Part Two

MARVEL COMICS

Timely Comics was one of the many comic book publishers that sprung up in the wake of the success of Superman at National Comics. Martin Goodman, like Harry Donenfeld, was a pulp magazine publisher before getting into the comic business. In the very first comic published by Timely, Marvel Comics #1, Goodman used stories he purchased from outside comic “packagers,” who created prepackaged comic book stories to sell to the multitude of new publishers making superhero comics. Soon, though, Timely began producing its own stories, including its biggest success, Joe Simon (the top editor at Timely) and Jack Kirby’s Captain America, which became one of the biggest-selling comics in the business. After Simon and Kirby left Timely, a young relative of Goodman’s took over as the head writer-editor. His name was Stanley Lieber, but he wrote under the pseudonym Stan Lee.

After the war, superheroes went belly-up, so during the 1950s Timely (now calling itself Atlas Comics) would follow whatever trend was popular at a given time. Westerns, romance, young adult stories, science fiction—whatever was selling in the industry, Atlas produced. Finally, at the beginning of the 1960s, inspired by DC Comics’ return to superheroes, Marvel (another name change) began introducing its own superheroes. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby spent the 1960s creating some of the most popular characters of the century, such as the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Hulk, and Spider-Man (Spider-Man was created by Lee with a different artist, Steve Ditko). By the early 1970s, Marvel Comics’ line of superheroes was outselling DC’s, most likely the first time since superheroes were introduced that DC was not the number one highest-selling comic book company.

Marvel has been the highest-selling comic company ever since (with occasional surges by DC pushing Marvel temporarily to number two). After being purchased by Ronald Perelman in the late 1980s, Marvel Comics went public in 1991, then went bankrupt in 1996, but eventually Marvel’s subsidiary Toy Biz (now Marvel Toys) took control of the company and brought Marvel back into the black, mostly through money earned by turning Marvel properties into films. Recently, Marvel set up its own movie studio and has started producing its own films, starting with Iron Man in 2008 and planned films starring Thor, Captain America, and other Marvel heroes.