Marvel Publishing, Inc. , a company doing business as Marvel Comics , produces American comic books and related media. It forms a subsidiary of Marvel Entertainment, Inc.
Marvel counts among its characters such well-known properties as Spider-Man, Wolverine, Iron Man, The X-Men, Captain America, The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Thor, Daredevil, The Punisher, Ghost Rider, Deadpool, Blade, The Silver Surfer, Nick Fury, and others. Most of Marvel's fictional characters operate in a single reality known as the Marvel Universe, with locales set in real-life cities such as New York.
The comic-book arm of the company started in 1939 as Timely Publications, and by the 1950s had generally become known as Atlas Comics. Marvel's modern incarnation dates from 1961, with the launching of Fantastic Four and other superhero titles created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others. Marvel has since become the largest American comic book publisher over longtime competitor DC Comics.
On August 31, 2009, The Walt Disney Company announced a deal to acquire Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion in cash and stock.
History
Timely Publications
Martin Goodman founded the company later known as Marvel Comics under the name Timely Publications in 1939. Goodman, a pulp-magazine publisher who started by selling a Western pulp in 1933, expanded into the emerging — and by then already highly popular — new medium of comic books. Goodman began his new line from his existing company's offices at 330 West 42nd Street, New York City, New York. He officially held the titles of editor, managing editor, and business manager, with Abraham Goodman officially listed as publisher.
Timely's first publication, Marvel Comics #1 (October 1939), included the first appearance of Carl Burgos' android superhero the Human Torch, and the first generally available appearance of Bill Everett's anti-hero Namor the Sub-Mariner, among other features. The contents of that sales blockbuster came from an outside packager, Funnies, Inc., but by the following year Timely had its own staff in place. With the second issue the series title changed to Marvel Mystery Comics.
The company's first true editor, writer-artist Joe Simon, teamed up with soon-to-become industry-legend Jack Kirby to create one of the first patriotically themed superheroes, Captain America, in Captain America Comics #1. (March 1941) It, too, proved a major sales hit, with a circulation of nearly one million.
While no other Timely character would achieve the success of these "big three", some notable heroes — many of which continue to appear in modern-day retcon appearances and flashbacks — include the Whizzer, Miss America, the Destroyer, the original Vision, and the Angel. Timely also published one of humor cartoonist Basil Wolverton's best-known features, "Powerhouse Pepper," as well as a line of children's funny-animal comics featuring popular characters like Super Rabbit and the duo Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal.
Goodman hired a teen-aged relative, Stanley Lieber, as a general office assistant in 1939. When editor Simon left the company in late 1941, Goodman made Lieber — by then writing pseudonymously as "Stan Lee" — interim editor of the comics line, a position Lee kept for decades except for three years during his military service in World War II. Lee wrote extensively for Timely, contributing to a number of different titles.
Atlas Comics
Main article: Atlas Comics (1950s)The post-war American comic market saw superheroes falling out of fashion. Goodman's comic-book line dropped them for the most part and expanded into a wider variety of genres than even Timely had published, emphasizing horror, Westerns, humor, funny-animal, men's adventure-drama, crime, and war comics, and later adding a helping of jungle books, romance titles, and even espionage, medieval adventure, Bible stories and sports. Like other publishers, Goodman also courted female readers with mostly humorous comics about models and career women.
Goodman began using the globe logo of Atlas, the newsstand-distribution company he owned, on comics cover-dated November 1951. This united a line put out by the same publisher, staff, and freelancers through 59 shell companies, from Animirth Comics to Zenith Publications, under the umbrella name Atlas Comics.
Atlas, rather than innovate, took what it saw as the proven route of following popular trends in television and movies — Westerns and war dramas prevailing for a time, drive-in movie monsters another time — and even other comic books, particularly the EC horror line. Atlas also published a plethora of children's and teen humor titles, including Dan DeCarlo's Homer the Happy Ghost (à la Casper the Friendly Ghost ) and Homer Hooper (à la Archie Andrews). Atlas unsuccessfully attempted to revive superheroes in Young Men #24-28 (December 1953 - June 1954), with the Human Torch (art by Syd Shores and Dick Ayers, variously), the Sub-Mariner (drawn and most stories written by Bill Everett), and Captain America (writer Stan Lee, artist John Romita Sr.).
1960s
The first comic book under the Marvel Comics brand, the science-fiction anthology Amazing Adventures #3, cover-dated August 1961, appeared May 9, 1961 displaying a box labeled "MC" on its cover. Then, in the wake of DC Comics' success in reviving superheroes in the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly with the Flash, Green Lantern, and other members of the team the Justice League of America, Marvel followed suit. The introduction of modern Marvel's first superhero team, in The Fantastic Four #1, cover-dated November 1961, began establishing the company's reputation. From then until the end of 1969, Marvel published a total of 831 comic books with at least one new superhero story, the majority of them written by editor-in-chief Stan Lee.
Editor-writer Lee and freelance artist Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four, reminiscent of the non-superpowered adventuring quartet the Challengers of the Unknown that Kirby had created for DC in 1957, originated in a Cold War culture that led their creators to deconstruct the superhero conventions of previous eras and better reflect the psychological spirit of their age. Eschewing such comic-book tropes as secret identities and even costumes at first, having a monster as one of the heroes, and having its characters bicker and complain in what was later called a "superheroes in the real world" approach, the series represented a change that proved to be a great success. Marvel began publishing further superhero titles featuring such heroes and antiheroes as the Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, Ant-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men (the original team consisting of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast, Angel and Iceman) and Daredevil, and such memorable antagonists as Doctor Doom, Magneto, Galactus, the Green Goblin, and Doctor Octopus. Lee and Steve Ditko generated the most successful new series in The Amazing Spider-Man . Marvel even lampooned itself and other comics companies in a parody comic, Not Brand Echh (a play on Marvel's dubbing of other companies as "Brand Echh", à la the then-common phrase "Brand X").
Marvel's comics had a reputation for focusing on characterization to a greater extent than most superhero comics before them. This applied to The Amazing Spider-Man in particular. Its young hero suffered from self-doubt and mundane problems like any other teenager. Marvel often presents flawed superheroes, freaks, and misfits — unlike the perfect, handsome, athletic heroes found in previous traditional comic books. Some Marvel heroes looked like villains and monsters. In time, this non-traditional approach would revolutionize comic books. Writer Geoff Boucher in 2009 reflected that, "Superman and DC Comics instantly seemed like boring old Pat Boone; Marvel felt like The Beatles and the British Invasion. It was Kirby's artwork with its tension and psychedelia that made it perfect for the times — or was it Lee's bravado and melodrama, which was somehow insecure and brash at the same time?"
Comics historian Peter Sanderson wrote that in the 1960s,
Lee, with his charming personality and relentless salesmanship of the company, became one of the best-known names in comics. His sense of humor and generally lighthearted manner became the "voice" that permeated the stories, the letters and news-pages, and the hyperbolic house ads of that era's Marvel Comics. He fostered a clubby fan-following with Lee's exaggerated depiction of the Bullpen (Lee's name for the staff) as one big, happy family. This included printed kudos to the artists, who eventually co-plotted the stories based on the busy Lee's rough synopses or even simple spoken concepts, in what became known as the Marvel Method, and contributed greatly to Marvel's product and success. Kirby in particular is generally credited for many of the cosmic ideas and characters of Fantastic Four and The Mighty Thor, such as the Watcher, the Silver Surfer and Ego the Living Planet, while Steve Ditko is recognized as the driving artist
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