The Rivalry Catches Fire

“In the beginning, it was just the two of us in the office. DC was so big, and we were the little guys. They had Batman and Superman. It’s just night and day, a little company to a huge company.”

—Flo Steinberg, Stan Lee’s former assistant

By 1962 DC’s boat had sprung a leak and was taking on water. The company was beginning to sink—it just didn’t know it yet.

While the executives remained blissfully ignorant, two prescient staffers attempted to sound the alarm.

Bob Haney and Arnold Drake had both been writing for the publisher since the mid-1950s. Haney was large man—he came into the world at a whopping eleven pounds—and had grown up in one of the Depression-era shantytowns known as Hoovervilles near Philadelphia. He had worked most notably on DC’s war comics. Drake was a New York City native and an observant Jew. He’d been writing on DC’s sci-fi and mystery anthologies.

One night while working late the pair decided to sneak to the other side of 575 Lexington Avenue, where Independent News was located, to flip through (and possibly steal) a few of the magazines DC’s sister company was distributing.

And that’s when—just a few months removed from the publication of Fantastic Four #1—they got their first inkling that the industry was about to be turned upside down.

“We were looking at this Marvel stuff and saying, ‘Look at this stuff!’” the late Haney said in 1997. “Kirby was doing this great stuff, and Stan Lee was editing and writing it. And we said, ‘This is terrific stuff! This is real far-out, wing-dingy comics!’”

Although both writers were in their mid- to late thirties at the time, something about Marvel’s hip, youthful energy set them abuzz. Drake and Haney grabbed a few magazines and later went in to see DC’s publisher, Irwin Donenfeld. They confidently pushed the Marvel books his way and told the executive to take a look. This, the writers claimed, was “great stuff,” and Donenfeld better recognize that something new was happening in the business.

Donenfeld was dismissive. He didn’t see what Haney and Drake had seen. “We do $100 million a year and they do $35 million,” the publisher said defensively.

“What was happening was the Marvel revolution, and we pointed it out to him,” Haney said. “And he didn’t recognize it. So then DC sales began to really drop.… Here was General Motors no longer selling every car they could turn out.”

The giant was stumbling. DC’s sales reached their height in 1963 and began to decline in 1964. Marvel’s, however, would continue to climb through the decade.

The problem DC would soon face was not how many comics overall it was selling but what percentage. At the time comics were treated like other periodicals. The publisher produced a large print run, which the distributor delivered to newsstands and other outlets. The books were put on sale for a fixed amount of time, and at the end of that period the covers were stripped from whatever hadn’t been sold and returned for credit. In most cases a significant number of copies from the print run went unsold and were eventually pulped, costing the publisher in wasted printing, paper, and administrative costs.

In 1962, when Drake and Haney were warning Donenfeld about DC’s potential challenger, the executive had good reason to feel invincible. DC released 343 individual comics that year, the most of anyone in the business (a title it would hold until 1973). Superman was the number-one title overall, and DC hogged seven of the other spots in the top ten. On the surface the publisher appeared dominant. Underneath, the numbers would begin to reveal another story.

DC was tops only because it printed far more titles. The problem was, the publisher’s sell-through rate, the percentage of the print run consumers were actually buying, was shakier compared to Marvel’s. It was as clear an indication as any that their rival’s readership was smaller but far more enthusiastic.

“Marvel was doing very well,” DC’s Carmine Infantino said in a 2000 interview. “We knew it because DC—Independent News—was handling Marvel at the time and their numbers were coming in. Marvel had books like Spider-Man coming in at 70, 80, even 85 percent sales. And we had books coming in at 40, 41, 42 percent. Something was wrong, and [DC’s executives] didn’t know how to fix it.”

Marvel was becoming so popular—and profitable for its distributor—that in 1963 Independent News acquiesced to an expansion of titles. Marvel was now allowed ten to fourteen books a month.

Superheroes were in vogue, so Goodman asked Lee to create more of them. Lee initially teamed with Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett for a brand-new character. But when Everett fell behind on the art chores, Lee was forced to go to plan B. Taking a page from DC’s playbook, Lee tossed together members of the company’s existing superhero roster into one powerful team, just like the Justice League. Using existing characters saved him and artist Jack Kirby from having to come up with brand-new ones and allowed the issue to be completed more quickly so it made it to the printer in time.

The Avengers #1, cover dated September 1963, featured Iron Man, Ant-Man, Thor, the Wasp, and the Hulk joining forces to defeat Loki—another preexisting character who’d been introduced in Thor’s title the year before.

Marvel’s other new title that month had even more in common with one of DC’s—a lot more. The similarities were so eerie, so draw-droppingly unbelievable that conspiracy theories quickly sprouted and persist to this day.

The X-Men debuted in the summer of 1963, and—no shock here—it was written by Lee and penciled by Kirby. It was about the wheelchair-bound Professor X who ran a Westchester-based school for gifted youngsters. The Beast was an athletic, ape-like brainiac, Marvel Girl possessed the power of telekinesis, Cyclops could blast an energy beam from his eyes, Iceman controlled the cold, and Angel could soar through the air on his birdlike wings. The twist here was that these heroes hadn’t acquired their power through cosmic rays or some scientific accident; they’d been born with them via a gene mutation.

Lee pitched Goodman on the series he called “The Mutants.” Goodman rejected the title, reasoning that kids wouldn’t have any idea what a mutant even was. Lee walked out of that meeting thinking, “This demonstrates how some people in big positions are idiots,” as he recounted at the 2016 New York Comic Con. So Lee went with The X-Men instead—the X standing for “extra,” as in the kids’ abilities.

The cover to issue #1 promised “The Strangest Super-Heroes of All!” Only they weren’t. DC had beat Marvel to it.

Three months earlier Marvel’s rival had released My Greatest Adventure #80, which featured the first appearance of a new team called the Doom Patrol. The artist was Bruno Premiani, and the writer was none other than Arnold Drake—that is, one of the few at DC who seemed to be paying attention to what was going on at Marvel. As such, it was probably no coincidence that the Doom Patrol came the closest to feeling like a Marvel book that DC produced at the time.

“One of the only guys who ever addressed the stylistic challenge [from Marvel] was Arnold Drake,” says Paul Kupperberg, a former DC writer and editor who would reboot the Doom Patrol in 1977. “Doom Patrol, if you read it now, was a pretty sophisticated book for its time. It had heady continuity and that Marvel interaction between characters. Arnold saw what was going on.”

The Doom Patrol was born when Murray Boltinoff, another of DC’s long-serving, pipe-smoking editors, decided to change up My Greatest Adventure. The anthology, which told a diverse range of stories from sci-fi to monster, had been floundering, so Boltinoff attempted to boost sales by injecting the flavor of the minute: superheroes. He asked Drake for ideas.

Over a single weekend Drake, with help from his buddy Haney, brainstormed a group that, as Drake described it, would attempt to move the superhero more into the real world and say, “They’ve got problems too. You don’t live without problems.”

The story found a wheelchair-bound genius, known as the Chief, gathering a team of misfits to fight crime and right wrongs. Actress Rita Farr, test pilot Larry Trainor, and race car driver Cliff Steele are all survivors of bizarre accidents that have granted them special powers. After inhaling volcanic gases in the African jungle, Farr becomes able to shrink and grow her body, taking on the name Elasti-Girl. Trainor (aka Negative Man) is exposed to cosmic radiation while flying a plane high in the atmosphere and is suddenly able to project from his body a being of negative energy. Steele is horribly mangled during an auto race, and his brain is transferred into a mechanical body, turning him into Robotman.

Like the members of Marvel’s Fantastic Four, these characters were bitter about the grotesque transformations their bodies had undergone and hated being superheroes. The first issue refers to them as “victims of a cruel and fantastic fate.”

These were not the typical, bright, “shiny teeth” (as Neal Adams called them) DC heroes. They were flawed freaks. “I decided I want a superhero for the nerds of the world,” Drake would say of the Chief.

My Greatest Adventure #80 hit racks in April 1963. The X-Men #1 landed that July, and the parallels were—let’s say—uncanny. The chances that two comic book publishers, completely independently, would put out a new book about a team of freaks led by a genius-level, wheelchair-bound mentor within weeks of each other were on par with the chances of Aquaman investing in Seaworld stock. The similarities were far too blatant to be coincidence. At least in Drake’s mind.

After X-Men #1 appeared, Drake walked into Weisinger’s office to raise a stink. The editor simply brushed him off, telling Drake, “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. Your man-in-a-wheelchair isn’t a new idea. Nero Wolfe never left his orchids to solve a murder.”

But classic fictional armchair detectives like Wolfe weren’t paraplegics. Professor X and the Chief were. Had Stan Lee ripped off the idea for X-Men from Drake?

Further muddying the waters was another incredible parallel. In the March 1964 issue the Doom Patrol fought a group of ne’er-do-wells called the Brotherhood of Evil. The exact same month in X-Men #4, Professor X and his mutants took on the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. A single coincidence is one thing. Two is hard to swallow.

But in the end it may have been just that: coincidence. The logistics of comic book creation make the prospect of a rip-off unlikely. It would have been impossible for Marvel’s editor to read My Greatest Adventure #80 in April and then write, draw, letter, and print a copycat by July—there simply wasn’t enough lead time. As unlikely as it sounds, the whole thing could probably be chalked up to chance—a conclusion that Drake accepted. Initially, at least.

When asked in 1984 about Marvel copying the Doom Patrol with the X-Men, Drake downplayed the possibility. “Not unless someone was looking over my shoulder while I was writing,” he said. “X-Men came out almost at the same time—just a little bit later.”

But toward the end of his life, he’d reconsidered the charges, claiming Stan Lee had “knowingly” stolen the idea of the X-Men from him.

“I [initially] reasoned that there wasn’t enough lead time for it to have been a rip-off. But back then I didn’t know that many DC artists were already working for Stan,” Drake said in 2003. “In short, from the day I dropped my first Doom Patrol script on Boltinoff’s desk, news could have leaked to Marvel about ‘a team of anti-super-heroes led by a scientific genius in a wheelchair.’ So the plagiarism issue remains open. And unless someone steps up to say, ‘Yes, one day, I told Stan about that,’ it will never close.”

When it came to the Brotherhood of Evil coincidence, it’s possible that both Lee and Drake could have drawn inspiration by simply opening the newspaper. A September 24, 1963, article about organized crime that was syndicated to newspapers across the country had a headline reading, “Brotherhood of Evil.” It’s possible that both men spotted the story as they were preparing the issues of their respective comic books that would arrive four months later and liked the ring of the phrase.

For his part Lee claims that he had no idea DC had produced a book featuring a team leader in a wheelchair, otherwise he’d have never done the X-Men. “The last thing in the world I wanted to do was anything that was like DC,” he said in 2003.

In 2005, two years before he died, Drake received an honorary award at the San Diego Comic-Con. He accepted his accolade in front of a packed house of comic book professionals, and before he left the stage he couldn’t resist taking one final dig at Lee. Drake ended his speech by breaking into an a capella song he’d written that included the line, “I hears somebody said it / that Stan Lee would take credit / for Spider-Man to the King James testament.” Many in attendance gasped.

The tragedy for Drake is that few people outside comic fandom are likely to know the Doom Patrol (volume 1 was canceled in 1968), a concept and series that was arguably as groundbreaking and original as the X-Men. But like so many of the head-to-head duels between the two companies, Marvel would somehow come out on top.

Stan Lee was certainly winning the PR battle. Through his magazines’ letters pages and his Soapbox column, Lee spoke directly to readers in a casual tone that helped Marvel establish the fun, rollicking brand personality it retains to this day. Lee made readers feel like they were part of a special club for those smart and selective enough to be reading Marvel books. While DC’s editors came off in print as what they were—middle-aged, uptight, management types—Stan brought goofy wit and a friendly personality.

“I don’t know if their stuff has deteriorated or whether you have improved that much, but the competition now seems like ecch!”

—Paul Gambaccini, from a letter printed in December 1963’s The Amazing Spider-Man #7

“There is, however, one company which puts out comics which I am not at all hesitant to call utter trash. The company has the nerve to refer to you as ‘Brand-Ech’ while they sit back and put out the worst comics in history.”

—Robert Wilczynski, from a letter printed in May 1966’s The Flash #161

Part of his persona was taking good-natured digs at DC in print. He referred to them as “Brand Echh,” a play on “Brand X,” a common euphemism in advertising used to refer to a competing product that one didn’t want to name. Lee lamented the “panicky pussycats” desperately trying to imitate Marvel and offered to sell them scripts.

DC responded to the ribbing by defensively referring to Marvel in its letters pages as “Brand I,” for imitator, or “Brand Ego.” Robert Kanigher used the cryptic “CC Comics,” presumably for “copycat” or “carbon copy.” Brave and Bold #74 (November 1967) opened with Batman acrobatically twirling around a flag pole, boasting, “Here’s one I did before anybody, including a certain web-spinning Peter-come-lately!” The Spider-Man insult aggravated some Marvel fans.

While Marvel was unleashing the “Marvel age” of comics, DC generally kept its head in the sand. Marvel, since 1961, had grown enough to make it worthy of parodying and sniping at in DC’s letters pages, but to those who ran the esteemed publisher, it still did not represent a major threat from a business perspective.

“It seems that the editors at DC were so institutionalized, coming off all these wonderful accomplishments, taking credit for the invention of the superhero and maintaining it, and acting like no one else could do a superhero as well as they did,” DC editor Joe Orlando said in 1998. “They were getting their asses kicked in by Marvel at the newsstands, and they were not reading the Marvel books, never analyzing or trying to figure out what the competition was doing. They treated their competitor with total contempt.”

One theory put forth by DC publisher Irwin Donenfeld about Marvel’s success was that it was simply an accident. Kids were getting confused at the newsstand and mistakenly buying Marvel books instead of DC, which they actually wanted. In early 1966 Donenfeld sought to remedy the perceived problem, and the result was one of the most ridiculed ideas in the history of the industry.

Beginning with titles cover dated April 1966 Donenfeld attempted to give the DC line a unified look by adding a checkboard-patterned stripe banner at the top of the cover. “Don’t hesitate,” house ads at the time ordered, “Choose the mags with the go-go checks!”

“In those days comics were on the newsstands with vertical slots for the magazines,” Donenfeld said in 1998. “I wanted to have something that showed DC Comics were different than anything else.… So wherever these magazines were displayed, you could always see a DC comic from way back. It was to distinguish us from anybody else.”

The go-go checks did their jobs. They did distinguish DC’s books from others on the stand. Only that may not have been such a great thing.

“It was the stupidest idea we ever heard,” DC’s Infantino would say of the checks, “because the books were bad in those days, and that just showed people right off what not to buy.”

Around the time the go-go checks were being rolled out, Arnold Drake was taking another stab at trying to get DC’s management to take seriously the challenge Marvel presented. On February 3, 1966, Drake typed a blistering, seven-page memo to Donenfeld laying out the reasons he believed Marvel was ascendant and the changes he recommended DC make to keep up.

“[Marvel] succeeded for two reasons primarily,” Drake wrote in the memo. “First, they were more with what was happening in the country than we were. And perhaps more important, they aimed their stuff at an age level that had never read comics before in any impressive number—the college level (let’s say ages 16 to 19 or 20).”

Drake suggested developing tiers of books aimed at different age groups. The entry-level books, such as Weisinger’s juvenile Superman, would target the youngest readers. The next step up would be Julie Schwartz’s superhero books, such as The Flash and Justice League of America. Those would be for the preteen reader. Finally, titles such as Drake’s Doom Patrol would be aimed at the oldest demographic and would contain “adult concepts, adult language, a little cheesecake, a little idol-breaking, a little ‘think’ stuff now and then.”

Donenfeld’s response to the memo was similar to his response back in 1962 when Drake and Haney had first sounded the alarm.

“You’re as full of shit as a Christmas turkey,” the executive fumed to Drake. “We outsell Marvel three to one.”

DC’s upper management may have been oblivious when it came to the evolving marketplace, but DC did show some signs of change through the decade. Arguably the most lasting tweak was the attempt to create a more coherent DC universe, as Marvel was busy doing. Starting in 1963, some two years after the modern Marvel universe had been born, DC took steps to streamline all its characters into a single world and to tighten the continuity among its titles.

DC’s heroes had appeared in one another’s books prior to 1963: Batman paid a visit to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude in 1958’s Action Comics #241, for instance, and the Flash guest starred in 1962’s Green Lantern #13. But the universe didn’t feel particularly coherent, and DC’s grouchy, territorial editors were often not so keen on allowing their heroes to cross into other titles.

That resistance began easing with the publication of Brave and Bold #50 (November 1963). The series had previously been a proving ground for new concepts, similar to Showcase. With #50 it became strictly about teaming two superheroes together. The inaugural story starred Martian Manhunter and Green Arrow—not exactly a blockbuster duo, though subsequent pairings were to be selected by fan vote, an ad at the time promised. Soon the Metal Men were joining forces with the Atom, and Batman was fighting alongside Green Lantern.

In the mother of all team-ups, the company’s two super squads—the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America—crossed paths in Justice League of America #21 (August 1963). The story called “Crisis on Earth One” proved so popular with buyers—if not artist Mike Sekowsky, whose hands were probably stricken with carpal tunnel from drawing all those different characters—that it became an annual tradition. It also installed the word “Crisis” as the publisher’s go-to brand for gigantic events involving numerous heroes.

DC was beginning to cobble together a universe. Unlike Marvel, whose universe had mostly been created during a few years and had been controlled by one editor, DC had to contend with decades of (often contradictory) story lines created by dozens of writers, editors, and artists. The result was a jumbled timeline into which not everything they published fit squarely.

The continuity problem would be something DC would wrestle with for years to come and still does in the present day, but the company did begin to try to address glaring errors that would irritate hardcore readers who increasingly cared about that kind of minutia.

Mystery in Space #75 (May 1962) was the first to retroactively correct a past error in order to make it jibe with continuity, a practice that would become a virtual cottage industry in later years. May 1961’s Justice League of America #4 had included a scene in which new members are nominated for inclusion in the group. The Flash suggests Adam Strange because “he’s achieved an excellent record.”

Strange, a sci-fi hero, had first appeared in 1958. He was an ordinary earthbound archeologist who one day suddenly finds himself transported to an alien world called Rann. There he befriends a beautiful woman and joins in Rann’s fight against alien invaders.

As a reader pointed out in the letters column to Justice League of America #6, however, the JLA couldn’t have known about Adam Strange because they’d never been shown meeting.

Schwartz solved the discrepancy by writing a story for Mystery in Space set in the time between JLA #3 and #4, detailing a meeting between Strange and the marquee superheroes.

Around that time DC also began freshening up some of its characters, most notably Batman. The hero is a multibillion-dollar franchise these days, but back in the early 1960s Batman was on the verge of cancellation and risked fading into oblivion like other characters from the pulp era, such as the Phantom. Imagine no Christopher Nolan movies, no Saturday morning cartoons, no Batman sweetened corn cereal.

Donenfeld tasked Julie Schwartz and artist Carmine Infantino with creating a “new look” for the character, and sales improved.

Modern storytelling approaches also touched other DC heroes. Green Lantern’s alter ego, Hal Jordan, proposed to girlfriend, Carol Ferris, in 1966. When she says no, he’s crushed and goes wandering across America in a multipart storyline. In one issue he’s working as an insurance adjuster in Washington State—one of the most powerful beings in the universe reduced to investigating fender benders.

One writer who introduced a Marvel sensibility to DC was Jim Shooter, a Pittsburgh native who sold his first story to DC in 1965 at the ripe old age of thirteen.

Shooter had grown up reading DC comics but abandoned them after he felt he’d outgrown them. A few years later, during a hospital stay when he was twelve, he discovered a pile of comics in his room. He flipped through Superman to find it hadn’t changed much since he was a little boy. He tossed it aside, bored. Then he picked up a stack of Marvel comics, and his young mind was blown. Inside he witnessed a whole new way of telling stories, a more mature way of handling superheroes.

“The [Marvel characters] seemed more real, more like people,” Shooter says. “Then I’d open a Superman comic, and Superman would be cutting a ribbon on a bridge opening or something.”

The budding writer began formulating a plan to earn money for his struggling family. He thought he could help elevate DC’s inferior stories by sending the publisher new ones written in the style of Stan Lee.

He crafted a tale of the Legion of Super-Heroes, a group of young do-gooders from the thirtieth century, because he felt that was the magazine that “needed the most help.” He then sent it, unsolicited, to Mort Weisinger. The editor liked it, and soon Shooter was penning Superman stories as well as the Legion’s adventures.

Shooter set about injecting his DC tales with some of the same elements that had attracted him to Marvel. He introduced memorable villains, including Parasite, and tried to amp up the characterization to be more in line with Marvel’s unique style. On his watch the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes began to have their own distinct personalities. Ferro Lad, a riff on Iron Man in which the hero transforms himself into metal, was killed off in a shocking twist that brought a little Marvel-style angst.

Shooter soon became known around DC as the “Marvel writer”—and that was not meant as a compliment. Weisinger colleagues often criticized him for using someone who wrote like Stan Lee.

“Mort forbade me to read Marvel comics because he thought they were a bad influence,” Shooter says. “I ignored that.”

When Marvel launched a fan club in 1964, Shooter happily joined. Later, when Lee promised to print the name of every member in the pages of Marvel comics, Shooter lived in terror for months, fearing Weisinger would spot his name and fire him. It never happened, and Shooter kept writing.

For all of Weisinger’s animosity and the dismissive attitude among the rest of DC’s higher-ups toward Marvel, they were clearly concerned about the rival company and made attempts to copy it.

“There was this odd dichotomy,” Shooter says. “People at DC ridiculed Marvel Comics, but they also hated the fact that they were selling. They couldn’t grasp it. They thought it was like the hula hoop, that it was a fad and it would go away, even while struggling to imitate it.”

“I think DC was concerned about staying relevant at a time when what defined relevance for comics had been shifted to someone else,” says former DC editor Brian Augustyn. “DC started to try to ape some of Marvel’s trappings, the superficial elements, that they could grab. But at this point it was forty-five-year-old men trying to understand what college students wanted.”

One of Marvel’s trademark elements that DC tried to copy was the Bullpen Bulletins, Marvel’s chatty news page. In March 1966 the company introduced its own coming attractions column called Direct Currents. The column stands as an enlightening demonstration of how much difficulty DC had in copying Marvel’s success. Again and again the publisher would latch onto elements from its rival and attempt to emulate them in a misguided or wrongheaded way.

Direct Currents tried its best to ape Lee’s freewheeling, slang-filled voice, but it ended up sounding like it had been spit out of a computer called the Alliterator 3000.

“Read this page of powerful predictions of popular publications produced by DC!” read the June 1967 entry. “Find out what fabulous fiction, fraught with fascinating features, will be awaiting you at your neighborhood newsstand!”

You can practically hear the writer desperately screaming across the DC offices, “Can anyone think of another word that begins with F?!”

Direct Currents offered none of the fun of Bullpen Bulletins. It didn’t offer a peek into the world of DC comics, dish on the goings-on at the office, or turn the company’s artists and writers into relatable personalities. It didn’t create a special bond with readers. It. Was. Just. There.

“DC tried to reach out and say, ‘Hey, I’m with you. I’m one of you,’ but they never really succeeded,” says Scott Edelman, a Marvel editor in the 1970s. “So they’d do things that would eventually get mocked. It was like when you watch old episodes of The Brady Bunch or The Partridge Family, and there would always be an old guy wearing a Nehru jacket with an ankh symbol and growing his hair a little long and trying to connect with kids.”

Part of DC’s lack of fraternity with the reader came down to philosophy. The company didn’t want to introduce readers to its staff because it would prefer that those picking up its books didn’t know who was creating them. To DC the characters were the star. “I don’t want anybody to know who you are, I want them to care about Superman,” Mort Weisinger once told one of his writers.

Comics was anonymous work for many years. The writer, penciler, inker, colorist, letterer, and other hands that produced them rarely received credit for their work in the magazines’ pages. The artist could occasionally sneak a signature onto a splash page or hide it within a background, like on a car’s license plate. (Though DC would often white out those before the pages saw print.) Official credits were not the normal part of doing business.

Until Stan Lee came along.

His and Jack Kirby’s names are scribbled on the upper right corner of the first page of Fantastic Four #1, and with issue #9 the book began including a proper credits box, giving a tip of the cape to those who worked on the issue.

“I put everybody’s name. I even put the letterer’s name down,” Lee says. “I wanted it to seem a bit like a movie. I wanted the readers to get to know who we were and to become fans. I wanted to personalize things and not just, ‘These are books. You buy them or you don’t buy them. You don’t know who did them and you don’t care.’ I wanted to give it a friendly feeling, as though we’re all part of one group of fans and we enjoy what we’re doing and we know each other.”

DC was slow to follow suit. Julie Schwartz had printed credits for writer Gardner Fox and artist Joe Kubert in a 1961 Hawkman story that ran in Brave and Bold, and he did the same in other stories. But credit for DC’s talent remained scattershot throughout the sixties.

“DC did not like that Marvel put credits in the front of its books,” says Peter David, a longtime comics writer who has worked for DC and Marvel since the 1980s. “They considered Stan to be a boastful son of a bitch, putting his name in the comics with the artist and the inker. That was just not done.”

DC held out until the talent forced its hand.

“They wound up following Marvel’s lead when various creators were going, ‘Wait a minute—how come Marvel does that and you don’t?’” David says.

About the only ones who weren’t getting proper credit at Marvel were those whom the publisher had lured over from DC. As the upstart publisher started to catch fire, several DC artists began quietly freelancing for Marvel. Very quietly. Many of them hoped to continue collecting a paycheck from DC, so to avoid the wrath of DC’s editors, the artists needed to use fake names.

“I heard many freelancers say it was like the Berlin Wall,” former Marvel editor David Anthony Kraft says. “You worked for Marvel or you worked for DC. You did not work for both. I think DC had that really rigid policy: you’re a traitor if you do anything for Marvel.”

The first to cross the wall were inkers Frank Giacoia, a competent draftsman who’d been working on the Flash and some romance titles, and Wonder Woman artist Mike Esposito. Beginning in 1965 Giacoia’s Marvel work appeared credited as “Frankie Ray” and Esposito’s as “Mickey Demeo.” Superman specialist Jack Abel started inking Iron Man under the name “Gary Michaels,” and Gil Kane, the cocreator of the 1960s Green Lantern, took the name “Scott Edward” to draw a Hulk story.

Lee reveled in the thefts and would chuckle about how many great artists DC had buried on their romance books. Marvel gave these guys a chance to really shine, but defecting could be dangerous: the artists ran the risk of losing their paycheck from DC, which at the time was a far more stable bet than Marvel.

One problem with the pseudonym strategy was that artists often drew with a distinct style, and recognizing their work wasn’t all that difficult, no matter what name was signed to it.

Gene Colan, another of DC’s underutilized artists, began freelancing for Marvel under the name “Adam Austin” in 1965.

“Everybody’s favorite guessing game these days is trying to figure out the real identity of the Sub-Mariner’s powerful penciller, Adam Austin!” Lee wrote in the December 1965 Bullpen Bulletins.

Colan drew with a delicate pencil style full of lush shading, and it didn’t take long for the artist to be outed. Soon after his Marvel work began appearing, Colan got a call from a fan saying, “Don’t bother trying to fool me with that Adam Austin bit. I’d know your work anywhere.”

The death knell came later when Colan was at the DC offices delivering some work. As he headed toward the elevator to leave, the doors opened, and out walked Marvel honcho Martin Goodman. “Hi, Gene,” Goodman said, and with that, all of Colan’s plans of continuing to work surreptitiously for both companies disappeared.

The next day Lee offered him full-time work, and he went on to become a Marvel mainstay, drawing Daredevil, Captain America, and Doctor Strange, among many others.

Writer defections were less common then, in part because Lee was able to handle all the titles he was allowed to release under Independent News’s constricting contract. As Marvel was allowed to release more material, additional hands were needed. Lee’s savior would come from DC.

Roy Thomas was a Missouri-based high school teacher who was among the most prominent fans in the industry. He’d been publishing the fanzine Alter Ego since 1964, and his letters often appeared in publications for both DC and Marvel.

Thomas, through fandom, had developed numerous contacts in the comic book industry, and in 1965 he left Missouri and moved to New York to take a job at DC as Mort Weisinger’s assistant. He’d finally realized his dream of being in the industry.

That dream soon turned to a nightmare working under the monstrous Weisinger. After work Thomas would return home to his dirty hotel room and feel tears welling in his eyes. Out of desperation he decided to write Stan Lee a letter, just telling the Marvel editor he was a fan of his work. Lee soon phoned Thomas, offering him a writer’s test. Thomas passed and was offered a job over a lunch, just eight days into his DC tenure.

He returned from lunch to the DC offices to give notice, and Weisinger threw him out of the office immediately, accusing him of being a spy for Marvel.

The hire would ultimately prove transformational for Marvel, and Thomas would become a major figure in the company’s development through the 1960s and 1970s, as the publisher’s sales roared ahead.

Marvel’s growth was so strong, so unprecedented, that its editor would soon declare victory over DC. The April 1968 Soapbox had Lee proclaiming Marvel “the undisputed leaders of the comics industry.”

The bluster was typical of Lee’s boastful style. Marvel still wasn’t quite number one—that milestone would take a few more years—but it had grown a remarkable amount.

Marvel’s titles had been selling so well that in 1967 Goodman was able to twist Independent News’s arm into allowing him to release even more. Suddenly the characters who had previously been forced to share the so-called split books got their own stand-alone titles. The Incredible Hulk, Sub-Mariner, The Invincible Iron Man, Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Captain America appeared on newsstands, substantially increasing Marvel’s presence in 1968.

The expansion was not just about sating readers’ desire for more Marvel; Goodman had an ulterior motive for pumping up the company’s output—namely, he was laying the groundwork for Marvel to be sold. After decades in the business, churning out pulps, men’s magazines as well as comics, Goodman had grown tired and desired to spend more time with his family.

“Coming into 1968 Goodman had been publishing for forty years,” says Robert Beerbohm, a historian and retailer who opened one of the country’s first comic book stores in Berkeley, California, in 1972. “Goodman doubled or tripled the output. You get Iron Man #1, Captain America [in his own title]. All of a sudden there’s a small flood of romance and war comics. Reprints crank up. What that did is gave the perception of higher circulation numbers so he got more money than he should have gotten when he sold Marvel.”

Goodman unloaded Marvel in 1968 for around $15 million to Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation, a hodgepodge conglomerate with a name so bland that it sounded like a corporate front for a James Bond villain. Perfect Film included a range of interests, from paperback books to The Graduate–approved “plastics.” The sale would move Marvel from a modest, family-owned business to a corporate concern and mark a significant step on the publisher’s long, slow road from niche children’s publisher to corporate licensing and IP factory.

Marvel’s new owners didn’t have any particular fondness for superheroes. The publisher was just another notch on Perfect Film’s corporate belt.

“They were terrible owners. They stunk,” says Mike Hobson, Marvel’s publisher from 1981 to 1996. “They didn’t give a damn about things at all. They just tried to buy everything.”

Perfect Film did have one asset that would soon prove valuable to Marvel: Curtis Circulation, a magazine distributor.

Goodman’s deal with Independent News was set to expire, and he and those at Marvel felt that having your competitor control your access to newsstands was a major disadvantage—that Independent didn’t work as hard to sell their books as DC’s. Lee likened it to Ford having hired General Motors to sell its cars.

Independent’s salespeople have claimed that their loyalty was first and foremost to what sold and that they didn’t show any particular favoritism to their sister company. That might have been the case. DC’s Infantino recalled a visit to a newsstand near DC’s office and was enraged to find his company’s titles taking a back seat to Marvel’s.

“I was … watching these jerks promoting Marvel over us—and they were working for us!” Infantino said in 2010. “Marvel got better slots on the newsstands, which made no sense to me.”

Whether or not working with Independent was actually hurting Marvel’s sales, the company cut ties with its longtime distributor and moved to Curtis. Starting with the comics cover dated September 1969, Marvel had a new distributor.

More important, the company had cut financial ties with DC. Marvel’s rival no longer benefited from every Marvel comic sold, and suddenly Marvel’s success became a much bigger threat.