Marvel Book A:Marvel Book
8/19/09
6:23 PM
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of the Marvel line of to open up the stuffy books, Roy Thomas; the world of art criticism to pre-Raphaelite beauty of include the creative artist Barry Smith; and products of pop culture. many others including Colliding with the artists Neal Adams, John rising popularity of Buscema, Gil Kane, Tom Marvel Comics of the Palmer, Dan Adkins, mid-to-late 1960s, these Wally Wood, John trends opened the public Romita, and Don Heck. mind to the worth of But before plunging such products of popular into the deep end of the culture as comic books pool, a reader might do and the possibility that well to first orient himself they could be more than regarding just how disposable art created Marvel Comics fit into the for children. bigger picture of the At the center of that comics industry itself. sea change in popular Even the company that perception was Marvel was to revolutionize editor in chief, Stan Lee comics, after all, didn’t and his chief lieutenants, spring full-blown from Jack Kirby and Steve The furor spearheaded by Dr. Frederic the brow of Stan Lee! Ditko. Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent led to the It all began in the late By the early 1960s, end of EC’s popular line of horror comics and 1930s, when comic books aside from a brief stint in the establishment of the Comics Code Authority. in America and as a mass the army and occasional medium (million-selling attempts to break out titles were not uncommon in the 1940s) were viewed with newspaper strip features or humor books, by the public at large, and with justification, as juve- Lee had spent his entire working career in the comic nile literature. This was especially true when comic book field. He managed to get his foot in the door in books ceased to be the forum for reprints of widely 1940 when he was still known as Stanley Lieber, and popular newspaper strips and became, instead, the Martin Goodman, his cousin’s husband (or something domain of colorfully costumed super-heroes. With like that) who was in the habit of giving jobs to his the advent of Superman and his descendents, comic relatives anyway, hired him and set him to work with books became inevitably associated with chil- Joe Simon, editor of the publishing company’s newly dren’s entertainment. And so, when some publish- formed Timely comic book division. ers in the 1950s (most notably EC Comics) began to present comics whose content was primarily that of violence and gore, the wider public became concerned, and when even the federal government threatened to step in to regulate the industry, publishers were frightened into forming the Comics Code Authority in self-defense. Guided by strict rules designed to shield the nation’s youngsters from harmful content, comic books came to be seen more than ever as the province of children. Until, that is, Marvel Comics came along in the early 1960s. As it would later turn out, the decade of the sixties was a time of vast social upheaval when many began to reappraise the status quo; rebellion was in the air regarding civil rights and justification of the Goodman’s company was a going concern in Vietnam War. It even reached the art world where 1942 when this photo of its staff was taken. artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein began 6
Mar vel Comics in the 1960s