the credits and the monthly "Bullpen Bulletins" and
letters pages, giving readers humanizing hype about the likes of
"Jolly Jack Kirby," "Jaunty Jim Steranko",
"Rascally Roy Thomas", "Jazzy Johnny Romita", and
others, right down to letterers "Swingin' Sammy Rosen" and
"Adorable Artie Simek".
In 1968, while selling 50
million comic books a year, company founder Goodman revised the
constraining distribution arrangement with Independent News he had
reached under duress during the Atlas years, allowing him now to
release as many titles as demand warranted. In the fall of that year
he sold Marvel Comics and his other publishing businesses to the
Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation, which grouped them as the
subsidiary Magazine Management Company, with Goodman remaining as
publisher. In 1969, Goodman finally ended his distribution deal with
Independent by signing with Curtis Circulation Company.
In
1971, the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
approached Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee to do a comic book
story about drug abuse. Lee agreed and wrote a three-part Spider-Man
story portraying drug use as dangerous and unglamorous. However, the
industry's self-censorship board, the Comics Code Authority, refused
to approve the story because of the presence of narcotics, deeming
the context of the story irrelevant. Lee, with Goodman's approval,
published the story regardless in The Amazing Spider-Man #96-98
(May–July 1971), without the Comics Code seal. The market
reacted well to the storyline, and the CCA subsequently revised the
Code the same year.
Goodman retired as
publisher in 1972 and installed his son, Chip, as publisher. Shortly
thereafter, Lee succeeded him as publisher and also became Marvel's
president for a brief time. During his time as president, he
appointed as editor-in-chief Roy Thomas, who added "Stan Lee
Presents" to the opening page of each comic book.
A
series of new editors-in-chief oversaw the company during another
slow time for the industry. Once again, Marvel attempted to
diversify, and with the updating of the Comics Code achieved moderate
to strong success with titles themed to horror (The Tomb of Dracula),
martial arts, (Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu), sword-and-sorcery
(Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja), satire (Howard the Duck) and
science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey, "Killraven" in
Amazing Adventures, Star Trek, and, late in the decade, the
long-running Star Wars series). Some of these were published in
larger-format black and white magazines, that targeted mature
readers, under its Curtis Magazines imprint. Marvel was able to
capitalize on its successful superhero comics of the previous decade
by acquiring a new newsstand distributor and greatly expanding its
comics line. Marvel pulled ahead of rival DC Comics in 1972, during a
time when the price and format of the standard newsstand comic were
in flux. Goodman increased the price and size of Marvel's November
1971 cover-dated comics from 15 cents for 39 pages total to 25 cents
for 52 pages. DC followed suit, but Marvel the following month
dropped its comics to 20 cents for 36 pages, offering a lower-priced
product with a higher distributor discount.
Goodman, now disconnected
from Marvel, set up a new company called Seaboard Periodicals in
1974, reviving Marvel's old Atlas name for a new Atlas Comics line,
but this lasted only a year-and-a-half. In the mid-1970s a decline of
the newsstand distribution network affected Marvel. Cult hits such as
Howard the Duck fell victim to the distribution problems, with some
titles reporting low sales when in fact the first specialty comic
book stores resold them at a later date. But by the end of the
decade, Marvel's fortunes were reviving, thanks to the rise of direct
market distribution, selling through those same comics-specialty
stores instead of newsstands.
Marvel
held its own comic book convention, Marvelcon '75, in spring 1975,
and promised a Marvelcon '76. At the 1975 event, Stan Lee used a
Fantastic Four panel discussion to announce that Jack Kirby, the
artist co-creator of most of Marvel's signature characters, was
returning to Marvel after having left in 1970 to work for rival DC
Comics. In October 1976, Marvel, which already licensed reprints in
different countries, including the UK, created a superhero
specifically for the British market. Captain Britain debuted
exclusively in the UK, and later appeared in American comics.
In 1978, Jim Shooter became
Marvel's editor-in-chief. Although a controversial personality,
Shooter cured many of the procedural ills at Marvel, including
repeatedly missed deadlines. During Shooter's nine-year tenure as
editor-in-chief, Chris Claremont and John Byrne's run on the Uncanny
X-Men and Frank Miller's run on Daredevil became critical and
commercial successes. Shooter brought Marvel into the rapidly
evolving direct market, institutionalized creator royalties, starting
with the Epic Comics imprint for creator-owned material in 1982;
introduced company-wide crossover story arcs with Contest of
Champions and Secret Wars; and in 1986 launched the ultimately
unsuccessful New Universe line to commemorate the 25th anniversary of
the Marvel Comics imprint. Star Comics, a younger-oriented line than
the regular Marvel titles, was briefly successful during this period.
Despite Marvel's successes
in the early 1980s, however, it lost ground to rival DC in the latter
half of the decade, as many former Marvel stars defected to
competitor. DC scored critical and sales victories with titles and
limited series such as Watchmen, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,
Crisis on Infinite Earths, Byrne's revamp of Superman, and Alan
Moore's Swamp Thing. In 1986, Marvel was sold to New World
Entertainment, which within three years sold it to MacAndrews and
Forbes, owned by Revlon executive Ronald Perelman.
Marvel
earned a great deal of money and recognition during the comic-book
boom of the early 1990s, launching the successful 2099 line of comics
set in the future (Spider-Man 2099, etc.) and the creatively daring
though commercially unsuccessful Razorline imprint of superhero
comics created by novelist and filmmaker Clive Barker. Yet by the
middle of the decade, the industry had slumped, and in December 1996
Marvel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Marvel suffered a
major blow in early 1992, when seven of its most prized artists, Todd
McFarlane (known for his work on Spider-Man), Jim Lee (X-Men), Rob
Liefeld (X-Force), Marc Silvestri (Wolverine), Erik Larsen (The
Amazing Spider-Man), Jim Valentino (Guardians of the Galaxy), and
Whilce Portacio left to form the successful company Image Comics.
Marvel acquired the
comic-book distributor Heroes World Distribution to use as its own
exclusive distributor. As the industry's other major publishers made
exclusive distribution deals with other companies, the ripple effect
resulted in the survival of only one other major distributor in North
America, Diamond Comic Distributors Inc. In early 1997, when Marvel's
Heroes World endeavor failed, Diamond also forged an exclusive deal
with Marvel giving the company its own section of its comics catalog Previews.
Creatively
and commercially, the '90s were dominated by the use of gimmickry to
boost sales, such as variant covers, cover enhancements, swimsuit
issues. In 1991 Marvel began selling Marvel Universe Cards with
trading card maker SkyBox International. These were collectible
trading cards that featured the characters and events of the Marvel Universe.
Another common Marvel
practice of this period was regular company-wide crossovers that
threw the universe's continuity into disarray. In 1996, Marvel had
almost all its titles participate in the "Onslaught Saga",
a crossover that allowed Marvel to relaunch some of its flagship
characters, such as the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, in the
Heroes Reborn universe, in which Marvel defectors (and now Image
Comics stars) Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld were given permission to revamp
the properties from scratch. After an initial sales bump, sales
quickly declined below expected levels, and Marvel discontinued the
experiment after a one-year run; the characters soon returned to the
Marvel Universe proper. In 1998, the company launched the imprint
Marvel Knights, taking place within Marvel continuity; helmed by
soon-to-become editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, it featured tough, gritty
stories showcasing such characters as the Inhumans, Black Panther and Daredevil.
In 1991 Ronald Perelman,
whose company, Andrews Group, had purchased Marvel Comic's Parent
corporation, Marvel Entertainment Group (MEG) in 1986, took the
company public in a New York Stock Exchange stock-offering
underwritten by Merrill Lynch and First Boston Corporation. Following
the rapid rise of this popular stock, Perleman issued a series of
junk bonds that he used to acquire other children's entertainment
companies secured by MEG stock. In 1997, Toy Biz and MEG merged to
end the bankruptcy forming a new corporation, Marvel Enterprises.
With his business partner Avi Arad, publisher Bill Jemas, and
editor-in-chief Bob Harras, Perlmutter helped revitalize the comics line.
With the new millennium,
Marvel Comics escaped from bankruptcy and again began diversifying
its offerings. In 2001, Marvel withdrew from the Comics Code
Authority and established its own Marvel Rating System for comics.
The first title from this era to not have the code was X-Force #119
(October 2001). Marvel also created new imprints, such as MAX (a line
intended for mature readers) and Marvel Age (developed for younger
audiences). In addition, the company created an alternate universe
imprint, Ultimate Marvel, that allowed the company to reboot its
major titles by revising and updating its characters to introduce to
a new generation.
The
new century saw many Marvel characters reborn as successful film
franchises, including the X-Men movie series, starting in 2000, and
the Spider-Man series, beginning in 2002 followed by The Hulk,
Daredevil, Elektra, The Punisher, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and
The Avengers in 2011. Many of the Marvel superhero movies feature a
cameo by Stan Lee.
In a cross-promotion, the
November 1, 2006, episode of the CBS soap opera The Guiding Light,
titled "She's a Marvel", featured the character Harley
Davidson Cooper (played by Beth Ehlers) as a superheroine named the
Guiding Light. The character's story continued in an eight-page
backup feature, "A New Light", that appeared in several
Marvel titles published November 1 and 8. Also that year, Marvel
created a wiki on its Web site.
In late 2007 the company
launched Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, a digital archive of over
2,500 back issues available for viewing, for a monthly or annual
subscription fee.
In 2009 Marvel Comics
closed its Open Submissions Policy, in which the company had accepted
unsolicited samples from aspiring comic book artists, saying the time-consuming
review process had produced no suitably professional work. The same
year, the company commemorated its 70th anniversary, dating to its
inception as Timely Comics, by issuing the one-shot Marvel Mystery
Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1 and a variety of other special issues.
On August 31, 2009, The
Walt Disney Company announced a deal to acquire Marvel Comics' parent
corporation, Marvel Entertainment, for $4 billion, with Marvel
shareholders to receive $30 and 0.745 Disney shares for each share of
Marvel they own.
Marvel
Worldwide, Inc., commonly referred to as Marvel Comics and formerly
Marvel Publishing, Inc. and Marvel Comics Group, is an American
company that publishes comic books and related media. In 2009, The
Walt Disney Company acquired Marvel Entertainment, Marvel Worldwide's
parent company, for $4.24 billion.
Martin
Goodman founded the company later known as Marvel Comics under the
name Timely Publications in 1939, publishing comic books under the
imprint Timely Comics. Goodman, a pulp magazine publisher who had
started with a Western pulp in 1933, was expanding into the emerging,
and by then already highly popular new medium of comic books.
Launching his new line from his existing company's offices at 330
West 42nd Street, New York City, New York, he officially held the
titles of editor, managing editor, and business manager, with Abraham
Goodman officially listed as publisher.
Timely's
first publication, Marvel Comics #1 (cover dated Oct. 1939),
included the first appearance of Carl Burgos' android superhero the
Human Torch, and the first generally available appearance of Bill
Everett's anti-hero Namor the Sub-Mariner, among other features. The
issue was a great success, with it and a second printing the
following month selling, combined, nearly 900,000 copies. While its
contents came from an outside packager, Funnies, Inc., Timely by the
following year had its own staff in place.
While
no other Timely character would achieve the success of these
"big three", some notable heroes, many of which continue to
appear in modern-day retcon appearances and flashbacks include the
Whizzer, Miss America, the Destroyer, the original Vision, and the
Angel. Timely also published one of humor cartoonist Basil
Wolverton's best-known features, "Powerhouse Pepper", as
well as a line of children's funny-animal comics featuring popular
characters like Super Rabbit and the duo Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal.
Goodman
hired his wife's cousin, Stanley Lieber, as a general office
assistant in 1939. When editor Simon left the company in late 1941,
Goodman made Lieber, by then writing pseudonymously as "Stan
Lee" interim editor of the comics line, a position Lee kept for
decades except for three years during his military service in World
War II. Lee wrote extensively for Timely, contributing to a number of
different titles.
The
post-war American comic market saw superheroes falling out of
fashion. Goodman's comic book line dropped them for the most part and
expanded into a wider variety of genres than even Timely had
published, featuring horror, Westerns, humor, funny animal, men's
adventure-drama, giant monster, crime, and war comics, and later
adding jungle books, romance titles, espionage, and even medieval
adventure, Bible stories and sports. Like other publishers, Goodman
also courted female readers with mostly humorous comics about models
and career women.
The
first modern comic books under the Marvel Comics brand were the
science-fiction anthology Journey into Mystery #69 and the teen-humor
title Patsy Walker #95 (both cover dated June 1961), which each
displayed an "MC" box on its cover. Then, in the wake of DC
Comics' success in reviving superheroes in the late 1950s and early
1960s, particularly with the Flash, Green Lantern, and other members
of the team the Justice League of America, Marvel followed suit. The
introduction of modern Marvel's first superhero team, in The
Fantastic Four #1, (Nov. 1961), began establishing the company's
reputation. The majority of its superhero stories were written by
editor-in-chief Stan Lee. The company continued to publish a
smattering of Western comics such as Rawhide Kid, humor comics such
as Millie the Model, and romance comics such as Love Romances, and
added the war comic Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos.
Editor-writer
Lee and freelance artist Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four, reminiscent of
the non-superpowered adventuring quartet the Challengers of the
Unknown that Kirby had created for DC in 1957, originated in a Cold
War culture that led their creators to revise the superhero
conventions of previous eras to better reflect the psychological
spirit of their age. Eschewing such comic book tropes as secret
identities and even costumes at first, having a monster as one of the
heroes, and having its characters bicker and complain in what was
later called a "superheroes in the real world" approach,
the series represented a change that proved to be a great success.
Marvel began publishing further superhero titles featuring such
heroes and antiheroes as the Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, Ant-Man, Iron
Man, the X-Men, and Daredevil, and such memorable antagonists as
Doctor Doom, Magneto, Galactus, the Green Goblin, and Doctor Octopus.
Lee and Steve Ditko generated the most successful new series in The
Amazing Spider-Man. Marvel even lampooned itself and other comics
companies in a parody comic, Not Brand Echh (a play on Marvel's
dubbing of other companies as "Brand Echh", à la the
then-common phrase "Brand X").
Marvel's
comics had a reputation for focusing on characterization to a
greater extent than most superhero comics before them. This applied
to The Amazing Spider-Man in particular. Its young hero suffered from
self-doubt and mundane problems like any other teenager. Marvel often
presents flawed superheroes, freaks, and misfits—unlike the
perfect, handsome, athletic heroes found in previous traditional
comic books. Some Marvel heroes looked like villains and monsters. In
time, this non-traditional approach would revolutionize comic books.
Writer Geoff Boucher in 2009 reflected that, "Superman and DC
Comics instantly seemed like boring old Pat Boone; Marvel felt like
The Beatles and the British Invasion. It was Kirby's artwork with its
tension and psychedelia that made it perfect for the times, or was it
Lee's bravado and melodrama, which was somehow insecure and brash at
the same time?"
Lee,
with his charming personality and relentless salesmanship of the
company, became one of the best-known names in comics. His sense of
humor and generally lighthearted manner became the "voice"
that permeated the stories, the letters and news-pages, and the
hyperbolic house ads of that era's Marvel Comics. He fostered a
clubby fan-following with Lee's exaggerated depiction of the Bullpen
(Lee's name for the staff) as one big, happy family. This included
printed kudos to the artists, who eventually co-plotted the stories
based on the busy Lee's rough synopses or even simple spoken
concepts, in what became known as the Marvel Method, and contributed
greatly to Marvel's product and success. Kirby in particular is
generally credited for many of the cosmic ideas and characters of
Fantastic Four and The Mighty Thor, such as the Watcher, the Silver
Surfer and Ego the Living Planet, while Steve Ditko is recognized as
the driving artistic force behind the moody atmosphere and
street-level naturalism of The Amazing Spider-Man and the surreal
atmosphere of the Strange Tales mystical feature "Doctor
Strange". Lee, however, continues to receive credit for his
well-honed skills at dialogue and sense of storytelling, for his keen
hand at choosing and motivating artists and assembling creative
teams, and for his uncanny ability to connect with the
readers—not least through the nickname endearments he bestowed
in the credits and the monthly "Bullpen Bulletins" and
letters pages, giving readers humanizing hype about the likes of
"Jolly Jack Kirby," "Jaunty Jim Steranko",
"Rascally Roy Thomas", "Jazzy Johnny Romita", and
others, right down to letterers "Swingin' Sammy Rosen" and
"Adorable Artie Simek".
In
1971, the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
approached Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee to do a comic book
story about drug abuse. Lee agreed and wrote a three-part Spider-Man
story portraying drug use as dangerous and unglamorous. However, the
industry's self-censorship board, the Comics Code Authority, refused
to approve the story because of the presence of narcotics, deeming
the context of the story irrelevant. Lee, with Goodman's approval,
published the story regardless in The Amazing Spider-Man #96-98
(May–July 1971), without the Comics Code seal. The market
reacted well to the storyline, and the CCA subsequently revised the
Code the same year.
A
series of new editors-in-chief oversaw the company during another
slow time for the industry. Once again, Marvel attempted to
diversify, and with the updating of the Comics Code achieved moderate
to strong success with titles themed to horror (The Tomb of Dracula),
martial arts, (Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu), sword-and-sorcery
(Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja), satire (Howard the Duck) and
science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey, "Killraven" in
Amazing Adventures, Star Trek, and, late in the decade, the
long-running Star Wars series). Some of these were published in
larger-format black and white magazines, that targeted mature
readers, under its Curtis Magazines imprint. Marvel was able to
capitalize on its successful superhero comics of the previous decade
by acquiring a new newsstand distributor and greatly expanding its
comics line. Marvel pulled ahead of rival DC Comics in 1972, during a
time when the price and format of the standard newsstand comic were
in flux. Goodman increased the price and size of Marvel's November
1971 cover-dated comics from 15 cents for 39 pages total to 25 cents
for 52 pages. DC followed suit, but Marvel the following month
dropped its comics to 20 cents for 36 pages, offering a lower-priced
product with a higher distributor discount.
Marvel
held its own comic book convention, Marvelcon '75, in spring 1975,
and promised a Marvelcon '76. At the 1975 event, Stan Lee used a
Fantastic Four panel discussion to announce that Jack Kirby, the
artist co-creator of most of Marvel's signature characters, was
returning to Marvel after having left in 1970 to work for rival DC
Comics. In October 1976, Marvel, which already licensed reprints in
different countries, including the UK, created a superhero
specifically for the British market. Captain Britain debuted
exclusively in the UK, and later appeared in American comics.
Marvel
earned a great deal of money and recognition during the comic-book
boom of the early 1990s, launching the successful 2099 line of comics
set in the future (Spider-Man 2099, etc.) and the creatively daring
though commercially unsuccessful Razorline imprint of superhero
comics created by novelist and filmmaker Clive Barker. Yet by the
middle of the decade, the industry had slumped, and in December 1996
Marvel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Marvel suffered a
major blow in early 1992, when seven of its most prized artists, Todd
McFarlane (known for his work on Spider-Man), Jim Lee (X-Men), Rob
Liefeld (X-Force), Marc Silvestri (Wolverine), Erik Larsen (The
Amazing Spider-Man), Jim Valentino (Guardians of the Galaxy), and
Whilce Portacio left to form the successful company Image Comics.
Creatively
and commercially, the '90s were dominated by the use of gimmickry to
boost sales, such as variant covers, cover enhancements, swimsuit
issues. In 1991 Marvel began selling Marvel Universe Cards with
trading card maker SkyBox International. These were collectible
trading cards that featured the characters and events of the Marvel Universe.
The
new century saw many Marvel characters reborn as successful film
franchises, including the X-Men movie series, starting in 2000, and
the Spider-Man series, beginning in 2002 followed by The Hulk,
Daredevil, Elektra, The Punisher, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and
The Avengers in 2011. Many of the Marvel superhero movies feature a
cameo by Stan Lee.
