Mighty Marvel Comes Out Swinging

“The fact is that Marvel Comics are the first comic books in history in which a post-adolescent escapist can get personally involved. For Marvel Comics are the first comic books to evoke, even metaphorically, the Real World.”

—The Village Voice, April 1, 1965

For much of its early life Marvel was the equivalent of a bad bar cover band. The company was less the “house of ideas,” as it would come to be known, than “the house of other people’s ideas.”

“We were a company of copycats,” Stan Lee would say of the company he first joined in 1940 as an errand boy.

Marvel’s founder, Brooklyn-born Martin Goodman, got his start producing low-rent magazines, just like the men who founded DC. By the 1930s his empire had ballooned to dozens of different publishing entities. (It sounds impressive, but it was actually a tax dodge.) Much of his business would revolve around so-called sweat mags, such as Swank and Stag, but his companies also vomited forth dozens of Western, jungle, and detective pulp titles.

Goodman released his first comic book in 1939 under his Timely imprint, and Marvel Comics #1, like many books hitting the stands during those years, was designed to draft off the success of DC’s Superman. The book introduced the first of the publisher’s superheroes: Carl Burgos’s combustible android, the Human Torch, and flying merman Sub-Mariner, from Bill Everett.

“We tried to outdo Superman,” the late Everett said of Sub-Mariner in 1971.

Those two characters have remained relevant to this day (though with fluctuating levels of popularity), but little else from those earliest days has. Goodman tried to build on the success of Marvel Comics #1 by churning out a list of less-enduring superheroes, including the Phantom Bullet, the Blue Blaze, and the Blonde Phantom. When the sales of comic books about costumed heroes dipped in the late forties, he moved on to other genres.

“Marvel was built on the idea of ‘Let’s see what’s selling for other people and imitate it,’” says comic writer and historian Evanier. “That was the history of [Marvel founder] Martin Goodman. He was notorious for it, and he owned up to it all the time.”

The Marvel honcho once reportedly summed up his business strategy as, “If you get a title that catches on, then add a few more, you’re in for a nice profit.”

That particular philosophy might be good for the bottom line, but when it comes to creating a quality product, it leaves much to be desired. Just ask anyone who sat through that second movie about an asteroid on a collision course with earth or the second movie about a killer volcano.

Throughout the forties and fifties Marvel jumped from fad to fad, with little originality or leadership in evidence. When crime comics began to take off, Marvel gave readers Lawbreakers Always Lose and All-True Crime. If Looney Tunes and funny animals were the thing, it pushed out Daffy—er, Wacky Duck. When B-Westerns got hot in Hollywood, Marvel rolled out Whip Wilson and The Arizona Kid. The company even published a title called Homer the Happy Ghost that bore more than a passing resemblance to Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Few of these books were memorable or had any lasting impact. They existed simply to exist—to plug a slot in the newsstand in the hopes that someone might stumble along and pick up one based on the subject matter alone.

Because of its leading-from-behind style of doing business, Marvel for many years lacked a strong identity. It had no unifying tone or theme running through its line of titles. Its magazines’ covers often had no particular design aesthetic, identifiable trade dress, or easily recognizable logo.

The company was the worst kind of imitator. Which brings us to one of the greatest ironies in the history of comics. The copycat notorious for lazily following trends and knocking off other companies suddenly, in 1961, became the most original name in superheroes.

And it did it by knocking off another company.

Marvel’s great leap forward would launch it in an exciting new direction and set it on the path to becoming the multibillion-dollar entity we know today. And it would resurrect a company whose best days were behind it.

Goodman’s troubles would date back to 1951 when he dumped his distributor (the middle man responsible for getting his magazines to stores) and launched his own. He called it Atlas News Company, and from 1951 until 1956 handling distribution himself allowed Goodman to unleash a tidal wave of books, releasing more titles than any other company in the industry.

By the mid fifties, though, Atlas was in the red. (Whether the losses were a result of the shrinking market or some bookkeeping shenanigans is unclear.) Goodman shuttered Atlas, and in the summer of 1956 he signed a five-year deal with distributor American News Company.

The decision would prove catastrophic for Goodman. A few months later, in May 1957, American News Company would abruptly close up shop, leaving Goodman with no way to get his books to the stands.

Goodman was forced to lay off his entire comic book staff, with the exception of Lee. It wasn’t long before DC, sensing that Atlas was fatally wounded, ghoulishly came sniffing around. In a deal that looks insanely lowball by today’s hyperinflated superhero market, DC offered to buy Atlas’s characters—Captain America, Sub-Mariner, and the Human Torch—for $15,000 (about $126,000 in today’s dollars). Goodman considered the offer, but in the end he passed. What was $15,000 to a millionaire like him?

Imagine how different the world would be today had that deal gone through. We’ll never know. Goodman held on to his titles and turned his attention to his immediate problem: finding a new distributor willing to accept his account and prevent his business from spiraling into oblivion. In a matter of months Atlas/Timely—or whatever name Goodman was using that week—had gone from one of the most prolific publishers in the market to one of the least.

Goodman had to act. The good news was that by the next month he’d found a distributor willing to accept his account. The bad news was that this distributor happened to be Independent News, the company started by Donenfeld. The reason Independent was willing to handle a direct competitor’s books had little to do with altruism; instead, it and sister company DC were concerned about appearing to be a monopoly, and agreeing to distribute Goodman’s line was a way to dispel those charges. Without the new distribution deal, Marvel would have likely died in the 1950s.

Regardless of motivations, Independent must have relished sticking it to its main competitor. The terms of the distribution deal it lorded over its rival were draconian, allowing Marvel to release only eight titles a month.

“We didn’t want the competition,” DC head Liebowitz wrote in his unpublished memoir.

Goodman opted to make the most of the limitation and instead of publishing eight monthly titles, chose to release sixteen bimonthlies. The first wave of books bearing the “IND” symbol denoting its distributor arrived on stands in the summer of 1957. The initial round included Gunsmoke Western, Kid Colt Outlaw, Love Romances, and Marines in Battle, among others. The second batch included World Fantasy, Two-Gun Kid, Strange Tales, and Navy Combat.

The next year, in 1958, Goodman’s company published only ninety-six comics, the fewest since 1944. And superheroes were not on its menu. Beyond a failed attempt to revive the genre in the midfifties, the company that would become Marvel had mostly given up on costumed heroes. Captain America was put on ice in 1949. The Sub-Mariner’s solo book was deep-sixed the same year.

The publisher no longer presented much competition for mighty National. By 1960 DC’s top title was selling some 810,000 copies, while Marvel’s bestseller, Tales to Astonish, barely moved 163,000.

And that’s when Goodman fell backward into his greatest success by relying on his old copycat ways.

Over at DC the Flash had been rebooted in 1956, and the superhero genre was suddenly hot again. It didn’t take long for competitors to sit up and take notice, and Atlas/Marvel was certainly one of those who did.

Multiple versions of what happened next have been propagated, and the one you believe will probably depend on how cynical you are.

The official version goes like this: One day in 1961 Goodman was playing a friendly game of golf with DC’s Jack Liebowitz when Liebowitz began bragging about the sales of his new Justice League of America, a title launched in 1960 that combined the company’s marquee heroes—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and the Flash—into one powerful super team. (Both men later insisted they never played golf together.)

Another version finds Goodman hitting the links with the head of his distributor, Independent News. Still another circulated by the freelancers of the day has the crafty Goodman learning the sales information from spies planted within Independent.

Whatever the case, the outcome was the same. Goodman returned to his offices at Madison Avenue and 60th Street and ordered Lee to dream up a new team of heroes to compete with DC’s.

“[Goodman] said, ‘Hey, maybe there’s still a market for superheroes. Why don’t you bring out a team like the Justice League. We could call it the Righteous League or something,’” Lee recalled in 1977. “I worked for him, and I had to do what he wanted, so I was willing to put out a team of superheroes. But I figured I’ll be damned if I’m just going to copy [DC].”

Lee had joined Goodman’s company in 1940 as a teenager, performing whatever tedious jobs needed doing around the office, including proofreading, fetching coffee, and running errands. He was made editor in 1941 and had remained ever since, despite having aspirations to become a great novelist. Comics were hardly a prestige business at the time and were considered trashy by some and downright disreputable by others. When strangers asked him what he did for a living, the embarrassed Lee had taken to answering vaguely that he was in “publishing.”

As DC’s Superman had continued to gain in stature through the years—even landing his own cartoon in 1941—Lee had been stuck shoveling stories into Goodman’s forgettable magazines, like coal into a furnace. From 1941 to 1961 Lee penned hundreds of quickly dashed-off tales in numerous genres, from romance to Western, all with little job satisfaction.

“Martin felt in those days that our readers were very, very young children or else older people who weren’t too bright or they wouldn’t be reading comics,” Lee said in an audio commentary to the 2006 book Stan Lee’s Amazing Marvel Universe. “I don’t think Martin really had a great deal of respect for the medium, and therefore, I was told not to get stories that were too complex, not to dwell on too much dialogue or too much characterization.”

So when Goodman asked for a new superhero team to compete with DC’s Justice League, Lee was determined to do something outside the norm of regular superhero stories, something closer to what he might like to read.

For this undertaking he had the good sense to tap Jack Kirby as his collaborator. Kirby should need no introduction, but just in case: Born in 1917. Grew up on New York’s rough-and-tumble Lower East Side. Self-taught artist with a unique visual style. Would go on to cocreate much of the Marvel Universe and is considered by many to be the most influential illustrator the medium has ever seen.

Kirby had been kicking around the comic industry for years. He’d cocreated Captain America for Marvel in 1940 before defecting to DC in 1941. He’d returned to Marvel in the late fifties after having a nasty legal falling-out with one of DC’s editors over royalties for a syndicated newspaper strip. DC’s loss was Marvel’s gain.

“DC did not see Jack Kirby as the major comic book figure that he was,” former Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas says. “He was just some guy who they’d blackballed because he got in a lawsuit with one of their top editors. He wouldn’t have gone to Marvel other than that, because he was getting more money at DC. So DC kind of killed itself, in that it put Stan and Jack together.”

Upon arrival at Marvel Kirby spent much of his time producing B-rate monster stories such as “The Creature from Krogarr.” In 1961 Kirby and Lee would team up for a new kind of superhero story, and the results would be far more memorable.

What they came up with was a team of adventurers who gain fantastical powers after flying into space and being bombarded by cosmic rays. Scientist Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic, gains the ability to stretch his body like rubber. His girlfriend, Sue Storm, has the power to turn invisible and takes the nickname the Invisible Girl. Her brother, Johnny Storm (the Human Torch), finds himself able to burst into flames, and Reed’s friend Ben Grimm (the Thing) is transformed into an orange, rocky monster.

It sounds pretty standard, and the setup had some echoes of a book Kirby had done for DC in 1957, Challengers of the Unknown, about a group of four adventurers who survive a plane crash and tackle missions. But The Fantastic Four, which hit newsstands in August 1961, had a crucial difference from that DC title as well as most every other superhero title that had come before.

“We tried to inject all kinds of realism, as we call it, into the stories,” Lee said in a 1968 radio interview. “We say to ourselves, just because you have a superpower, that doesn’t mean you might not have dandruff, or trouble with girls, or have trouble paying your bills.”

Kirby and Lee attempted to instill these larger-than-life characters with a bit of humanity, for the first time giving superheroes real-world problems and anxieties. They became more three-dimensional.

“These are real people who just happen to have superpowers, as opposed to super powered people who are trying to be real,” longtime Marvel artist and writer John Byrne told Comics Feature in 1984.

In the Fantastic Four’s world, powers did not necessarily lead to happiness; if anything, they were the source of more trouble. The Four react to their newfound abilities like a scene straight out of a body-horror flick. The Thing is miserable being trapped in his rocky, orange form. Sue is terrified when she begins disappearing.

Another innovative touch: the characters squabble with one another like two kids on a long car trip.

“To keep it all from getting too goody-goody, there is always friction between Mr. Fantastic and the Thing, with Human Torch siding with Mr. F,” Lee wrote in his original 1961 typewritten synopsis for the book.

In issue #2 the Thing tussles with both Reed and Johnny, as Sue pleads, “We’ll just destroy ourselves if we keep at each other’s throats! Don’t you see?”

This new way of handling superheroes was revolutionary in large measure because it was completely different from what DC—who had invented the superhero and basically owned the market in 1961—was doing.

“I doubt you can imagine the sheer impact that single comic possessed back there in the comic-starved wastelands of 1961,” Alan Moore, the great British comic writer behind Watchmen, declared of Fantastic Four #3 in a 1983 essay. “To someone who had cut his teeth upon the sanitized niceness of the Justice League of America, this was heady stuff indeed.”

DC’s heroes were blander, steadier, and less likely to be consumed by their emotions. They had fewer human foibles and little characterization beyond do-gooder, and as a result, they felt more like cardboard cutouts than living, breathing people.

“If you go back to early DC Comics like World’s Finest, where you’ve got Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman—and [1970s Marvel writer] Steve Gerber said this—you can switch the tails of the balloon among characters, and it makes no difference,” says David Anthony Kraft, a writer and editor at Marvel in the seventies. “They all talk exactly the same because they’re not like really alive, they’re not characters.”

It wasn’t just the dialogue that set Marvel apart from its competitor; DC’s pantheon was generally composed of more powerful, godlike, and flawless members.

“There’s something fundamental about the environment in which these heroes were imagined,” says Joan Hilty, a DC editor from 1995 to 2010. “All of DC’s heroes are royalty. Superman is the last son of an alien planet. Batman in a super-rich guy. Wonder Woman is a princess. Green Lantern is a top-line fighter pilot. Aquaman is the king of the sea. All of these heroes came out of the 1930s and ’40s during World Wars and a desire to find archetypes that could save entire countries. DC characters are too perfect and pegged to a different time.”

The heroes’ alter egos also represented law, order, and mainstream values. Jim Corrigan, the Spectre, is a cop. Katar Hol, Hawkman, is also a cop but on an alien world. Barry Allen, the Flash, works as a police scientist. Ray Palmer, the Atom, is a university professor. Clark Kent, Superman, helps to right societal wrongs with his typewriter, working as a journalist at the Daily Planet.

The worlds they lived in were clean and tidy. DC had previously taken the exciting step of assembling its heroes into a superteam, driving young readers into a slobbering frenzy, only to deliver a story in which the group spends time debating the rules of meeting etiquette. Robert’s Rules of Order was their greatest supervillain. The first appearance of DC’s Justice Society of America in 1940 finds Hawkman, the Flash, Green Lantern, and the rest on the cover … sitting serenely around a table as if they’re about to discuss that quarter’s P/E ratio.

Back during the 1954 Senate subcommittee hearings, DC adviser Dr. Lauretta Bender was asked if she thought Superman was a good influence.

“A good influence,” she replied affirmatively. “The children know that Superman will always come out on the right side.”

And by the 1960s that was increasingly becoming a problem. DC’s antiseptic heroes were well suited for the conservative forties and fifties, a time when McGraw-Hill produced a workplace educational video entitled “The Trouble with Women” and Elvis Presley was allowed to be shown on TV only from the waist up.

But by the following decade America was changing. An unpopular war in Vietnam was escalating, changing many Americans’ notions of its country’s righteousness. Civil rights protests were flaring across the country. East Germany slapped up the Berlin Wall, and nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union seemed closer than ever. America was retreating from the relative safety of the fifties and moving into a more volatile age. And certain readers were in search of a modern brand of storytelling that felt more sophisticated, more of the moment.

Lee and his collaborators, whether through good sense or sheer luck, managed to introduce a different kind of hero at a time when America was entering into a period of historic social upheaval. Who wants to read about a gee-whiz cop hero when you can see the real police every night on the news beating African Americans in the streets? How can you not roll your eyes at a Superman story in which the hero uses his virtually unlimited power to figure out how many jelly beans a mystery jar contains?

Fantastic Four was an immediate success. Lee and Kirby’s new style of superhero struck a nerve, particularly among more mature and seasoned readers.

“Great art, terrific characters, and a more adult approach to the stories than any other mag,” reader Len Blake wrote in a letter published in Fantastic Four #4. “You are definitely starting a new trend in comics—stories about characters who act like real people, not just lily-white do-gooders who would insult the average reader’s intelligence.”

Clearly Marvel was onto something, and in the months that followed, Lee and his collaborators would unveil more heroes within the groundbreaking mold of the Fantastic Four. They were often regular people on whom—to quote a famous phrase—“great responsibility” had been imposed, and they were left struggling with their new abilities and how best to use them.

The Hulk, introduced by Lee and Kirby in 1962, was scientist Bruce Banner who had been blasted by a gamma ray bomb after rushing to save a teenager who’d mistakenly wandered onto the test field. He then spontaneously began transforming into an angry monster who could smash anything in his wake. As with the Fantastic Four characters, Banner is conflicted about his newfound powers, breaking down in tears in the debut issue over what he’s become.

Spider-Man made his debut in Amazing Fantasy #15, cover dated August 1962. The character was a collaboration between Lee and Steve Ditko, a frequent freelancer for Marvel whose style veered toward the oddball. His characters were gawky and weird, making him the perfect choice for developing the story of nerdy Peter Parker, a hapless high school brainiac who gets bitten by a radioactive spider and gains superstrength and agility. Though the teen’s new status hardly solves all his problems.

“Sometimes, I hate my Spider-Man powers,” the hero whined in one early issue. “Sometimes I wish I were just like any normal teen-ager.”

Legend has it that Goodman loathed spiders and initially balked at publishing the story before finally allowing it to run in Amazing Fantasy, a title that was set to be canceled anyway.

By 1963 Marvel also had Ant-Man, Thor, and mystical sorcerer Dr. Strange in its bullpen. Iron Man, debuting in March 1963, provided a test for this modern way of storytelling. As Lee tells it, he wanted to create a character whom readers of the day would find, on the surface, unappealing. And what could be more unappealing at the height of the Cold War than a wealthy, arrogant weapons manufacturer?

Like the heroes who came before him, Iron Man (written by Stan’s brother Larry Lieber and drawn by Don Heck) also took off.

“Marvel’s success was about storytelling and putting a mirror up to the real world for not just kids but a growing group of adults who were tired of the DC traditional characters saying the same things as they did in the forties and the fifties, ‘Good Grief!’” John Romita Sr. says.

What Lee and his gang had done—as counterculture newspaper the Village Voice suggested in a 1965 article—was bring the antihero to comics.

“How can a character as hopelessly healthy as Superman compete with this living symbol of the modern dilemma, this neurotic’s neurotic, Spider-Man, the super-anti-hero of our time?” Sally Kempton asked in the piece about the growing “cult” of Marvel.

The antihero concept that Marvel co-opted had been bubbling up in literature for at least a decade, starting with 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye and continuing with 1957’s beat classic On the Road. It was a concept that proved particularly appealing for the morally muddy times. Marvel’s heroes were not the clean, square-jawed heroes of old. They didn’t even always act heroically. In fact, Marvel’s first wave of 1960s characters seemed to have more in common with the monsters that had populated the company’s books just a few years before.

“DC Comics came from a time historically where heroes came from the pulps—Doc Savage and The Shadow. These heroes were born good guys. They had shiny teeth; they had good aspirations when they were younger,” says Neal Adams. Adams began drawing books for DC in 1967 and became one of the defining artists of the era as well as one of the most important behind-the-scenes forces in the industry.

Marvel upended the traditional template by casting morally questionable guys in the lead. Peter Parker is a social outcast who decides to become Spider-Man only after his inaction to catch a robber leads to the murder of his beloved uncle. Dr. Strange is an arrogant surgeon who learns humility—and the ways of magic—after losing the use of his hands in an accident. And the Hulk? He’s a literal monster.

“All these characters are assholes,” Adams says. “They’re bad guys. They’re not heroes. All the characters at Marvel began as monster stories, and they somehow find their way to doing good stuff in their lives.”

Marvel’s superhero books were written from the inside out, with a focus on characterization, emotion, and the heroes’ inner turmoil.

“Marvel’s stories were completely unstructured,” former Marvel and DC writer Mike Friedrich says. “They were all over the map, emotion driven and character driven. DC’s talked to you about plots and conflict and resolutions and all the traditional English analysis of creating stories.”

To give a favorite Stan Lee example of DC’s plot-driven style of storytelling: a mystery would arise that Batman would be required to solve. A clue would be planted. Batman would pick up on that clue and, by the last page, solve the mystery. The end. It was all very neat and tidy.

Marvel’s new line began growing in leaps and bounds. The publisher sold some 18.9 million magazines in 1960. By 1964 that number had exploded to 27.7 million.

“Marvels sell fast! Marvels sell out!” a 1965 trade ad touted. “When fans EYE them, they BUY them!”

But the limitations of its distribution deal with Independent continued to hamstring Marvel. Goodman and Lee were unable to introduce solo titles for their increasingly popular heroes, and the characters were instead forced to share space in a single title. Captain America and Iron Man went halvsies in Tales of Suspense, for example.

Goodman’s poor distribution deal did have one silver lining that became apparent only in retrospect. It allowed a lone editor, Stan Lee, to oversee an entire line of comic books, imposing a singular vision and voice on every title. In that sense, if you liked one Marvel magazine, chances are you’d like another. Marvel was finally emerging as a cohesive brand.

“Stan had an intention to build a company, to build an entity that would be called Marvel Comics,” says Denny O’Neil, a former DC and Marvel writer-editor and a fifty-year industry veteran. “There was never any such intention from DC. They published forty titles a month but without any intention to make them uniquely DC titles.”

At DC each of the editors was like his own separate brand.

“From the 1940s through the 1960s DC’s editors were independent fiefdoms, never reading each others’ books and rarely using each other’s talent,” former DC editor Bob Greenberger says.

As a result, each editor’s books had a look and feel that might differ from those of the guy down the hall.

Marvel was different. Because Lee had been in charge of this newly emerging superhero line from its inception, he was able to build something special.

A coherent universe.

And that Marvel universe proved to be a huge selling point for the company through the 1960s and beyond.

The concept that heroes lived in the same world was not new, of course. The industry’s first superhero crossover occurred in 1940’s Marvel Mystery Comics #8. There, the publisher’s two original characters, the Human Torch and Sub-Mariner, fought each other atop the Brooklyn Bridge. The story was so epic that it spilled over into the next issue.

DC also published the occasional crossover, although the editors were notoriously territorial and didn’t like lending their characters to editors working on other books.

Batman and the Man of Steel teamed up on the comic book pages in 1952’s Superman #76, and the company’s World War II heroes also appeared side by side in the Justice Society of America during the 1940s. But in terms of a cohesive universe, DC didn’t really have one.

Neither did Marvel. But that all changed with 1962’s Fantastic Four #4. In that groundbreaking issue Johnny Storm encountered a mysterious man at a homeless shelter who turned out to be the Sub-Mariner. With that simple plot twist Lee and Kirby not only blew the minds of those old enough to remember the faded Golden Age figure but also introduced the idea that the Fantastic Four were not the only super-powered characters inhabiting this world.

Lee and Kirby also had the good sense to make that four-color world look as much like ours as possible. They set the Fantastic Four and the adventures of subsequent heroes in New York City, as opposed to the fictionalized Metropolises or Central Citys of DC’s titles.

The real-life setting helped to ground Marvel’s stories—future Marvel artist John Byrne has admitted that when reading the Fantastic Four as a kid in Canada, he thought they might be real—and this allowed for greater continuity among the titles. Soon the Incredible Hulk was slugging it out with the Thing, and Spidey was attempting to join the Fantastic Four in The Amazing Spider-Man #1. In perhaps the biggest twist of them all, Captain America was revived in 1964’s Avengers #4, having spent the previous decades frozen in a block of ice. He was soon integrated into the contemporary Marvel universe, becoming one of its most important figures. Compare that to DC’s 1960s revival of the Justice Society of America, which quarantined the veteran heroes in an alternate universe to the one inhabited by DC’s contemporary names.

Marvel also pioneered the idea of stories continuing stories. By 1962 Lee was becoming increasingly overworked and no longer had the time to craft tight, self-contained stories. As a cheat, he took one story and stretched it out over several issues, leaving a cliffhanger at the end of each. The idea flew in the face of standard industry practices because the haphazard nature of comic book distribution meant a customer could never be sure he would be able to find consecutive issues at his local newsstand.

But the new format did not cause readers to abandon Marvel; in fact, they were being drawn deeper into this burgeoning fictional world, in some cases buying every title the company produced.

Readers were also digging the art, much of which Kirby handled. His line work was craggy, his figures somewhat boxy, and their fingers were squared off on the ends, giving the books a rawer quality than those of Marvel’s competitors.

“Only a few short months later, I couldn’t really look at Infantino or [Gil] Kane or [Curt] Swan or any of the other DC artists of that period without feeling that there was something missing,” Alan Moore wrote of discovering early Marvel. “A lack of grittiness or something.”

Beyond offering a unique artistic look, Kirby helped establish Marvel’s visual style. His way of telling stories would soon become the default at the publisher, and Lee would use Kirby’s pages as a guide to show other artists what to do. Kirby became so important to Marvel that colorist Stan Goldberg used to joke that when he and inker Frank Giacoia would go to lunch with Kirby, the two men would stand on either side of the star artist as they crossed the street in order to protect Kirby from oncoming traffic.

Kirby’s art was like a silent movie that plucked out only the most dramatic moments. Everything was turned up to eleven. Even the simplest actions had to be exaggerated. Nothing was done halfway. If someone was throwing a punch, the artist would draw the conclusion of a follow-through so powerful that it looked as though it would yank the arm from its socket. When a character was angry, every tendon in his body strained.

Marvel’s art conveyed a sense of movement and drama that few other books had at the time.

“The thing that appealed to me about Marvel was, first, its sense of dynamism,” writer Peter Gillis, who wrote Marvel’s Defenders and Dr. Strange in the seventies and eighties, said in 1985. “I picked up a Tales of Suspense with a ten-page Captain America story drawn by Jack Kirby, and there was more excitement in that one story than in practically all the DC Comics I’d read up to that point.”

“It’s a simple thing, but even today, I don’t think DC fully understands it,” Lee said in 2000.

If Marvel’s art was a double espresso, DC’s was like a pleasant green tea. The publisher favored a cleaner, more technically correct style than what Kirby, Ditko, and the others were doing for Marvel.

DC artists were forced to work within an established house style that governed the page layout as well as the look of the artwork. Editor Julie Schwartz’s motto was, “If it’s not clean, it’s worthless.”

Carmine Infantino and the other favored DC artists at the time were no doubt extremely talented men. The art they produced was beautiful. It was correctly referenced and anatomically accurate. It just lacked a certain flare, a certain energy, a certain danger that would get readers’ hearts racing.

Marvel was more experimental, more edgy.

“Marvel is a cornucopia of fantasy, a wild idea, a swashbuckling attitude, an escape from the humdrum and prosaic,” Lee would write, summing up what Marvel was all about. “It’s … a literate celebration of unbridled creativity, coupled with a touch of rebellion and an insolent desire to spit in the eye of the dragon.”

By the mid sixties the spitting would start going DC’s way.