Before superheroes saved it, Marvel was a pulp publisher hiding behind 59 shell companies
Marvel's history is less about capes than about a pulp publisher chasing trends. Martin Goodman ran his comics through dozens of paper companies, dumped superheroes when they went out of fashion, and in 1957 was squeezed to a dozen titles a month by his biggest rival's distributor. Then came The Fantastic Four.
Goodman had been publishing pulp magazines since 1933 when, in 1939, he opened a comics line called Timely from offices on West 42nd Street in New York. Its first issue, Marvel Comics No. 1, introduced Carl Burgos's android Human Torch and Bill Everett's Namor the Sub-Mariner, and with a reprint sold almost 900,000 copies. In March 1941 Joe Simon and Jack Kirby added Captain America, whose debut sold close to a million. Back in 1939 a teenage relative of Goodman's wife, Stanley Lieber, then 16, had joined as an office helper; writing as Stan Lee, he became interim editor in late 1941 and stayed in charge for decades.
Goodman's habit was to publish everything through many corporations sharing one office and staff. One of them was already called Marvel Comics by 1944, yet the name was not formally adopted until 1961. After the war, when superheroes lost their appeal, the line swerved into Westerns, horror, romance, war, crime, talking animals and even Bible stories. From 1951 it carried the globe logo of Goodman's Atlas News distributor, uniting output from 59 shell companies. Lee later said Atlas survived by being fast, cheap and passable rather than inspired.
Disaster struck in 1957. Goodman moved distribution to the American News Company, which soon lost a Justice Department case and shut down. The only option left was Independent News, owned by rival DC, which accepted just eight or twelve books a month from a publisher that had been turning out 40 to 60.
The rescue came from characters with flaws. The Fantastic Four, launched in November 1961 by Lee and Kirby, bickered, bore grudges and chose fame over secret identities, deliberately aimed at older readers. The Amazing Spider-Man, whose teenage hero wrestled with self-doubt and ordinary money and school worries, became the company's most successful title. Disney has owned Marvel since December 31, 2009.
Source: Marvel Comics
