Marvel Comics

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Bradford W. Wright

Marvel Comics is the largest publisher of comic books in the United States. It owns many of the most popular characters in comic books, including Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, and the Fantastic Four. As a player in the history of the comic book industry, Marvel's significance is equaled only by its longtime rival and chief competitor, DC Comics. Despite being one of the oldest comic book companies, Marvel did not emerge as a truly distinctive and influential creative force in the field until the 1960s. Since then, however, the Marvel style has virtually defined the character of mainstream American comic books.

The company that became known as Marvel Comics began its operation in 1939, when a young pulp magazine publisher named Martin Goodman decided to enter the fledgling comic book business. Taking note of DC's recent success with Superman, Goodman purchased several superhero stories from one of several comic-art studios supplying material to publishers. Soon thereafter, Goodman set up his own comic book production staff under the editorial direction of his teenage nephew Stanley Lieberman, who also wrote comic book stories under the name of Stan Lee. The company was initially called Timely Comics, but also referred to itself by the title of its first publication, Marvel Comics.

The first issue of Marvel Comics, dated November 1939, introduced several original superhero characters, at least two of whom found a lasting audience. The Human Torch, created by Carl Burgos, was actually not a human but an android with the rather terrifying ability to burst into flames and set objects and people ablaze. The Sub-Mariner, created by Bill Everett, was the son of an interracial marriage between an American sea captain and a princess from the undersea kingdom of Atlantis. Possessing superhuman strength and the ability to breathe on land as well as in water, the Sub-Mariner also harbored a fierce antipathy towards the dwellers of the surface world, thereby qualifying him as perhaps the first comic book anti-hero.

Neither the Human Torch nor the Sub-Mariner were about to rival the likes of Superman, Batman, or Captain Marvel, but they helped to give Marvel a significant share of the rapidly expanding comic book market. That share increased in 1941 when Marvel debuted Captain America. The creation of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Captain America became the definitive comic book super-patriot of World War II and Marvel's most popular "star." The cover of Captain America Comics number one brashly portrayed the red-white-and-blue costumed hero socking Adolf Hitler in the mouth. That striking image, appearing more than six months before United States entry into the war, epitomized the staunch anti-Nazi and implicit interventionist tone of this series in particular, and of Marvel's output in general. Although a number of comic book companies published anti-Nazi stories before, during, and after the war, Marvel was among the first to do so. As early as 1939, a Marvel cover showed the Sub-Mariner in battle with the crew of a swastika-flagged submarine, and the Human Torch could be seen burning through the German air force in 1940, over two years before United States air forces would follow suit.

After Pearl Harbor most comic book publishers enlisted wholeheartedly in the war effort, but few became as completely caught up in it as Marvel did. Marvel responded to the global struggle with a ceaseless barrage of simplified and overstated patriotic stories, in which self-righteously noble American heroes crusaded against viciously caricatured German and Japanese cronies. While these comic books did little to inform readers about the real issues and conduct of the war, and some--especially in their depiction of the Japanese--were outright racist, they were hardly unique in wartime American popular culture in these respects. Like most of its competitors, Marvel simply worked to bolster the morale of the young people and servicemen who read comic books, while cashing in on wartime patriotism in the process.

The war figured so prominently into Marvel's superhero comic books, that sales of these titles plummeted with the return to peace. By the end of the 1940s Marvel had ceased publication of all its superhero comic books. The company thrived, however, by diversifying its output and exploring new genres like crime, romance, humor, and horror. Marvel's editorial and publishing strategy during the postwar decade maximized the advantages of Goodman's sizable distribution network. Essentially, the company would take note of the most popular current trends in comic books and flood the market with imitations thereof. Typical examples of this approach were Lawbreakers Always Lose, Marvel's answer to Lev Gleason Publication's successful Crime Does Not Pay and Strange Tales, a pale take-off on EC's Tales From the Crypt. What Marvel's stories lacked in quality, the company made up for with quantity. Whereas EC Comics, the originator and quintessential publisher of horror comic books, actually produced less than 200 such comics between 1950 and 1955, Marvel published over 400 during the same period.