We’re businessmen who can’t be expected to protect maladjusted children who might be affected by cops-and-robbers stories.
—Stanley Lieber, The New York Herald Tribune, May 9, 1948
Like Stanley Lieber, Judith Klein was born in 1922, she in the Bronx.
In that same year, Friedrich Ignatz Wertheimer came to the United States from Austria to complete his training in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.
By 1948—as Stan Lee, Judith Crist, and Fredric Wertham—their lives would for a time be fatefully intertwined by circumstances related to Goodman’s startling directive.
Why would Martin Goodman order Stan Lee to fire his staff of artists when business was booming?
One explanation that has come down through history is largely economic.
To make sure the company had enough material for so many comics—in the neighborhood of seventy titles per month—and because he didn’t like to say no to anybody in need of work—Lee had amassed an enormous quantity of inventoried stories, stories that could be slotted in when and where needed. Supposedly, when Goodman one day discovered all these pages in a closet—one would think he would have noticed the buildup before that—he was so infuriated he decided to fire everybody and burn off the excess.
On examination, this makes little sense. Cutting back on staff, perhaps, or ramping up the number of titles temporarily to use the accumulated art would have made more sense if excess inventory were such a problem. (After all, much of the excess had been generated by artists in the course of their day jobs, not just by freelance work executed by moonlighting staffers and others.) But what if a new fad that they needed to jump on came along, which seemed inevitable to happen sooner rather than later? Then they’d be stuck.
Another, more plausible explanation was that someone in Goodman’s company—possibly comptroller Monroe Froehlich Jr.—discovered that new tax regulations made it a better business move to convert the artists to freelance status (as most of the writers already were) and have them work from home. At the very least, it would save on renting space for staff artists, not to mention on whatever benefits they might have been getting. It would also make the company, in some ways, able to respond more nimbly to changing market conditions, using only those artists appropriate to a given trend.
Raphael and Spurgeon noted, “Most of the staffers were let go in a series of fits and starts beginning around Christmas of 1949,” and that “Lee was able to offer a sizeable amount of freelance work to former members of the bullpen by the end of 1950 and into 1951.”1
It was concern over those changing market conditions that led Goodman to leave his distributor, Kable News, and start his own distribution company for his comic books and magazines.2 As Raphael and Spurgeon observed, “By starting Atlas News Company [distributors], which was anchored in part by the eighty-two monthly titles that Stan Lee and the boys were producing in the comic-book division, Goodman could increase profits by eliminating the middleman. He could also respond much more rapidly to evolving trends and sales figures.”3
There was a major factor in the “evolving trends” above and beyond the usual issue of readers’ tastes. It was the ongoing attack on comics, which had continued from the 1940 Sterling North editorial (and before him was conducted by others attacking comics, starting with the earliest syndicated comic strips) and carried on, starting in the late ’40s, by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who was the most vocal and visible of a growing number of comic book critics.
Goodman, Froehlich, and Stan Lee realized that the movement against comics had impacted public perception of their industry, and they needed to be nimble and adaptable to survive whatever impact that movement would have on them. Anti-comics legislation had been introduced in dozens of localities, and there were even comic book burnings around the country, including in Binghamton, New York, just a few hours’ drive from the Manhattan offices of the majority of comic book publishers.
Numerous comics companies had gone out of business or soon would. Goodman’s structural adjustments meant that he wasn’t just surviving. With fewer companies producing comics for the still sizeable audience, his comics line was thriving. People were still buying millions of comics of all kinds—although, notably, they weren’t buying nearly as many superhero comics as they used to.
A few years earlier, with the end of World War II, the superhero fad had waned, but comic books were as popular as ever, if not more so. The medium was growing in diversity, with all manner of genres represented. Of course, there would always be more and less popular genres over time, and in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were four genres that were more popular than others.
There was the romance genre, newly invented by Simon and Kirby for Crestwood Publications but soon adopted by the rest of the industry. There was crime, exemplified by titles like Justice Traps the GUILTY! and CRIME Does Not Pay. There was the horror genre, intent on giving intentionally shocking thrills to readers. War comics were quite popular, too, especially during the Korean War.
Publisher William M. Gaines’s EC Comics line was known for its publications’ high quality of scripts and art. Lee studied EC’s comics, especially when Goodman encouraged him to imitate what was working for that company. And, as Raphael and Spurgeon noted, Lee was fascinated by the way EC “was able to create an identity for the entire line despite the fact that EC, like Atlas, always worked in multiple genres.”4
However, what EC, as well as some other publishers, did was push the boundaries of acceptable content with their crime and horror stories. One extreme, now classic, example was the EC story “Foul Play” in Haunt of Fear #19 (dated June 1953), which depicted a baseball game that employed a hated character’s body parts—his head as the ball and his intestines as base lines. Many crime comics emphasized brutal violence and often featured highly sexualized femmes fatales. Stories like these were noticed and seized on by comics critics and became the subject of much negative media scrutiny.
Goodman’s Timely/Atlas (the company has come to be known by both names, although Atlas was technically only the name of the distribution arm) was the most prolific—and highest quality—of the EC imitators. This was in part due to the ongoing closing of comics companies that made more top artists available to Goodman and Lee. While their crime and horror comics were rarely as extreme as those of EC and some others, they played in the same general arena.
In municipalities all over the country, attempts were being made to ban or regulate comics, especially crime and horror comics. While Lee made sure his comics weren’t as intense in their depictions of violence and gore as some of the other publishers’, they could still get fairly extreme, at least in the eyes of comics’ critics. Most prominent among the critics was psychiatrist Fredric Wertham.
Wertham was active in a variety of causes, and in 1954, his research was used as evidence of the negative effects of segregation and in favor of school integration in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. He also ran a low-cost psychiatric clinic in Harlem.
Working largely with poor, African American children in the Harlem clinic, Wertham had become convinced that the problems many of them faced were, if not caused, then exacerbated by violence and misogyny as portrayed in popular culture, especially in comic books.
As opposed to some other opponents of comics who came at them from a religious and/or socially conservative point of view, Wertham was a liberal progressive who believed that comics, as a “secret” subculture that kids could access for dimes, could do damage to impressionable young people that parents wouldn’t even be aware of. While Wertham seemed sincere in his concerns, he needed publicity to get his word out, and he did not shy from seeking it. He became a very public intellectual, publishing articles about his concerns regarding comics in many mainstream magazines. His ideas found an eager reception among adults concerned about a perceived rise—in numbers as well as the level of brutality—in youth crime, also known as “juvenile delinquency.”
(In recent years, comics historian Carol Tilley has discovered what many suspected: that Wertham often faked and fudged his data to conform to his desired results.)5
Interestingly, Wertham would, time and again, have his anti-comics activities covered by a young reporter, a woman who, at least once, had interviewed Stan Lee.
Judith Klein, daughter of a once-prosperous New York fur trader who’d lost everything when his business tanked in the Depression, had attended Morris High School in the Bronx and Hunter College in Manhattan. She then earned a master’s degree from Columbia University’s journalism school. In 1945, she went to work for The New York Herald Tribune as a general assignment reporter. In 1947, she married public relations man William Crist and took his surname. As Judith Crist, she would, of course, go on to be one of the most well-known film critics of all time. But in 1947, as a young reporter, she was assigned to cover Fredric Wertham. As she recalled in 2008:
I was a reporter [on the Herald Tribune’s] Social Significance Page … and the editor of that page was Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, who was a prominent woman columnist in her day … and she apparently read or heard something about Wertham. So she sent me down to interview him at his apartment.… I remember his making a great case [against comics] … and so I wrote an interview.…
He did some work that I admired.… I had one of his books. The most memorable of his pieces is something called “Medea in Long Island” or something like that … about a woman who had killed her children on Long Island somewhere. He paralleled it with the Medea complex, and so on. It was a fascinating and truly unforgettable piece about a modern Medea.6 [The piece was called “The People vs. Medea,” and it originally appeared in Harper’s Bazaar’s January 1948 issue.]7
Another fan of Wertham’s writings about insane murderers was Stan Lee. As he recalled:
When I was a kid, about thirteen years old, I had read a book [Dark Legend] written by a psychiatrist … and I thought it was a wonderfully written book. Really, it touched on some important issues.… Years later, I found out it was the same Dr. Wertham [as the one attacking comics] who had written that book. I don’t know what made him go crazy years later.8
Dark Legend was published in 1941, so Lee was already eighteen and working at Timely when it came out, but the fact remains that he recalled the book more than seven decades after it was published.
Judith Crist went on to recall:
[Wertham] was a very impressive man. He was also very charming … We kind of kept in touch vaguely.… I believe he sent me a copy of his collected essays or something.… I think that he was a thorough-going egotist. He didn’t see very far beyond his own principles. Not a man that I worshipped in any way, but he did stick in my memory.9
Apparently, Crist was indeed impressed and charmed by him, even if she didn’t worship him. In any case, for whatever reasons—perhaps just being a young reporter whose instincts told her to stick with a story—she wrote numerous stories for the Herald Tribune about Wertham and his anti-comics activities.
For the December 28, 1947 (Lee’s twenty-fifth birthday), Herald Tribune, Crist wrote a Wertham-centric article with the headline COMIC BOOKS ARE CALLED OBSCENE BY N.Y. PSYCHIATRIST AT HEARING. The subhead read: “Dr. Wertham Says They Present ‘a Glorification of Sadistic-Masochistic Sexual Attitudes’; He Defends Nudist Society’s Magazine.”
In the article, Wertham, testifying on behalf of the publishers of nudist magazine Natural Herald at a Washington, D.C. Post Office Department obscenity hearing, declared that the magazine was far from obscene. The article continued with a tortured leap of logic:
But if obscenity, the psychiatrist declared, is to be gauged by its lewdness or its effect in stimulating the average person sexually, then, he suggested, it was time for official cognizance be given to comic books. These he termed “definitely harmful—guilty of instilling the wrong attitudes about sex and violence.”
Crist also covered, for the Herald Tribune, the Psychopathology of Comic Books symposium conducted by Wertham at New York University on March 19, 1948. At it, speakers besides Wertham included cultural critics Gershon Legman and Wertham’s research partner, Hilde Mosse. In the audience—but not given a chance to speak—were members of the comics industry, including cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, who was at the time doing short humor pieces for Lee at Timely. Wertham likened their presence there to “distillers attending a symposium on alcoholism.”10
Perhaps Crist’s best-known article about comics—and Wertham—was published in the March 27, 1948, issue of Collier’s magazine. The piece was titled “Horror in the Nursery.” (“I was a little surprised at the headline,” she reflected in 2008, indicating that it was more lurid than she had wanted.)11 In it, she gave Wertham a forum in a popular national magazine, even as the photos depicted child actors “torturing” each other based on actions allegedly seen in comic books. In the piece, Wertham—through Crist—made a number of points. For just a few examples, he said:
The comic books, in intent and effect, are demoralizing the morals of youth. They make violence alluring and cruelly heroic.… If those responsible refuse to clean up the comic-book market … the time has come to legislate these books off the newsstands and out of the candystores.12
While Wertham generally did not advocate censorship of comics for adults, he certainly wished they didn’t exist and that their sale to children under age fifteen be regulated.
Of psychiatrists who defended comics, he said:
The fact that child psychiatrists endorse comic books does not prove the healthy state of the comic books. It only proves the unhealthy state of child psychiatry.13
In a May 9, 1948, Herald Tribune article entitled CONTROVERSY OVER “CRIME” COMIC BOOKS GROWS, Crist covered local government attempts to regulate comics in Detroit, Indianapolis, and other cities. In the piece, she noted that:
Most of the editors [I spoke to] emphasized their personal integrity, as did Stanley Lieber, editor of five of the banned [crime comic] books.
Stan Lee, apparently going by his real (and still legal) name for his interview with Crist, told her:
We’re not selling books on the basis of bosoms and blood. We’re businessmen who can’t be expected to protect maladjusted children who might be affected by cops-and-robbers stories. We feel we use stringent self-censorship.
This didn’t sound like the affable, propeller-beanie-wearing Stan Lee that his colleagues had come to know. Perhaps Lee/Lieber hadn’t yet learned how to charm reporters. Or perhaps his most venal-sounding statement made for the most attention-grabbing quote for an article about the pernicious influence of comic books.
By October 1948, fifty cities had enacted measures to ban or censor comic books.14 Like other companies, Timely hired an expert to counter the onslaught of negative attention. In this case, it was Dr. Jean Thompson, “a psychiatrist in the Child Guidance Bureau of the New York City Board of Education,” as the editorial in the November and December 1948 cover-dated issues of Timely’s comics declared. (This piece, and three subsequent editorials, referred to the company as Marvel Comic Group, a name it sometimes used over the years before making it permanent in the ’60s.)
The editorials were all signed, “The Editors, Marvel Comic Group.” Historian Michael Vassallo believes that they were written by editor Stan Lee “most certainly under the direction of publisher Martin Goodman.”15 It does seem likely that such important communication with readers would be produced by the company’s editorial boss.
The first editorial, written in a friendly but serious manner, stated that:
We want to help you protect your right to buy and read your favorite magazines, as long as they contain nothing that might be hurtful to you.
It went on to say that Dr. Thompson “will insure the fact that our comics contain nothing that might meet with objections from your parents, teachers or friends.”
The second editorial, in the January through March 1949 cover-dated comics, is less casual and more specific. Referencing an article by Wertham in The Saturday Review of Literature, the editorial declared that
a Dr. Wertham discussed the problem of juvenile delinquency in America today, and pinned the blame for some of the cases on comic magazines.…
Now the enemies of comics were distilled into one person: Dr. Wertham.
After quoting an eloquent response to Wertham in a later issue of Saturday Review by fourteen-year-old David Pace Wigransky (“In none of these cases was it proved that reading comic books was the cause of the delinquency”), Lee went on to ask
why not give the comics credit for the good influence that they have been on these millions of healthy, normal kids, instead of just blaming them for our handful of delinquents?
By the third editorial, in his comics cover-dated April and May 1949, Lee tried another tack entirely—doing his best to establish comics as a natural step in the evolution of great literature:
Let these critics of today look to their history. Let them decide if they want to be remembered as the 20th Century counterpart of the people who called Robinson Crusoe “slop.”
The anger beneath the editorial’s words is palpable. Lee was asking Wertham, Legman, and other comics-negative academics and intellectuals to consider how history would judge them. This was pretty audacious for a twenty-six-year-old whose most advanced credential was a diploma from a New York public high school.
The fourth, and final, editorial, in the Marvel/Timely comics cover-dated June and July 1949, framed the company’s argument in a passionate, yet wistful, manner, with the writer seeming to almost sigh as he lamented:
The grown-ups of this world owe you young people an apology, because we haven’t made the world a very secure and peaceful place in which to live.…
He then went on to reflect that, at least in the comics, the good guys always win. He then pointed out that:
Just as there are good and bad people, good and bad radio programs, good and bad movies, so there is good and bad literature … comics, with their many pictures, are just one type of literature.
Comics, the editorial continued, are “a stepping-stone to your appreciation of books that have stood the test of time.”
Here, Lee has tossed in the proverbial kitchen sink, telling readers that the world might be an ugly place, but at least in comics, as opposed to real life, the good guys always win; that some comics are “good”—although he conflates “good” as meaning enjoyable with good as meaning “beneficial”—and that comics are just part of “our vast literary heritage” and not the only thing you should read.
You can’t accuse the guy of not trying.
While it’s hard to know the actual effect of the editorials, they were at least, it could be argued, one factor in the company’s staying in business over the next eight years, while numerous competitors would shutter their doors.
Interestingly, the voice in the editorials is familiar as the editorial voice that Lee had been developing since his first published work—the prose story in Captain America Comics #3—and that would fully blossom as the voice of Marvel and of Stan Lee in the ’60s in Marvel’s letters pages and Bullpen Bulletins.
As Wertham’s fight against comics was gaining momentum, life went on for Stan Lee, his family, and his company.
Lee was still overseeing dozens of comics a month and writing several comics stories each week. Even, or especially, after the layoffs of 1949, there was still much work to be done. Now, though, with a few exceptions, Lee dealt with the artists as freelancers. New names that would become familiar to comics readers in the coming years started showing up in the comics. While there were some veterans of the ’30s and ’40s doing work—notably Carl Burgos and Bill Everett—there were also numerous artists working for the company who were too young to have been involved in the first years of the superhero craze, who were kids or teens reading those stories, and who were eager to get into the field. To even the most enthusiastic, though, comics were still a way to earn some quick money, an avenue to be used as a stepping-stone to careers in illustration or advertising.
Nonetheless, this was the era when the work of such artists as John Romita, Joe Maneely, Gene Colan, Dick Ayers, and Joe Sinnott started appearing in the books. Even Jerry Robinson—famous for his work on Batman in the ’40s—came to work for Timely from 1950 to 1960. Of working for Lee, he recalled:
I guess he must have known my work from Batman or elsewhere, because he said, “Gee, I’d love to work with you”.… He enticed me back to comic books, since I wasn’t interested in doing them at the time.… We had a very nice relationship for those [ten] years. And he was a very easy editor. I guess he had confidence in what I would do, so I didn’t have to check anything with him.16
Somewhere in the period when Robinson worked for Lee, he would introduce the editor to a student of his at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (soon to be called the School of Visual Arts), Steve Ditko.
Over that period of about six months, from 1949 into 1950, Stan Lee went about letting his staff artists go, although he would soon start rehiring them, but on a freelance basis. Even dependable creators who doubled as editors were let go. Lee regarded many of them as friends, people whose families he knew and cared about. He recalled the layoff period as “black days for me.”17 For instance, Al Jaffee went from editing teen comics to writing and drawing them.
But Timely, in fact, was actually thriving—although always in the shadow of impending doom. Smaller companies were going out of business, but Goodman’s self-distribution enabled him to pick up the pieces from the other publishers who were leaving the field or severely downsizing. (Goodman also cut freelancer rates as part of a strategy for survival.) Stan Lee was overseeing more than seventy comic book titles.18
The list of artists who worked for Lee in the period between 1950 and 1957 is an incredible who’s who of people who were or would become legendary comic book creators, including John Romita, Gene Colan, Stan Goldberg, Joe Sinnott, Jerry Robinson, Bernard Krigstein, Al Feldstein, Al Jaffee, and so many more. Some of their memories give insight into the times and Lee’s role in them.
Goldberg, the head staff colorist, socialized with the Lees. But even then, Lee was looking to expand his horizons. According to Goldberg:
Even when we would go visit his and Joan’s house … he would say, “Come on upstairs!” That’s where he worked. “Let’s go over some ideas that I have.” These were ideas that we would try to submit for syndication.… One was a single-panel gag strip … we called it “Doc.” It was about a friendly little doctor.… [It didn’t sell to a syndicate, but] We were able to get rid of about 75% of the Doc material to medical journals.19
Goldberg’s wife, Pauline, recalled:
I can always remember SG saying he usually went to lunch with SL. SL would drag him all around town to pick up out of town papers to check the comics.… SG said that when he got back to the office, he was exhausted and his shins killed him [from the long walks Lee was famous for].… SL was always very good to SG. He would always raise his salary without SG asking. Also, he would always critique his work, which SG really appreciated, and as a result, he felt his work really improved. SG was always very thankful for that. He always mentioned it. SG always felt he owed his career to SL.
I also remember going to their house for dinner in Hewlett Harbor on a snowy winter evening, and there was SL standing at a bar in their home wearing a blue blazer and white pants, looking dashing, I might add. He looked like he was on a ship [docked] on a Caribbean island.… [Stan and Joan] were very charismatic. They were a perfect pair.20
Artist Joe Sinnott, who started working for Lee in 1950, recalled:
Stan always liked to see things exaggerated. He would actually get up on his desk and show you a certain pose that he wanted.… He took his job seriously.… And I don’t think you could find a better editor than Stan. [And] he wrote stories that were interesting … and they were easy to draw as far as [visually] telling the story.21
Artist Bernard Krigstein would go on to legendary status for his work at EC, notably on a story called “Master Race,” written by Al Feldstein. Krigstein actually did more than seventy stories for Lee at Timely/Atlas between 1950 and 1957—many more than he ever did for EC or any other publisher—and with generally more creative freedom than he’d gotten anywhere else.22 Nonetheless, he was not among those who came away with good feelings about Lee. They parted over what could politely be called “creative differences.”
An artist who enjoyed working with Lee and with whom Lee equally loved working, as well as enjoyed a personal rapport with, was Joe Maneely. Maneely could draw beautifully in just about any genre, including humor. He penciled and inked his own stories and was extraordinarily fast. He and Lee would even do a moderately successful syndicated strip together, Mrs. Lyons’ Cubs.
John Romita joined Atlas in 1949 and, between then and 1957, would draw over two hundred stories for Lee. Gene Colan would do a similar quantity over that period. Both men would go on to become mainstays of Marvel in the 1960s.
Carl Burgos, who had created the Human Torch in 1939, was on staff in the office, drawing plenty of stories but serving also as de facto cover editor. Many of Atlas’s covers of the 1950s had a consistent look because, in that period, he touched up a large percentage of them—a process Vassallo, whose research shed light on Burgos’s role in the office—calls “Burgosizing.”
In April 1950, Joan Lee gave birth to a daughter, Joan Celia Lee, who would come to be nicknamed “JC” to differentiate her from her mother. Asked if becoming a father changed his outlook on life, Lee recalled, in 2017:
No, it didn’t change anything as far as my outlook. The only thing it did, it gave me less time to write because I had to spend more time with my daughter.23
And Joan Lee said of her husband’s adjustment to parenting:
When my daughter was born, [Stan] would always make time to take her to the carnivals and merry-go-rounds. No matter how hard he worked, he always had time for her and for me. He always found the time to spend with her [JC]. In fact, the three of us sometimes worry that we are too close. When we go off to the Great Unknown, she’ll really miss us because she’s insane about her father … and her mother.24
Later that year, in Goodman’s Focus magazine’s October 1950 issue, edited by Lee, an article appeared—credited to “Stanley Martin”—entitled “Don’t Legalize Prostitution.”
The piece is interesting not just for the fact that it’s a rare nonfiction piece written by Lee for a Magazine Management publication—and Focus was also one of the relatively few Goodman magazines he edited over the years—but also because it seems to make use of data on venereal disease that Lee most likely became familiar with when he was conducting his anti-VD campaign while in the army.
Whether the opinion voiced in the article was indeed Lee’s at the time—that legalizing prostitution tended to increase, not decrease, incidence of venereal disease, so prostitution should stay illegal—he certainly made a data-strong case (along with a few unsubstantiated assertions) for the argument. While Lee had written fiction and humor material for Goodman’s magazines over the years, this was one of the few—perhaps only—nonfiction, research-based pieces he would ever write for them.
Larry Lieber, who’d been doing production work for Magazine Management, came back to the comics to do some work, first inking humor and teen titles, then penciling and inking at least one story—“Cop on the Beat”—in All True Crime #44, cover-dated May 1951. Lieber would soon join the U.S. Air Force, where he would serve, partly in Okinawa, until 1955.
It was in 1952 that Martin Goodman started doing his own distribution of his comics and magazines, under the name Atlas. (Timely’s comics from this period are generally referred to as Atlas Comics, since the Atlas logo was the only consistent branding that appeared on the covers.) Perhaps he and company comptroller Froehlich were concerned that, with all the negative publicity comics were getting, distributors would not give them the attention they needed, and so he’d be better off distributing them himself (although this wouldn’t explain why doing his own distribution on the non-comics magazines seemed preferable). In theory, Goodman would also now have been able to keep a larger percentage of the profits of the comics (as well as of the magazines), which would have been especially important, as retailers—in light of the negative publicity comics were getting—were carrying fewer comics, or even none at all. In any case, the switch seemed to work, and Goodman’s comics and magazines continued to thrive.
That same year, the Lees moved to a new home, “a remodeled carriage house on Richards Lane in Long Island’s Hewlett Harbor.… incorporated from a private club in the 1920s and home to what local historians describe as the island’s most ‘socially prominent and very wealthy families.’”25 Stan and Joan’s philosophy was to buy the oldest, most affordable home in an area’s high-end neighborhood.26 Like their previous home, this one was also not far from Martin Goodman’s opulent estate.
In 1953, Joan Lee gave birth to another daughter, whom she and her husband named Jan. The infant died, however, when she was less than a week old. Joan reflected:
Our one big tragedy was when we lost a daughter. She only lived a few days after birth and we couldn’t have any more children. Perhaps that is why Stan, our daughter and I have always been such a close-knit family. Aside from that one tragic event, I’ve been terribly, terribly blessed.27
Told by their doctor that Joan couldn’t have any more children, the couple tried to adopt, but Joan’s fragile emotional state after losing baby Jan made agencies wary of letting them. The fact that Stan was Jewish and Joan Episcopalian also presented an issue to the agencies they applied to. For better or worse, they gave up trying to expand their family.28
In 1953, despite the general lack of interest in superheroes on the newsstands (of the major heroes, only Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman were still appearing regularly), the Superman TV series was a big hit, which led Goodman and Lee to revive Timely’s three top superheroes in several titles. John Romita—already, in his early twenties, establishing the style that would make him a superstar comics artist in the 1960s—drew Captain America stories for the revival. Carl Burgos, who had created the Human Torch, and newcomer Dick Ayers, worked on that character. Bill Everett returned to his creation, the Sub-Mariner. The revival would last less than a year, except in the case of the Sub-Mariner, who held on for another year, into 1955, with the prospect of a TV series adaptation of the character keeping the print version alive. The TV series would never happen, though.
While writing some superhero stories that year, Lee mostly confined his writing to humor and Westerns, as well as doing some mystery, horror, and war stories.
In issue #29 of Suspense, dated April 1953, Lee and Maneely—in a thinly veiled attack on Wertham—did a story called “The Raving Maniac.” In it, an overexcited, disheveled man barges into the office of the comic’s editor to tell him off for printing scary stories. The editor is a dead ringer for Stan Lee. He angrily refutes the frantic complainer by showing him the day’s newspaper, filled with terrifying headlines (NEW H BOMB MAY DESTROY THE EARTH) and tells him, “At least our readers know that our stories aren’t true!! They can put our magazine down and forget about it! But you can scare yourself to death by reading a newspaper nowadays!” Further, he tells the agitated office-crasher that if he doesn’t like the stories:
Don’t read ’em! Nobody’s shoving ’em down your throat!! That’s one of the wonderful things about this great nation of ours … everybody is free to do what he wants to do, as long as it doesn’t injure anybody else!
A moment later, attendants from an unspecified institution come to haul the “raving maniac” back there. The editor heads home at the end of his workday, where he is happy to see his wife (who looks exactly like Joan Lee) and young daughter. The story ends with the editor telling the child a bedtime story that begins:
Once upon a time an excited little man, with nothing more important on his mind, ran into an editor’s office to complain about some magazines …
Lee would edit, and write the stories for, the first eight issues of a new horror and fantasy series called Menace, which debuted with cover date March 1953. Perhaps wanting to show that he—and Atlas—could give EC a run for its money, the title seemed to have become a pet project for him. In the series, Lee’s editorial voice came though, informally speaking to the readers at the beginning and end of many stories. The series would, as Lee’s pet project, use his favorite artists, including Joe Maneely, Bill Everett, Russ Heath, Joe Sinnott, John Romita, Gene Colan, and George Tuska.
Menace #7 included another anti-anti-comics story, “The Witch in the Woods,” by Lee and Joe Sinnott. It involves a concerned father who takes away his son’s comic books and reads the kid a fairy tale instead. But the gruesome fairy tale proves too upsetting for the well-meaning father, who is unable to finish reading the story. The kid demands, “C’mon, Dad … tell me! What happened next?”
The terrified, sweating father replies, “I can’t! It’s too awful! It’s making me ill!”
And the son supplies the story’s kicker:
Golly, Dad … you oughtta take up reading comics for a while … those fairy tales are really gruesome!
Also in 1953 and ’54, Lee and Goodman, imitating EC’s successful Mad—which was at first a color comic that largely spoofed other comic books and comic strips—put out three short-lived imitators: Crazy, Wild, and Riot comics. Comics historians are unable to determine if Lee wrote any of the stories in the comics, but he certainly, as editor, used some of his favorite artists, including John Severin, Joe Maneely, Russ Heath, Dan DeCarlo, and Al Hartley. The three humor series, however, all ended by mid-1954.
Around the same time, Fredric Wertham’s crusade was gaining momentum, especially with the publication of his bestselling anti-comics tome, Seduction of the Innocent, released in April 1954. Meanwhile, Senator Estes Kefauver took up the cudgel against juvenile delinquency and the possible comics connection to it. Hearings were held in Washington, D.C., even as Seduction was making big waves.
While comics publishers sent representatives to the hearings, at which Wertham himself testified, the only publisher to personally testify was EC’s William M. Gaines, whose April 21, 1954, testimony history has generally come to be regarded as a fiasco for himself, his company, and the industry. Gaines ended up having to defend an EC cover featuring a woman’s severed head as being “in good taste.”
As Joe Simon recalled it, he and Kirby and their families were watching the televised proceedings together. Seeing Gaines’s testimony, Simon recalled, “We knew we were in trouble.”29
Froehlich, not Goodman, testified before the committee on behalf of Timely. Whereas Gaines had hoped to somehow convince the senators that EC’s horror comics were all in good fun—even while displaying a condescending attitude toward his interrogators—Froehlich’s testimony was literally businesslike, downplaying Timely’s crime and horror comics, saying they only published the ones they did to stay competitive with other publishers. He noted that they had published Bible comics (“Our editor went up to Yale Divinity School for guidance”) but that they had tanked.
Having reeled off facts and figures, Froehlich then switched gears and waxed poetic:
If violence per se had been outlawed from all literature, the weird and savage and taboo, would Mary Shelley have written Frankenstein? Would Shakespeare have written Macbeth? 30
While Froehlich might have charmed the committee, Timely/Atlas was nonetheless pilloried along with everyone else. Invoking Shelley and Shakespeare was no defense when a committee member displayed a copy of Goodman’s Strange Tales #28, noting that it contained “five stories in which thirteen people die violently.”31
In response to the government attention, publishers formed the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA)—replacing the Association of Comic Magazine Publishers—and instituted the Comics Code, a set of internal censorship guidelines for the comics industry. Unwilling to join the CMAA, and unable to gain marketplace traction with a line of “New Direction” comics—especially because so many distributors and retailers were wary of the EC brand—Gaines ended up transforming his successful Kurtzman-edited Mad comic book into a large black-and-white magazine, free—in that format—from the code. Mad magazine became an enormous hit, saving Gaines’s company. Lee, always a lover of humor, put out Timely’s answer to it: Snafu.
A mildly naughty, military-originated acronym (Situation Normal All Fucked Up—or Fouled Up, for more delicate sensibilities), Snafu was entirely written by Lee, except for a few features that were written by their artists. The credits for the first issue read: “The entire project was, for the most part, lovingly WRITTEN and EDITED by STAN LEE.”
Among the other humorous credits are “Founded by Irving Forbush” and “Losted by Marvin Forbush,” Lee here using funny-sounding names that could have been taken from a Jewish vaudeville comedy routine. This is possibly the first mention in print of Irving Forbush, a name Lee would use over the years to evoke humor with a mildly Yiddish flavor. As far as can be told, the name Marvin Forbush hasn’t been used since.
For the second issue, Lee again went Yiddish, with his credit reading: “The whole mashuguna affair is WRITTEN and EDITED by smiling STAN LEE.”
Not only was Stan “smiling,” but all the people listed in the credits in the issue were also given endearing nicknames, as Lee would be famous for granting to his cocreators in the Marvel Age. The others used in Snafu #2 included: “fun-loving” Martin Goodman; “merry” Monroe Froelich Jr. (of whom it’s noted that “Irving Forbush would be proud of him”—perhaps for having an equally funny Jewishy-sounding name?); “jolly” Joe Maneely; and “jovial” Johnny Severin. Interestingly, Severin’s sister was named on the credits page: “In charge of PRODUCTION is madcap MARIE SEVERIN.” Marie had recently joined Timely, in the wake of the severe reduction of the line at EC, where she had been head colorist. She would go on to become one of Marvel’s top artists in the 1960s.
A humor magazine like Snafu—competing with his friend and former artist Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad—was smack-dab in the middle of Lee’s wheelhouse. While humor is subjective, some items of note in a couple of the issues stand out:
Issue #1 (dated November 1955) has a feature called “Cheesecake.” It contains seven fairly tame photos of female models in swimsuits or the equivalent. At the bottom of the page, a caption inside an arrow says, “Turn this page for the world’s biggest cheesecake picture!” The next page consists solely of a photo of—maybe you’ve already guessed—a large cheesecake.
Issue #3 (dated March 1956) contains a photo feature called “You Don’t Say!” This was a title Lee would use numerous times, including for the fumetti (photo funnies) magazine he’d put out in the ’60s. In this case, it’s a two-page spread with eight photos of a young woman with short dark hair who is addressing, to unknown listeners, “some typical remarks that a typical girl might utter.” Underneath each remark, however, is “the true thought that our Snafu girl is thinking.”
For instance, one caption reads, “Oh, Nancy, MUST you leave so soon?” Underneath that is what the woman in the photo is thinking: “(One more minute with this insufferable bore and I’ll SCRRREAM!)” The “girl” in the photos (all of which have imaginative doodled backgrounds) is none other than an uncredited Joan Boocock Lee. She also appears as a model wearing a chaste, one-piece swimsuit in the same issue’s “Let ’Em Have Cheesecake!” section, where she is identified only as one of “eight delicious dishes.” There are no baked goods in this version, but each photo has a humorous caption.
The third issue has a letters column, with letters that seem mostly faked for humorous effect. A short one of note reads:
Dear Stan:
Potrzebie!
Karvey Hurtzman
(address withheld for fear of retaliation)
How many readers got these inside jokes is hard to determine. (Besides the play on Kurtzman’s name, potrzebie was a nonsense word frequently used in Mad.) In any event, issue #3 was the last issue of Snafu.
The magazine was immediately followed on newsstands by three more issues (#4 –6), in a traditional color comic book format, of Riot, all with writing credits attributed to Lee. These issues spoofed comic strips, comic books, movies, and more. Two standout features were Lee and Maneely’s “The Seventeen-Year Itch” and their dead-on Dennis the Menace satire, “Pascal the Rascal.”
By 1956, Larry Lieber, who had returned from the air force the year before, was drawing—and possibly writing—romance comics for Timely/Atlas. He was living with the Goodmans and was also taking classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan.32
That same year, Jack Kirby, having split with Joe Simon, was doing freelance work for DC. But in need of more income, he returned to Timely/Atlas for the first time since his and Simon’s falling-out with Goodman in 1941. There, he did some short science-fiction stories, as well as three issues of the Fu Manchu–inspired Yellow Claw comic. It’s likely this was all material he wrote, as well as penciled. But Kirby’s—and everybody else’s—work at Timely would soon come to a sudden, crashing halt.
While Atlas’s sales were reasonably good, the entire anti-comics mood in the country had inevitably affected even that company’s revenues. Freelancer rates were regularly reduced. According to Raphael and Spurgeon: “Frightened by the decline in comic book titles and the potential effects of the Senate hearings and the Comics Code, Goodman closed Atlas News [distribution] in November 1956 to sign a deal with the largest comic-book [and magazine] distributor of the mid-1950s, American News.”33
But American News, it turned out, was itself in disastrous financial condition. “Fun-loving” Martin Goodman—advised by “merry” Monroe Froehlich (who had perhaps seen the writing on the wall when he addressed the Senate committee in 1954)—had made what Raphael and Spurgeon termed, “the worst business decision of his career … American News left the market in early 1957, forcing Goodman to scramble for another distributor.”34
History is vague as to why Goodman didn’t simply take hat in hand, apologize to the wholesalers and retailers he’d abandoned, and reestablish his own distribution company.
Whatever the reasons, Goodman shifted his distribution to the giant Independent News (IND), which was actually a subsidiary of National Periodical Publications / DC Comics. But wary of Goodman’s habit of flooding markets, IND limited him to eight comics per month (which he fulfilled as sixteen bimonthlies). In effect, Goodman was suddenly publishing 80 percent fewer comics per month.35
Lee stopped giving out freelance assignments as he scrambled to use up the material he’d accumulated. He had to, once again, tell artists that there was no work for them. By one account, he went to the men’s room after each firing and threw up.36
Among the many freelancers Lee ordered to stop working, in this case, through a phone call from a secretary—perhaps afraid to directly confront a man he held in high regard—was John Romita. As Romita recalled:
I thought I would never be in comics again … When Stan pulled a Western book out from under me in the middle of a story, I figured, “That’s it.” I never got paid for it, and I told [my wife] Virginia, “If Stan Lee calls, tell him to go to hell.”37
She didn’t have to bother.
He was already there.