May 6, 2019 • 28 mins
Today, Marvel is known for breaking global box office records with blockbuster films. But this multibillion dollar company first got its start from much more humble beginnings. How did Marvel establish itself?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the Brink, a production of I Heart Radio's
How Stuff Works. They put the amazing in Our Spider Man,
the incredible in Our Hulk, and Captain America started punching
Nazis before America even entered World War Two. So it
(00:24):
might seem astounding that Marvel entered bankruptcy in the late nineties,
having weathered the fickleness of the comics market multiple times,
like a human torch burning bright, bursting bubbles, greedy ventures,
and what some might call financial villainy lead owners grasping
for a plan seed to world comic domination and selling
(00:45):
their heroes out like mercenaries. But it pays to be good,
and after a struggle of illegal battle, some positive new blood,
and some daring risks, Marvel is now living up to
the Excelsior motto. This is Marvel on the Brink. Hi, Ariel, Hi,
(01:11):
I like Marvel. I do too. I like I like
comic books and superheroes and comic book movies and comic
book TV shows. He guess what, I like all that
stuff too. Yeah, So Ariel and I are fans. Some
might call us geeks. I would call us geeks. We
have called each other geeks affectionately, and we love Marvel.
(01:32):
I mean we love especially the most recent incarnation of Marvel.
It's impossible to ignore Marvel at this point. There's a
new Marvel film out practically every month. Well not every month,
but you like every quarter. Yeah, well enough, like to
the point where people joke that if it's if you
go to the movie theater, what are you seeing a
(01:53):
Star Wars movie or a Marvel movie? Yeah? And you know,
when Marvel movies first started coming out, I was like,
I don't know about this, Arcter. But now at this point,
I'm just like, here, let me just write you a check. Yeah.
Every time that Marvel was coming out with a new film,
I was thinking, can they really pull this off? I mean,
starting off with iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe stories,
I thought, wow, iron Man really, because that's I don't
(02:15):
think of him as a upper tier character. I mean
he is if you're a comic fan, right, but mainstream
mainstream audiences I don't think knew very much about iron Man.
And then then you get to something like Guardians of
the Galaxy and you're like, there's no way they're going
to make that work, And you know to be fair.
Even though I am a self proclaimed geek and I
(02:35):
love Marvel. I came to comics late in my geekdom um.
I started off with sci fi and fantasy and kind
of worked my way to superheroes. So it's been a
learning curve. Yeah. I I collected a little bit when
I was a kid. I'll talk about one of the
comics I collected in this episode. But I was not
the biggest comic book fan. I I always tried to
(02:58):
keep semi aware of what was going on because it
was interested in it. I just didn't have the allowance
to go out and buy every single title that was
coming out. Well, and we'll get to it, but there
was a while where Marvel was putting out so much
stuff you couldn't keep up. Yeah, so we're gonna talk
today about how we got to this point because there
it was not a guarantee that Marvel was going to
(03:19):
become such a breakout success, not at all. Not a
few years ago. You would have laughed if someone had
said that a company would buy Marvel for four billion dollars,
But that in fact has happened. Before we get into it, though,
arial we need to settle something who is your favorite
Marvel character? Well, that would be the Hulk. The Hulk.
(03:41):
The Hulk is that the secret You're always angry? That's fair,
all right? You know I'm a hulk. I like in
D and D. I play a barbarian. I'm just a bruiser,
sort of a girl. Got you, all right? That's fair.
Who's Taskmaster? I can see that Taskmaster is a villain
in Marvel. He has not yet been depicted in films
as far as I can tell. Taskmaster's ability is he
(04:04):
can watch other people do stuff and then he can
replicate it perfectly. So he can watch, say, an Olympic
diver do a perfect dive, and then he can do
that perfect dive. He's kind of like a visual rogue. Yeah,
he's He's usually known for training mercenaries. Okay, we had
to get that out of our system. We had to
get all of that geekery out so that we can
talk about the business. Yeah, we we need to get
(04:26):
down to business because there's a lot to cover, and
I know we're gonna want to cover it all. We
are going to be able to cover it. Also, you
can do tangents and stuff anyway, So let's let's Let's
try to start off by talking about how Marvel got started,
because it wasn't always known as Marvel. No, it was
started by Martin Goodman in he had made a comic
(04:47):
brand called Timely Comics, and Marvel Comics Number one was
the actual comic book. Right. This is not unusual, by
the way. We think of a lot of like big
name comic books like Superman or Batman, which are both
d C comic books. Well, those didn't start off as
Batman number one or Superman number one. In fact, the
first Batman comic was a Detective Comics issue number twenty seven.
(05:10):
The first Superman comic was in a spinoff called Action
Comics Number one. Well, and I would call you on
talking about d C during a Marvel episode. But it's
important to note because DC came out with superheroes before Marvel. Yeah,
like two years yeah, but still still it still counts.
So who was in Marvel Comics number one? Tell everybody
(05:31):
the superhero who appeared in that. Well, there are a few,
but the most notable are Human Torch. But at the
time he was like a human android, So he wasn't
It wasn't Johnny story, it was it was human Torch
version one point oh yes, and the sub Mariner a
k A naymore a k A antihero version of Aquaman,
although Acuman is sometimes an Yeah, he went through a
(05:54):
dark phase. We all went through that dark phase. It's
just a couman did it well after his teenage year.
And something to note, right when Timely Comics was starting off,
stan Lee joined. So he joined at the age of
seventeen with the help of his uncle to become an
assistant there. So, I mean he's he's bounced around and
he's written stuff for DC as well, but he started
right at the beginning. And someone else who was really
(06:17):
important in Marvel history and comic book history is Jack Kirby.
And one of his huge contributions happened just a couple
of years after the founding of this company, and that
was in one with the first Captain America comic book. Yeah,
good old cap and Captain America that you might remember.
(06:38):
There's like the famous illustration of Captain America punching Hitler
and they kind of recreated that in the the Captain
America film Contain America the First a Injured. The interesting
fact is we mentioned in the introduction that Marvel had
their superheroes fighting Nazis before the United States had even
entered into World War Two. Yeah, Timely had some other
(07:00):
heroes Wizard, Miss America, Destroyer, and they still occasionally show up,
but they never really took off, like Captain America and
I guess for that matter, nay More or the Human Torch. Yeah,
so not everyone would end up becoming a household name.
Now these days, the years between nineteen thirty eight and
nineteen fifty six or so, these are not hard dates,
(07:23):
but kind of general dates. We tend to refer to
that as the Golden Age of comics. You'll hear people
to talk about Golden Age heroes, Silver Age heroes, Bronze
Age heroes, and modern age. So fifty six, that's golden age.
Let's win. A lot of different iconic characters debuted. With
d C. You had Batman and Superman. With Marvel, you
(07:44):
had sub Mariner, Captain, Captain America. But you also saw
a lot of comic books that weren't superhero comics. We
often think the two are hand in hand, but in truth,
there were a lot of different genres that got started
or at least that had comic book versions, like horror stories,
science fiction westerns, and in fact, a lot of those
(08:07):
became more popular than superheroes because when America came out
of the Great Depression of World War Two in the
early fifties, people stopped buying comic books. It was still
the Golden Era, but it was it was shifting around some. Yeah.
Part of the reason why comic books were doing so
well even during the Great Depression or or shortly thereafter,
was that they were a cheap form of entertainment. You know,
(08:29):
it wasn't as expensive as going out and buying a
radio or heaven help you, a television set. After World
War two, Yeah, these were much less expensive, and so
they were very popular. And we should also point out
that the comic books at this time they weren't necessarily
just for kids. There were quite a few that we're
dealing with some pretty dark subject matter, and they got
(08:51):
darker as time went on. So as as comics evolved,
they tried to reach out to a broader audience. Other
notable things in Marvel's history and early fifties is Timely
comics turned their name to Atlas magazines and Steve Ditko,
who is also a very famous comic artist, joined the
Marvel team, well, the Atlas team, and at that time
(09:14):
Timely Slash Atlas Slash Marvel decided they were going to
stop making superhero books for a while and focus more
on the other genres sci fi, Western, horror, funny animals
to try to recoup they had tried to push Captain
America and Nay More and Human Torch and it just
wasn't quite going right. And so this was kind of
industry wide. It wasn't just Marvel that was backing off
(09:36):
on superheroes. That didn't last too long though. By the
mid fifties, d C started to reintroduce some of these
characters and create some new ones, including new teams and
new uh associations. So that became a trend where we
started seeing superheroes come back in. So it was only
you know, it was only kind of like four or
five years when superheroes were sort of absent. Yeah, and
(09:58):
that was still a part of the olden age. Around
that time, Atlas switched its distribution to American News Company.
And now we're getting back to the business stuff, which
is it's hard because again we just want to talk
about all of the fun heroes and things like that.
American News Company was the largest distributor in the US,
and shortly after Atlas switched their comic distribution to them,
(10:20):
they were found guilty of restraint of trade. They kind
of had a monopoly on the distribution market and they
liquidated and disappeared. Yeah, so that's the danger of becoming
too big. So eventually the government might say, hey, you
need to you know, break up into lots of little
companies in order for this to be fair. This would
(10:40):
also be the mark of the transition from the Golden
Age to the Silver Age of comics. And we'll talk
about it. Right after this break superheroes had gone to
decline for a few years, but they came back because
(11:01):
the United States started to regulate what content could be
used in comic books. You've probably heard about the comic
book code and this various rating systems. That was largely
in response to this, because the United States government was saying,
we need to make sure that these youths ain't becoming
delinquents by reading your funny books. They read your funny
(11:21):
books and the next thing you know, they all wants
to hang out at the drug store and smoke cigarettes.
And then there's a music man who comes in and
tries to sell instruments. I might be mixing my metaphors.
I think you are, I think you are. Let's get
back on all right. Anyway, The point is that they
started to bring superheroes back as kind of a way
of they were backing off on some of the more
controversial topics, right, they were trying to create more family
(11:44):
friendly type content. This would also be the era where
we started seeing more zany comic books. If you don't remember,
it's so much from the Marvel side, but on the
d C side you definitely saw. This is when like
characters like the Joker or the Penguin started being much
more cartoonish and less violent. During the Silver Age. In
nineteen sixty one, you did get somes any because Marvel
(12:07):
came out with its what If series, Oh Yes, which
I love. What If was where they would ask these
hypothetical questions like what if Dr Doom had turned into
a good guy. Yeah. It's the same year that they
actually went from Atlas magazines specifically to Marvel Comics. So
now Marvel comics were all branded as Marvel Comics, and
they added a bunch of characters. Most successfully, they started
(12:29):
the Fantastic Four, Stanley and Jack Kirby did, and they
started a new sort of comic writing. Now these superheroes
were interacting with each other in a more like realistic
way and dealing with real world problems, and they also
inhabited this shared universe, right, So now it was no
longer these individual story arcs where characters just kind of
inhabited their own version of the world. Now they had
(12:51):
a shared version, which was beneficial in the sense that
you could boost different title sales by having different character
show up, almost like a cameo, But it would also
add the problem of the more complex this got, the
harder it was to maintain continuity across the entire universe. Yeah,
and you know, unsurprisingly, the Silver Age Marvel heroes were
(13:13):
Fantastic Four, Hulk, Thor Ant Man, Iron Man, Spider Man,
X Men, Avengers, which they did to compete specifically with
Justice League, which had come out in nineteen sixty Daredevil,
and then the what If comic the original Bullpen, where
Stanley and all of them were the Fantastic Four. So
this is an era where a lot of the characters
(13:34):
we often associate with comic book superheroes today. This is
the era they first arrived. And if you look at
Marvel movies nowadays and you go, well, why in the
world do they make an ant Man movie? Guse he
was part of their silver age, choosing around a long time. Yeah. Uh.
Then in nineteen sixty eight we get a change of ownership.
(13:55):
That's when Goodman would sell his company, actually the parent
company that owned Marvel Comics, because it was kind of
an umbrella company holding company almost to a company called
the Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation. Yeah, okay, the PFCC. Yes.
So the interesting thing here was not just that it
(14:15):
was a acquisition, but that Goodman himself went along with it.
It wasn't like Goodman sold and then walked away. Yeah,
and you know, PFCC seemed to be very interested in
Marvel's success, unlike some of the companies we talked about
where they acquire company and then don't really pay attention
to it. I would say, like my Space or something. Sure,
they were invested. So they also bought Curtis Circulation in
(14:38):
ninety nine to help use them to distribute the Marvel
comics they had bought. This is really interesting to me too,
because throughout the history of Marvel you'll see eras where
the company would own its own distribution, and then following
eras where they would abandon that and go and work
with an independent distributor. So that's kind of interesting. Nineteen
(15:00):
seventy Marvel would say goodbye to one of its instrumental creators, Yes,
Jack Kirby. He goes over to d C. The Trader.
There's a lot of crossover, that's true, and this would
be about where we see the transition between Silver Age
and the Bronze Age. So in the Bronze Age you
(15:21):
started to get a change in tone, and there's no
like hard line here. There's not like an event that
you could point to. A lot of a lot of
Marvel's history doesn't have hard lines. It's kind of very fluid, right,
So in this case, we started seeing sort of a
return to what the kind of storylines you saw in
the Golden Age, but amped up, like you started seeing
comic books deal with some very serious and very dark
(15:44):
themes in this era. This is when we start seeing
more of the types of stuff that would feed into
even the the nineties and early two thousand's. I think
of like Frank Miller's run with Daredevil that would come
in the Bronze age. That such a good one. It
is a really good run. I'm not a huge Frank
Miller fan, but that Daredevil run was really good. When
(16:06):
I when I was watching the Netflix Daredevil series, I'm like, oh,
I see especially season two there it owes a ton
to the Frank Miller run. In the U S Department
of Health, Education and Welfare commission Stanley to do a
comic story regarding drug abuse which goes falls into this
darker era, and Stanley wrote a three parts Spider Man
(16:29):
series about it, kind of warning against it. So it
was a darker subject, but a positive message and a
positive message for kids who might read it as well
or teenagers who relate to Spider Man. But the Comics
Code Authority didn't approve it. They said, you can't put
this out because it talks about drugs. Period. Yeah, it
doesn't matter what the messages. The content itself was objectionable.
(16:51):
So what did they do? Well? They published it anyhow,
you know, and it was so popular that the c
c Age changed their rules that same year. Huh. So,
I guess that's better to ask for forgiveness than permission,
I guess. Sometimes In nineteen seventy two, Goodman would finally
step down. He retired, and he handed the reins over
(17:12):
to someone who had started when he was just seventeen
years old as an assistant Excelsior Stanley. Yes. And then
immediately the comic books went into a slump. This was
not Sley, by the way, not at all. So Marvel
diversified to expand their comic line, and they kind of
give us superheroes in the other genres, so like they
(17:32):
gave us superheroes in the fantasy genre like Red Sonja
and Conan and Barbarian, or in funny animals like Howard
the Duck. Now, I mentioned earlier that as a kid,
I collected certain comic books. Howard the Duck was one
of the comic books I collected. I had the first
twenty issues of Howard the Duck. You know, people are
hit a miss on him, but I like him in
(17:54):
the comics. He was a very interesting character, and he
would often end up teaming up with someone like Spider Man.
Spider Man's history is often spider Man teaming up with
a even more sarcastic, crazy character. Sometimes it's how Are
the Duck, Sometimes it's Deadpool. Sometimes it's stores Frog, sometimes
it's Wolverine who just doesn't put and they switched bodies. Anyhow,
(18:18):
They also this year lowered their comic prices and kind
of started under cutting d C and taking DC's market
share because people could buy Marvel Comics cheaper. Yeah, this
is not necessarily a long term sustainable no strategy, by
the way, but it's a good way to get fans alright.
So then we get to nineteen seventy three when PFCC
(18:40):
was it went under its own identity change became Cadence Industries,
and the Magazine Management Company officially was renamed the Marvel
Comics Group. So, just just to clarify because we didn't
really talk about it earlier, Magazine Management Company was the
overhead company of Marvel com So you had Magazine Management
(19:01):
Companies a parent company, and then Marvel Comics under it,
and now the entire group is Marvel Comics Group. Now
this is also when we started seeing a shift in
consumer behavior. So up to this point, the place where
you would typically buy a comic book would be a newsstand.
You would go to a news stand, you buy yourself,
you know, your whichever titles you liked, and you would
(19:23):
go off on your married little way. But by the
mid seventies, newsstand sales were in decline. This could have
led to a complete collapse of the comic book industry,
but the industry as a whole was able to adapt
to this by concentrating more on specialty stores comic book stores,
(19:45):
because those were not really a thing until the mid seventies.
It wasn't until you started seeing people who had grown
up with comic books investing to create stores specifically to
cater to that audience. That's when you started seeing comic
book stores start. And without that, the industry might not
have made it. So this was like almost like a
mini brink moment where if the industry had not been
(20:07):
able to adapt, it would have gone into extinction or
at least gone into hibernation for a really long time.
But you know, the comic industry, they're they're like the underdogs.
They write about their scrappy They just fighting. We have
more to say about Marvel, but first let's take a
quick break. In nineteen Jim Shooter became the editor in
(20:35):
chief of Marvel and Jim Shooter. He was kind of
a controversial editor in chief. He did some really good
things like he introduced creator Royalties and a subsidiary of
Marvel Epic Comics, I believe, where the creators of the
comics could own the properties they were creating. And then
he also made a company wide crossover Secret Wars. Yes,
(20:55):
this was one of those things where when I heard
about Secret Wars, I would have to ask my friends
who were more avid comic book collectors to explain what happened.
That tends to happen whenever there would be any of
these huge multi title arcs or or whatever, like the
various Crises and Secret Wars and things, where it usually
is an attempt to reset everything so that the continuity
(21:19):
makes sense again, because one of the problems with having
all these individual titles is that things that developed in
one title might not be reflected in other titles because
you have different teams working on them. Yeah. But you know,
Jim Shooter, despite all those good things, yeah he So
let me talk about this for a second. About in
this era, there had been kind of a revolving door
(21:42):
for the editor in chief of Marvel, and the reason
for that was largely because the artists or writers who
would become editor in chief would find that it was unmanageable.
There were so many different titles that were being published
at the time, each of which had its own deadline,
and they had deadlines for are completing art completing the writing,
(22:03):
publishing it, getting it distributed, and it was becoming unmanageable,
and there are a lot of teams that were slipping
on their deadlines. Yeah, So Shooter becomes the editor in
chief and he lays down the law. He starts exercising
editorial control. He starts to in the minds of some
writers and artists, interfere with their work. But on the
(22:26):
flip side, he starts making sure that those titles are
hitting those deadlines. So he starts turning things around and
getting the company back on track. But he is his
style and his hands on approach was something that really
rubbed the creative types of the wrong way. So it
was a double edged sword. On the one hand, the
(22:48):
business side is getting attended to. On the other hand,
the writers and artists are getting more and more irritated
and frustrated and angry about how things are going. So
it was it was definitely I think you put it
best saying it's a he was a controversial leader. Yeah,
and also around this time, we're getting him to a
point where Marvel doesn't just go through editors in Chief,
(23:11):
but they're going to start changing hands a lot. But
before they do, Shooter buys an animation studio, the one
that used to make Pink Panther, and they rename it
Marvel Productions, and they start making animated cartoons like Spider
Man and his Amazing Friends. And in eighty four they
had the opportunity to do something pretty amazing. I kind
(23:31):
of wonder what how things would have turned out if
they had done this. They had the chance to buy
out their old nemesis, d C. Yeah, but why didn't they? Well,
they figured that DC characters just weren't as good as
Marvel characters. That's why DC was struggling, and that's how
Warner Brothers just trying to sell them off to Marvel.
(23:51):
But they were wrong. Yeah. No, I mean it turns
out like I think, for your average person, if you
asked them to name comic book characters, if Batman or
Superman isn't or Wonder Woman, if those are not in
like the first more or five names that they say,
that's odd. I mean they are the first ones that
I think of. Superman was like, first, I'm a I'm
(24:12):
a huge Marvel fan, and I think of Superman and
Batman first Marvel. I like the Marvel stories more, but
the characters don't stick in your mind the way like Batman, Superman,
Wonder Woman do Yeah. Typically I say that now I
also acknowledge at the box office they can do no wrong.
But we'll get to that. Yeah, Okay, so we've hit
the Golden Age, Silver Age, and the Bronze Age. What
(24:32):
age is next? The Modern Age? That's the age wherein now?
So that that starts around the mid eighties. Generally, this
is where we start getting to more psychologically complex storylines
and characters. You get into a lot of storylines that
involve anti heroes, so heroes who are not always behaving
like super good guys. Wolverine is a great example. Wolverine
(24:54):
is kind of an anti hero. He's more on the
heroic side of anti hero. But then you have like Elektra,
who's maybe more on the shady side of anti Pools
an anti hero. Deadpool is definitely an anti hero. Deadpool
is a special case all on his own because he
can break the fourth wall. At least, it was just
about saying until recently, but we don't need that's a
(25:14):
large that's that's yeah. Yeah, So we started seeing that.
By the end of nineteen eighty five, the company was
hitting revenues of a hundred million dollars a year. And
the interesting thing to me is that not all of
that was coming from comic book sales. They were making
a significant amount of their revenue through licensing their characters,
(25:34):
either to toy companies to produce toys or lunch boxes
or you know that sort of thing. So video games
that would become a thing, not so much in five
but a few years later, so that would become an
increasingly important part of their revenue. Yeah. In Marvel Entertainment
Group sold to New World Entertainment for forty six million
dollars yep. And they mainly wanted to get the animation
(25:56):
studio and the rights to all those characters. And then
in we get the release of a film that is
a rift between your beloved hosts. Yes, Howard, I'm not
going to sing it the Duck because I don't want royalties,
but yeah, how are the Duck? Released? It did not
go over well, it's it's not a good movie, Ariel,
It's not a good movie. But it's a fun movie.
(26:18):
Ariel loves this movie and I do not. When Howard
the Duck came out and Guardians of the Galaxy, and okay,
I did like that. I was I want to know
Howard the Duck movie. Now, I'm just glad that they
avoided having to get like the music sting from the
Howard the Duck film and played in the background. Yeah,
there were other Marvel movies that people wanted to produce,
but they cost too much to make, so they just
(26:39):
stayed in this production limbo. Yeah, and just never got
out of the development phase. Now, how Are the Duck tanked?
But the failure wasn't necessarily an omen However, the following
ten years would lead to the event that would almost
put Marvel out of business. So we're now about to
get into the braink But in a surprise plot twist,
(27:02):
we're going to cover that in part two of Marvel
on the Brink. Don't you just hate when you're left
with a surprise cliffhanger. Look, if Marvel can have twenty
two movies in their first arc, I think we can
have it to be continued, all right, We'll tune in
next week for another exciting installment of Marvel on the Brink.
And if you want to get any of your suggestions
(27:22):
to us, well, you can send us a little email
that's a feedback at the Brink Podcast dot show. And
you can also check out our website at www dot
The Brink podcast dot show. And until then, I am
Jonathan Strickland and I'm arial casting. We'll see you next week.
Excel See or the Brink is a production of I
(27:44):
Heart Radio and How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Nine
Welcome to the Brink, a production of I Heart Radio's
How Stuff Works. They put the amazing in Our Spider Man,
the incredible in Our Hulk, and Captain America started punching
Nazis before America even entered World War Two. So it
(00:24):
might seem astounding that Marvel entered bankruptcy in the late nineties,
having weathered the fickleness of the comics market multiple times,
like a human torch burning bright, bursting bubbles, greedy ventures,
and what some might call financial villainy lead owners grasping
for a plan seed to world comic domination and selling
(00:45):
their heroes out like mercenaries. But it pays to be good,
and after a struggle of illegal battle, some positive new blood,
and some daring risks, Marvel is now living up to
the Excelsior motto. This is Marvel on the Brink. Hi, Ariel, Hi,
(01:11):
I like Marvel. I do too. I like I like
comic books and superheroes and comic book movies and comic
book TV shows. He guess what, I like all that
stuff too. Yeah, So Ariel and I are fans. Some
might call us geeks. I would call us geeks. We
have called each other geeks affectionately, and we love Marvel.
(01:32):
I mean we love especially the most recent incarnation of Marvel.
It's impossible to ignore Marvel at this point. There's a
new Marvel film out practically every month. Well not every month,
but you like every quarter. Yeah, well enough, like to
the point where people joke that if it's if you
go to the movie theater, what are you seeing a
(01:53):
Star Wars movie or a Marvel movie? Yeah? And you know,
when Marvel movies first started coming out, I was like,
I don't know about this, Arcter. But now at this point,
I'm just like, here, let me just write you a check. Yeah.
Every time that Marvel was coming out with a new film,
I was thinking, can they really pull this off? I mean,
starting off with iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe stories,
I thought, wow, iron Man really, because that's I don't
(02:15):
think of him as a upper tier character. I mean
he is if you're a comic fan, right, but mainstream
mainstream audiences I don't think knew very much about iron Man.
And then then you get to something like Guardians of
the Galaxy and you're like, there's no way they're going
to make that work, And you know to be fair.
Even though I am a self proclaimed geek and I
(02:35):
love Marvel. I came to comics late in my geekdom um.
I started off with sci fi and fantasy and kind
of worked my way to superheroes. So it's been a
learning curve. Yeah. I I collected a little bit when
I was a kid. I'll talk about one of the
comics I collected in this episode. But I was not
the biggest comic book fan. I I always tried to
(02:58):
keep semi aware of what was going on because it
was interested in it. I just didn't have the allowance
to go out and buy every single title that was
coming out. Well, and we'll get to it, but there
was a while where Marvel was putting out so much
stuff you couldn't keep up. Yeah, so we're gonna talk
today about how we got to this point because there
it was not a guarantee that Marvel was going to
(03:19):
become such a breakout success, not at all. Not a
few years ago. You would have laughed if someone had
said that a company would buy Marvel for four billion dollars,
But that in fact has happened. Before we get into it, though,
arial we need to settle something who is your favorite
Marvel character? Well, that would be the Hulk. The Hulk.
(03:41):
The Hulk is that the secret You're always angry? That's fair,
all right? You know I'm a hulk. I like in
D and D. I play a barbarian. I'm just a bruiser,
sort of a girl. Got you, all right? That's fair.
Who's Taskmaster? I can see that Taskmaster is a villain
in Marvel. He has not yet been depicted in films
as far as I can tell. Taskmaster's ability is he
(04:04):
can watch other people do stuff and then he can
replicate it perfectly. So he can watch, say, an Olympic
diver do a perfect dive, and then he can do
that perfect dive. He's kind of like a visual rogue. Yeah,
he's He's usually known for training mercenaries. Okay, we had
to get that out of our system. We had to
get all of that geekery out so that we can
talk about the business. Yeah, we we need to get
(04:26):
down to business because there's a lot to cover, and
I know we're gonna want to cover it all. We
are going to be able to cover it. Also, you
can do tangents and stuff anyway, So let's let's Let's
try to start off by talking about how Marvel got started,
because it wasn't always known as Marvel. No, it was
started by Martin Goodman in he had made a comic
(04:47):
brand called Timely Comics, and Marvel Comics Number one was
the actual comic book. Right. This is not unusual, by
the way. We think of a lot of like big
name comic books like Superman or Batman, which are both
d C comic books. Well, those didn't start off as
Batman number one or Superman number one. In fact, the
first Batman comic was a Detective Comics issue number twenty seven.
(05:10):
The first Superman comic was in a spinoff called Action
Comics Number one. Well, and I would call you on
talking about d C during a Marvel episode. But it's
important to note because DC came out with superheroes before Marvel. Yeah,
like two years yeah, but still still it still counts.
So who was in Marvel Comics number one? Tell everybody
(05:31):
the superhero who appeared in that. Well, there are a few,
but the most notable are Human Torch. But at the
time he was like a human android, So he wasn't
It wasn't Johnny story, it was it was human Torch
version one point oh yes, and the sub Mariner a
k A naymore a k A antihero version of Aquaman,
although Acuman is sometimes an Yeah, he went through a
(05:54):
dark phase. We all went through that dark phase. It's
just a couman did it well after his teenage year.
And something to note, right when Timely Comics was starting off,
stan Lee joined. So he joined at the age of
seventeen with the help of his uncle to become an
assistant there. So, I mean he's he's bounced around and
he's written stuff for DC as well, but he started
right at the beginning. And someone else who was really
(06:17):
important in Marvel history and comic book history is Jack Kirby.
And one of his huge contributions happened just a couple
of years after the founding of this company, and that
was in one with the first Captain America comic book. Yeah,
good old cap and Captain America that you might remember.
(06:38):
There's like the famous illustration of Captain America punching Hitler
and they kind of recreated that in the the Captain
America film Contain America the First a Injured. The interesting
fact is we mentioned in the introduction that Marvel had
their superheroes fighting Nazis before the United States had even
entered into World War Two. Yeah, Timely had some other
(07:00):
heroes Wizard, Miss America, Destroyer, and they still occasionally show up,
but they never really took off, like Captain America and
I guess for that matter, nay More or the Human Torch. Yeah,
so not everyone would end up becoming a household name.
Now these days, the years between nineteen thirty eight and
nineteen fifty six or so, these are not hard dates,
(07:23):
but kind of general dates. We tend to refer to
that as the Golden Age of comics. You'll hear people
to talk about Golden Age heroes, Silver Age heroes, Bronze
Age heroes, and modern age. So fifty six, that's golden age.
Let's win. A lot of different iconic characters debuted. With
d C. You had Batman and Superman. With Marvel, you
(07:44):
had sub Mariner, Captain, Captain America. But you also saw
a lot of comic books that weren't superhero comics. We
often think the two are hand in hand, but in truth,
there were a lot of different genres that got started
or at least that had comic book versions, like horror stories,
science fiction westerns, and in fact, a lot of those
(08:07):
became more popular than superheroes because when America came out
of the Great Depression of World War Two in the
early fifties, people stopped buying comic books. It was still
the Golden Era, but it was it was shifting around some. Yeah.
Part of the reason why comic books were doing so
well even during the Great Depression or or shortly thereafter,
was that they were a cheap form of entertainment. You know,
(08:29):
it wasn't as expensive as going out and buying a
radio or heaven help you, a television set. After World
War two, Yeah, these were much less expensive, and so
they were very popular. And we should also point out
that the comic books at this time they weren't necessarily
just for kids. There were quite a few that we're
dealing with some pretty dark subject matter, and they got
(08:51):
darker as time went on. So as as comics evolved,
they tried to reach out to a broader audience. Other
notable things in Marvel's history and early fifties is Timely
comics turned their name to Atlas magazines and Steve Ditko,
who is also a very famous comic artist, joined the
Marvel team, well, the Atlas team, and at that time
(09:14):
Timely Slash Atlas Slash Marvel decided they were going to
stop making superhero books for a while and focus more
on the other genres sci fi, Western, horror, funny animals
to try to recoup they had tried to push Captain
America and Nay More and Human Torch and it just
wasn't quite going right. And so this was kind of
industry wide. It wasn't just Marvel that was backing off
(09:36):
on superheroes. That didn't last too long though. By the
mid fifties, d C started to reintroduce some of these
characters and create some new ones, including new teams and
new uh associations. So that became a trend where we
started seeing superheroes come back in. So it was only
you know, it was only kind of like four or
five years when superheroes were sort of absent. Yeah, and
(09:58):
that was still a part of the olden age. Around
that time, Atlas switched its distribution to American News Company.
And now we're getting back to the business stuff, which
is it's hard because again we just want to talk
about all of the fun heroes and things like that.
American News Company was the largest distributor in the US,
and shortly after Atlas switched their comic distribution to them,
(10:20):
they were found guilty of restraint of trade. They kind
of had a monopoly on the distribution market and they
liquidated and disappeared. Yeah, so that's the danger of becoming
too big. So eventually the government might say, hey, you
need to you know, break up into lots of little
companies in order for this to be fair. This would
(10:40):
also be the mark of the transition from the Golden
Age to the Silver Age of comics. And we'll talk
about it. Right after this break superheroes had gone to
decline for a few years, but they came back because
(11:01):
the United States started to regulate what content could be
used in comic books. You've probably heard about the comic
book code and this various rating systems. That was largely
in response to this, because the United States government was saying,
we need to make sure that these youths ain't becoming
delinquents by reading your funny books. They read your funny
(11:21):
books and the next thing you know, they all wants
to hang out at the drug store and smoke cigarettes.
And then there's a music man who comes in and
tries to sell instruments. I might be mixing my metaphors.
I think you are, I think you are. Let's get
back on all right. Anyway, The point is that they
started to bring superheroes back as kind of a way
of they were backing off on some of the more
controversial topics, right, they were trying to create more family
(11:44):
friendly type content. This would also be the era where
we started seeing more zany comic books. If you don't remember,
it's so much from the Marvel side, but on the
d C side you definitely saw. This is when like
characters like the Joker or the Penguin started being much
more cartoonish and less violent. During the Silver Age. In
nineteen sixty one, you did get somes any because Marvel
(12:07):
came out with its what If series, Oh Yes, which
I love. What If was where they would ask these
hypothetical questions like what if Dr Doom had turned into
a good guy. Yeah. It's the same year that they
actually went from Atlas magazines specifically to Marvel Comics. So
now Marvel comics were all branded as Marvel Comics, and
they added a bunch of characters. Most successfully, they started
(12:29):
the Fantastic Four, Stanley and Jack Kirby did, and they
started a new sort of comic writing. Now these superheroes
were interacting with each other in a more like realistic
way and dealing with real world problems, and they also
inhabited this shared universe, right, So now it was no
longer these individual story arcs where characters just kind of
inhabited their own version of the world. Now they had
(12:51):
a shared version, which was beneficial in the sense that
you could boost different title sales by having different character
show up, almost like a cameo, But it would also
add the problem of the more complex this got, the
harder it was to maintain continuity across the entire universe. Yeah,
and you know, unsurprisingly, the Silver Age Marvel heroes were
(13:13):
Fantastic Four, Hulk, Thor Ant Man, Iron Man, Spider Man,
X Men, Avengers, which they did to compete specifically with
Justice League, which had come out in nineteen sixty Daredevil,
and then the what If comic the original Bullpen, where
Stanley and all of them were the Fantastic Four. So
this is an era where a lot of the characters
(13:34):
we often associate with comic book superheroes today. This is
the era they first arrived. And if you look at
Marvel movies nowadays and you go, well, why in the
world do they make an ant Man movie? Guse he
was part of their silver age, choosing around a long time. Yeah. Uh.
Then in nineteen sixty eight we get a change of ownership.
(13:55):
That's when Goodman would sell his company, actually the parent
company that owned Marvel Comics, because it was kind of
an umbrella company holding company almost to a company called
the Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation. Yeah, okay, the PFCC. Yes.
So the interesting thing here was not just that it
(14:15):
was a acquisition, but that Goodman himself went along with it.
It wasn't like Goodman sold and then walked away. Yeah,
and you know, PFCC seemed to be very interested in
Marvel's success, unlike some of the companies we talked about
where they acquire company and then don't really pay attention
to it. I would say, like my Space or something. Sure,
they were invested. So they also bought Curtis Circulation in
(14:38):
ninety nine to help use them to distribute the Marvel
comics they had bought. This is really interesting to me too,
because throughout the history of Marvel you'll see eras where
the company would own its own distribution, and then following
eras where they would abandon that and go and work
with an independent distributor. So that's kind of interesting. Nineteen
(15:00):
seventy Marvel would say goodbye to one of its instrumental creators, Yes,
Jack Kirby. He goes over to d C. The Trader.
There's a lot of crossover, that's true, and this would
be about where we see the transition between Silver Age
and the Bronze Age. So in the Bronze Age you
(15:21):
started to get a change in tone, and there's no
like hard line here. There's not like an event that
you could point to. A lot of a lot of
Marvel's history doesn't have hard lines. It's kind of very fluid, right,
So in this case, we started seeing sort of a
return to what the kind of storylines you saw in
the Golden Age, but amped up, like you started seeing
comic books deal with some very serious and very dark
(15:44):
themes in this era. This is when we start seeing
more of the types of stuff that would feed into
even the the nineties and early two thousand's. I think
of like Frank Miller's run with Daredevil that would come
in the Bronze age. That such a good one. It
is a really good run. I'm not a huge Frank
Miller fan, but that Daredevil run was really good. When
(16:06):
I when I was watching the Netflix Daredevil series, I'm like, oh,
I see especially season two there it owes a ton
to the Frank Miller run. In the U S Department
of Health, Education and Welfare commission Stanley to do a
comic story regarding drug abuse which goes falls into this
darker era, and Stanley wrote a three parts Spider Man
(16:29):
series about it, kind of warning against it. So it
was a darker subject, but a positive message and a
positive message for kids who might read it as well
or teenagers who relate to Spider Man. But the Comics
Code Authority didn't approve it. They said, you can't put
this out because it talks about drugs. Period. Yeah, it
doesn't matter what the messages. The content itself was objectionable.
(16:51):
So what did they do? Well? They published it anyhow,
you know, and it was so popular that the c
c Age changed their rules that same year. Huh. So,
I guess that's better to ask for forgiveness than permission,
I guess. Sometimes In nineteen seventy two, Goodman would finally
step down. He retired, and he handed the reins over
(17:12):
to someone who had started when he was just seventeen
years old as an assistant Excelsior Stanley. Yes. And then
immediately the comic books went into a slump. This was
not Sley, by the way, not at all. So Marvel
diversified to expand their comic line, and they kind of
give us superheroes in the other genres, so like they
(17:32):
gave us superheroes in the fantasy genre like Red Sonja
and Conan and Barbarian, or in funny animals like Howard
the Duck. Now, I mentioned earlier that as a kid,
I collected certain comic books. Howard the Duck was one
of the comic books I collected. I had the first
twenty issues of Howard the Duck. You know, people are
hit a miss on him, but I like him in
(17:54):
the comics. He was a very interesting character, and he
would often end up teaming up with someone like Spider Man.
Spider Man's history is often spider Man teaming up with
a even more sarcastic, crazy character. Sometimes it's how Are
the Duck, Sometimes it's Deadpool. Sometimes it's stores Frog, sometimes
it's Wolverine who just doesn't put and they switched bodies. Anyhow,
(18:18):
They also this year lowered their comic prices and kind
of started under cutting d C and taking DC's market
share because people could buy Marvel Comics cheaper. Yeah, this
is not necessarily a long term sustainable no strategy, by
the way, but it's a good way to get fans alright.
So then we get to nineteen seventy three when PFCC
(18:40):
was it went under its own identity change became Cadence Industries,
and the Magazine Management Company officially was renamed the Marvel
Comics Group. So, just just to clarify because we didn't
really talk about it earlier, Magazine Management Company was the
overhead company of Marvel com So you had Magazine Management
(19:01):
Companies a parent company, and then Marvel Comics under it,
and now the entire group is Marvel Comics Group. Now
this is also when we started seeing a shift in
consumer behavior. So up to this point, the place where
you would typically buy a comic book would be a newsstand.
You would go to a news stand, you buy yourself,
you know, your whichever titles you liked, and you would
(19:23):
go off on your married little way. But by the
mid seventies, newsstand sales were in decline. This could have
led to a complete collapse of the comic book industry,
but the industry as a whole was able to adapt
to this by concentrating more on specialty stores comic book stores,
(19:45):
because those were not really a thing until the mid seventies.
It wasn't until you started seeing people who had grown
up with comic books investing to create stores specifically to
cater to that audience. That's when you started seeing comic
book stores start. And without that, the industry might not
have made it. So this was like almost like a
mini brink moment where if the industry had not been
(20:07):
able to adapt, it would have gone into extinction or
at least gone into hibernation for a really long time.
But you know, the comic industry, they're they're like the underdogs.
They write about their scrappy They just fighting. We have
more to say about Marvel, but first let's take a
quick break. In nineteen Jim Shooter became the editor in
(20:35):
chief of Marvel and Jim Shooter. He was kind of
a controversial editor in chief. He did some really good
things like he introduced creator Royalties and a subsidiary of
Marvel Epic Comics, I believe, where the creators of the
comics could own the properties they were creating. And then
he also made a company wide crossover Secret Wars. Yes,
(20:55):
this was one of those things where when I heard
about Secret Wars, I would have to ask my friends
who were more avid comic book collectors to explain what happened.
That tends to happen whenever there would be any of
these huge multi title arcs or or whatever, like the
various Crises and Secret Wars and things, where it usually
is an attempt to reset everything so that the continuity
(21:19):
makes sense again, because one of the problems with having
all these individual titles is that things that developed in
one title might not be reflected in other titles because
you have different teams working on them. Yeah. But you know,
Jim Shooter, despite all those good things, yeah he So
let me talk about this for a second. About in
this era, there had been kind of a revolving door
(21:42):
for the editor in chief of Marvel, and the reason
for that was largely because the artists or writers who
would become editor in chief would find that it was unmanageable.
There were so many different titles that were being published
at the time, each of which had its own deadline,
and they had deadlines for are completing art completing the writing,
(22:03):
publishing it, getting it distributed, and it was becoming unmanageable,
and there are a lot of teams that were slipping
on their deadlines. Yeah, So Shooter becomes the editor in
chief and he lays down the law. He starts exercising
editorial control. He starts to in the minds of some
writers and artists, interfere with their work. But on the
(22:26):
flip side, he starts making sure that those titles are
hitting those deadlines. So he starts turning things around and
getting the company back on track. But he is his
style and his hands on approach was something that really
rubbed the creative types of the wrong way. So it
was a double edged sword. On the one hand, the
(22:48):
business side is getting attended to. On the other hand,
the writers and artists are getting more and more irritated
and frustrated and angry about how things are going. So
it was it was definitely I think you put it
best saying it's a he was a controversial leader. Yeah,
and also around this time, we're getting him to a
point where Marvel doesn't just go through editors in Chief,
(23:11):
but they're going to start changing hands a lot. But
before they do, Shooter buys an animation studio, the one
that used to make Pink Panther, and they rename it
Marvel Productions, and they start making animated cartoons like Spider
Man and his Amazing Friends. And in eighty four they
had the opportunity to do something pretty amazing. I kind
(23:31):
of wonder what how things would have turned out if
they had done this. They had the chance to buy
out their old nemesis, d C. Yeah, but why didn't they? Well,
they figured that DC characters just weren't as good as
Marvel characters. That's why DC was struggling, and that's how
Warner Brothers just trying to sell them off to Marvel.
(23:51):
But they were wrong. Yeah. No, I mean it turns
out like I think, for your average person, if you
asked them to name comic book characters, if Batman or
Superman isn't or Wonder Woman, if those are not in
like the first more or five names that they say,
that's odd. I mean they are the first ones that
I think of. Superman was like, first, I'm a I'm
(24:12):
a huge Marvel fan, and I think of Superman and
Batman first Marvel. I like the Marvel stories more, but
the characters don't stick in your mind the way like Batman, Superman,
Wonder Woman do Yeah. Typically I say that now I
also acknowledge at the box office they can do no wrong.
But we'll get to that. Yeah, Okay, so we've hit
the Golden Age, Silver Age, and the Bronze Age. What
(24:32):
age is next? The Modern Age? That's the age wherein now?
So that that starts around the mid eighties. Generally, this
is where we start getting to more psychologically complex storylines
and characters. You get into a lot of storylines that
involve anti heroes, so heroes who are not always behaving
like super good guys. Wolverine is a great example. Wolverine
(24:54):
is kind of an anti hero. He's more on the
heroic side of anti hero. But then you have like Elektra,
who's maybe more on the shady side of anti Pools
an anti hero. Deadpool is definitely an anti hero. Deadpool
is a special case all on his own because he
can break the fourth wall. At least, it was just
about saying until recently, but we don't need that's a
(25:14):
large that's that's yeah. Yeah, So we started seeing that.
By the end of nineteen eighty five, the company was
hitting revenues of a hundred million dollars a year. And
the interesting thing to me is that not all of
that was coming from comic book sales. They were making
a significant amount of their revenue through licensing their characters,
(25:34):
either to toy companies to produce toys or lunch boxes
or you know that sort of thing. So video games
that would become a thing, not so much in five
but a few years later, so that would become an
increasingly important part of their revenue. Yeah. In Marvel Entertainment
Group sold to New World Entertainment for forty six million
dollars yep. And they mainly wanted to get the animation
(25:56):
studio and the rights to all those characters. And then
in we get the release of a film that is
a rift between your beloved hosts. Yes, Howard, I'm not
going to sing it the Duck because I don't want royalties,
but yeah, how are the Duck? Released? It did not
go over well, it's it's not a good movie, Ariel,
It's not a good movie. But it's a fun movie.
(26:18):
Ariel loves this movie and I do not. When Howard
the Duck came out and Guardians of the Galaxy, and okay,
I did like that. I was I want to know
Howard the Duck movie. Now, I'm just glad that they
avoided having to get like the music sting from the
Howard the Duck film and played in the background. Yeah,
there were other Marvel movies that people wanted to produce,
but they cost too much to make, so they just
(26:39):
stayed in this production limbo. Yeah, and just never got
out of the development phase. Now, how Are the Duck tanked?
But the failure wasn't necessarily an omen However, the following
ten years would lead to the event that would almost
put Marvel out of business. So we're now about to
get into the braink But in a surprise plot twist,
(27:02):
we're going to cover that in part two of Marvel
on the Brink. Don't you just hate when you're left
with a surprise cliffhanger. Look, if Marvel can have twenty
two movies in their first arc, I think we can
have it to be continued, all right, We'll tune in
next week for another exciting installment of Marvel on the Brink.
And if you want to get any of your suggestions
(27:22):
to us, well, you can send us a little email
that's a feedback at the Brink Podcast dot show. And
you can also check out our website at www dot
The Brink podcast dot show. And until then, I am
Jonathan Strickland and I'm arial casting. We'll see you next week.
Excel See or the Brink is a production of I
(27:44):
Heart Radio and How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Nine
Business on the Brink News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Ariel Kristen Kasten
Show Links
AboutPopular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.