MARVEL COMICS

   Eventually named for its first COMIC - much as DC COMICS was named after Detective Comics - MC was founded by Martin Goodman (1910-1992) as Timely Comics before, in the 1950s, being renamed Atlas Comics after its distribution company; it became MC in 1963. Marvel Comics \#1 (Nov 1939) featured two of the company's three early mainstays. The Human Torch was an ANDROID who could become a figure of living flame; he was created and drawn by Carl Burgos. Prince Namor, the Sub Mariner - a warlike undersea monarch who had an ambivalent relationship with the surface world - was chronicled by William Blake (Bill) Everett. Throughout the 1940s both The Human Torch and Prince Namor had their own comics (The Human Torch fromFall 1940, Sub Mariner Comics from Spring 1941). Running alongside them were Marvel Mystery Comics (Marvel Comics retitled) and the third of those mainstays: Captain America (Mar 1941-Jan 1950). The original masked superpatriot was created by artist Jack KIRBY and writer Joe Simon.In the 1950s Marvel Mystery Comics became Marvel Tales, and was indistinguishablefrom dozens of other horror, war, sf, Western, gag and romance anthology titles; Stan LEE was credited with writing most of the contents. Not quite lost among the chaff were strips by many fine illustrators, including Bill Benulis, Gene Colan, Richard Doxsee, Bernie Krigstein, Joe Maneely, GrayMORROW and Al Williamson. The mid-1950s slump in comics sales saw the disappearance of Atlas but not of all of its titles. Stan Lee retrenched in 1958, giving more of an sf/horror/ MONSTER-MOVIE flavour to his titles. With the help of a returned Jack Kirby (who had worked elsewhere throughmost of the 1950s) plus regular artists Dick Ayers, Steve Ditko and Don Heck, editor Lee and his "Bullpen" were soon eager to re-enter theSUPERHERO genre, starting with Nov 1961's Fantastic Four. Lee allowed his heroes to be fallible: they could be bad-tempered, immature, repressed . . . The motif would establish MC at the vanguard of comics publishing.At thedawn of the "Marvel Age" MC experimented with an sf-anthology title. Produced by Lee and Ditko and complete with contents and letters pages,Amazing Adult Fantasy ran for 8 issues Dec 1961-July 1962 before being retitled Amazing Fantasy for 1 final issue, which featured the debut of MC's most popular character ever: Spider-Man.Most of Marvel's superheroeshad various kinds of run-ins with PSEUDO-SCIENCE, especially The Fantastic Four, a group of superpowered troubleshooters. Kirby and Lee elegantlyplundered Norse mythology for their Thor series (Journey into Mystery \#83 (Aug 1962) to present; renamed Thor in 1966) while Lee and Ditko produced the definitive interdimensional magic strip in Doctor Strange (Strange Tales \#114-\#134 (Nov 1963-1965); then his own title \#169-\#183 (June (1968-Nov 1969); then in a relaunched Strange Tales \#1-\#19 (Apr 1987-Oct 1988). Marvel Super-Heroes \#12 (Dec 1967) saw the arrival of MC's space-born superhero Captain Marvel; it was not long before he had the red-yellow-blue costume and a teenage alter ego full of wisecracks and buzzwords like his 1940s namesake. (For the full tortuous story of CAPTAIN MARVEL, see his entry.) During 1968-71 MC's finest sf character, TheSilver Surfer, was given his own title, drawn by John Buscema and with the writing credit going, inevitably, to Lee. In 1970 MC began publishing its own version of Robert E. HOWARD's Conan, adapted by Roy Thomas with artists John Buscema, Gil Kane and Barry Smith.MC currently (1992) dominates the US comics marketplace, most notably with the bestselling X-MEN titles. Since 1987 MC has been reprinting many of its sought-after1960s comics in the Masterworks series: Spider-Man (4 vols to date), The Fantastic Four (3 vols), X-Men (4 vols), The Avengers (2 vols) - no relation to the tv series - The Silver Surfer (2 vols) and, each with 1 vol to date, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Daredevil and Captain America.An authorized and therefore somewhat uncritical account of the company's history is Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics (1991) by Les Daniels.

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   See also: ILLUSTRATION.