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The Marvel Comics Zone INTRODUCTION Arguably the most famous comic book publishing house in the world, Marvel Comics produced some of the best known and best loved fictional characters of the 20th century, among them The Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Captain America and the company's two most successful creations, Spider-Man and the mutant superhero team X-Men. The roots of this classic American success story lie in the late 1930s when a small publisher, which had already undergone a number of name changes, settled on a new corporate identity, Timely Comics. In October 1939, Timely published issue 1 of Marvel Comics which featured an android who could turn into a flying streak of flame, The Human Torch, and the ambiguous Atlantean prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner. The latter had been created by Bill Everett for another company but he brought him to Timely just in time for their debut comic. These were just the first of a string of superhero characters that would help to revolutionise the U.S. comics industry. During the war torn 1940s, Timely added the first of their four colour superstars, the patriotic Nazi basher Captain America who helped to keep the Stars and Stripes flying throughout the war years. Cap first appeared in December 1940, created by 24-year-old wunderkind Jack Kirby, an animator and comic strip artist who would come to define superhero comics for an entire generation. During the next decade, Timely - who would eventually morph into Atlas Comics - played second fiddle to the mighty DC Comics, their long-time rivals who were holding the best cards in the twin shapes of Superman (who had debuted in the first issue of Action Comics in June 1938) and Batman (who arrived a year later). Atlas may not have had the superstar heroes, but it did offer a much wider range of titles than DC, turning out Westerns, romance, horror, war, detective, teen humour, girl interest, jungle adventure, spy, space action, historical and even music related comics as well as men in tights romps. Their biggest hits at the time were in comics aimed at a young female readership, featuring characters like Patsy Walker (who debuted in 1944 in Miss America before appearing in titles like Teen, Patsy and Hedy, Patsy and Her Pals, A Date With Patsy, Girl's Life and Patsy Walker) who accounted for more than five millions sales per issue at her peak. At one point, Patsy was appearing in no less than six titles simultaneously and stuck around until 1967. Things began to change in the mid-1950s. In response to the outcry over the excesses of the EC horror comics, the industry opted for self-regulation and set up the Comic Code Authority. With EC effectively muzzled, readers started to look for other genres to get their fix. What a lot of them found was superheroes. Atlas opted to simply tone down their horror titles and the company started to lose even more ground to DC who had wholeheartedly embraced superheroes. But the arrival at Atlas of Stan Lee, a young, ambitious writer whose larger-than-life, exuberant style perfectly suited the art styles of Kirby and Atlas new boy Steve Ditko. They worked together on a handful of strange tales titles that were among the very few to survive the 1950s - by the end of the decade, Atlas had dwindled away to almost nothing, boasting only four of their horror-tinged anthologies, four Western titles and the Patsy Miller and Millie the Model (Patsy's big rival) comics. Lee had a vision for Atlas - or as the company was now becoming, Marvel Comics - and decided that if the company was to survive, it needed to emulate DC and embrace superheroes. Atlas head man Martin Goodman was initially reluctant but Lee kept badgering him and eventually got him to agree to a trial. Inspired by DC's superhero team the Justice League of America, Lee created his own team of costumed crime-fighters, The Fantastic Four. Drawn initially by Jack Kirby, The Fantastic Four - who debuted in August 1961 - were hugely popular and set the tone for much of what was to come at Marvel. Lee wanted his superheroes to have a human core, to suffer and feel like the rest of us while struggling to save the world and whose private lives would be as integral to the story as their ass-kicking antics. Inspired by the success of the FF, Goodman and the newly christened Marvel Comics gave Lee and Kirby virtual free reign to do whatever they wanted. In January 1962, they added the green-skinned behemoth The Incredible Hulk to the stable and resurrected Namor the Sub-Mariner. In June that year, the Norse god of thunder, Thor, was added to the roster, but the company's biggest star was having trouble being born. Lee had been desperate for a new idea and, after watching a spider on his study wall one day, wondered if a man with insectoid powers could be the answer. Goodman was unconvinced that he dismissed the idea out of hand. But Lee was adamant - if any one of his creations was going to stand the test of time, he believed, this was going to be it. To keep his star writer quiet, Goodman offered him the final issue of Amazing Fantasy, reasoning that as the title was being retired, it wouldn't matter if the character was the disaster he believed it would be. When Amazing Fantasy 15 was published in August 1962, it featured the debut of puny teenager Peter Parker who, after being bitten by a radioactive spider, found himself in possession of some of the creature's abilities. Spider-Man, and a comic book legend, was born. Drawn by Steve Ditko, Spider-Man was an instant hit with Marvel's ever-growing readership. He based the character on a series of sketches done by Jack Kirby for Black Magic, a comic created by Prize's which were never used. He was quickly given his own title and the rest, as they say, is history, Spider-Man became the company's most popular character and remains one of the best-loved comic characters of all time. Other characters were added at a tremendous rate - Iron Man was on board by the end of 1962, as was the Hulk whose career had stalled but whose clash with The Fantastic Four proved that the public loved him enough to prompt Marvel to relaunch his own title. The meeting was important in that it convinced Lee and Goodman that the Marvel characters should exist together in a unified fictional world and that they could - and indeed should - meet on a regular basis. The crossover storyline was born and the world of Marvel Comics was about to get a lot more complicated. In July 1963, Steve Ditko was given the chance to edge out from under the shadow of the great Jack Kirby and created his own character, Doctor Strange, who appeared in a wild and inventive title that found great favour in the burgeouning underground scene in California, much to the dismay of Ditko who reportedly hated the nascent counter-culture. More traditional - and more far-reaching - was the decision taken by Lee and Kirby that same year to unite many of their most famous characters (Thor, Hulk, Iron Man, Ant Man and the Wasp) under the banner of The Avengers, a superhero team whose line-up would change on a regular basis - indeed when internal continuity started to get muddled because of events in the characters' own titles, Lee ditched the lot and created a whole new set of characters, though the superstars would turn up from time to time. The idea of a team of heroes appealed to Lee and he hatched an idea that was to prove incredibly flexible and long-lived - the idea of mutant superheroes, possessed of incredible physical and mental powers, who would fight for Mankind even though they were despised and ostracised. The X-Men went virtually unnoticed at the time, but in the hands of subsequent writers and artists, grew to become one of Marvel's most profitable franchises. Amid this frenzy of creativity, Kirby took the opportunity to revive his Captain America, his frozen body resuscitated in the modern day by The Avengers in Avengers 4 -the "Captain America" that had appeared in Strange Tales two months before had ultimately been revealed as an impostor. Daredevil was the next of the classic Marvel heroes, the blind Man Without Fear making his bow in February 1964, clad in a yellow and black costume which was soon changed to the more familiar red catsuit. Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD followed in August 1965, bringing a flavour of the popular James Bond films to the Marvel universe and Jim Steranko was added the line-up of artists that same year. A whole host of heroes and villains continued to stalk the pages of Marvel comics throughout the 60s and they were joined in May 1968 by one of the strangest of Marvel's characters. Reflecting many of the concerns of the hippie counter-culture, The Silver Surfer, first drawn by new-boy John Buscema. The bizarre, metallic alien who roamed the universe aboard a silver surfboard in search of his lost homeworld was not a hit at home but was hugely popular among the turned-on, tripped-out French kids and the stories he featured in became increasingly surreal and bizarre. During the 1960s, Lee had taken over the running of Marvel Comics but stepped aside in the early 1970s, allowing a series of Editors-in-Chief to guide the company through a fallow period that was laying waste to the whole comics industry. The Silver Age was over, but Marvel would endure, with Lee still around as its avuncular figurehead. The 70s saw the company spreading its wings, reintroducing horror titles (Tomb of Dracula, Frankenstein Lives!, Werewolf By Night, Man-Thing), venturing into sword and sorcery and more overtly fantasy subjects (Conan the Barbarian, Ka-Zar) and staging big, blockbuster "event" storylines like the astonishing and completely unexpected death of Peter parker's girlfriend Gwen Stacy in the classic Spider-Man 121 in June 1973. Superheroes may have been the basis of the company's success, but in the 70s, new examples were few and far between. But with sales dropping, Marvel reactivated an old favourite which had been rested for a while - the new X-Men did wonders for the company's bank balance and made something of a star of writer Chris Claremont who developed many of the themes and sub-texts of the original series into a full blown soap opera with socio-political undertones. The new X-Men series also gave Marvel a chance to try out new talent like artist John Byrne. At the start of the 80s, Jim Shooter had become Marvel's Editor-in-Chief and he gave the company a mighty shake-up, changing the prevailing attitudes and ushering in a new era of creative and financial prosperity. In 1981, Marvel bought the animation company DePatie-Freleng Enterprises from Friz Freleng and David H. DePatie and it was quickly renamed Marvel Productions Ltd. It was used to produce a series of television shows based on some of the company's most popular titles. In 1988, Marvel was bought by investor/entrepreneur Ronald Perelman and Marvel became a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time. Under his leadership, the company enjoyed another boom period which coincided with renewed interest in comics and the birth of a new fandom. But the boom years weren't to last - Marvel Productions sold off its back catalogue to Saban Entertainment and the animation house was shut down. It wasn't long before Marvel were doing the unthinkable - the once indestructible House of Ideas filed for bankruptcy, with Perelman acused of asset-stripping the company. The prospect of Marvel going under send shockwaves through the comics industry. In 1994, Marvel had bought out the industry's biggest distributors Heroes World and the failure of Marvel could have jeopardised the entire American industry. But the company endured, bought out in 1997 by Toy Biz owner Isaac Perlmutter after a long legal battle with investor Carl Icahn who had also tried to take control of the ailing company. Under the leadership of Perlmutter, Avi Arad, publisher Bill Jemas and Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada, Marvel went on to even greater success, Arad overseeing the successful move into big screen adaptations, particularly the hugely successful Blade, X-Men and Spider-Man franchises. For all its ups and downs over the years, Marvel remains, for many,
the face of American comics. Its pantheon of stars are among the most
well known of fictional characters and with the successes if their core
characters on the big screen, their future looks assured. FILMOGRAPHY * = television 1944 1963 1964 1966 1967 - 1970 1967 1969 1971 - 1986 1971 1977 - 1979 1977 - 1982 1978 - 1979 1978 Supaidaaman
* 1979 Captain America II: Death Too Soon * Fred and Barney Meet the Thing * 1980 1981 - 1982 1981 - 1984 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1988 1989 The Punisher Trial of the Incredible Hulk 1990 Death of the Incredible Hulk 1991 Captain America and the Avengers 1992 - 1997 1992 1993 - 1998 1993 1994 - 1996 1994 1995 1996 - 1997 1996 1997 The Incredible Hulk: The Pantheon Saga + 1998 - 1999 1998 Marvel vs Capcom: Clash of the Super Heroes + Nick
Fury: Agent of Shield * 1999 - 2000 1999 - 2001 1999 2000 Krull: Marvel Comics Video Adaptation Marvel vs Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes + X-Men 2001 - 2004 Spider-Man 2: The Sinister Six + Spider-Man: Mysterio's Menace + Supertalk (2001) X-Men II: Apocalypse Now (2001) 2002 Behind
the Scenes: Spider-Man the Movie * Blade II Blade II + Spider-Man Spider-Man: An MTV Movie Special * The Spider-Man Story * Spider-Man: The Mythology of the 21st Century Spider Mania * De Superman a Spider-Man: L'aventure des super-heros 2003 Comic
Book Superheroes Unmasked * Daredevil Daredevil: From the Comic to the Big Screen * Daredevil Meets the (Norman) Osborns Spider-Man
* Hulk Hulk + The Hulk: An MTV Movie Special * Hulk: The Lowdown * The Making of Hulk The Men Without Fear: Creating Daredevil The Second Uncanny Issue of X-Men! Making X2 The Secret Origin of X-Men Sex, Lies
and Superheroes The Visual Effects of X-Men X2 X2 - Wolverine's
Revenge + X-Factor: The Look of X-Men X-Men Production Scrapbook 2004 Blade: Trinity The Punisher Spider-Man 2 Spider-Man 2 + War Journal: On the Set of the Punisher 2005 2006
Last Updated: 1 January, 2009
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