Why is marvel comics called marvel

So the groups listed in it are "advertising groups". Which means that you couldn't place an ad in one specific title in the group, but your ad would be in all the titles of the group. Note where it says "Space sold in combination as a group" under the Marvel Comic Group listing. Each of those were an advertising group. These advertising groups were promoted by publishers in trade journals to create brands.

All of Goodman's comics are under the Marvel Comic Group listing. He put his men's mags under another group name entirely. As for how the newsstand retailer ordered his comics and magazines, that would be dependent on the local wholesaler and how they wanted to offer them. In some cases, the newsstand took what ever they gave him. The advertising groups were not relevant unless the wholesaler used them.

Advertising was the driver, not distribution. Also, a newsstand was generally not free to order from any national distributor. The retailer was generally stuck with the national distributor s that his wholesaler dealt with. Some publishers were their own national distributor, but they generally went directly to the local wholesaler, not the newsstand dealer.

This is after Before is much more complicated. These are not hard and fast rule, but the vast majority of comic books and magazines followed this method. In Fantastic Four No. The pity of beauty. The comics became hits—with kids, and then with older teens and college students, too. They had no highbrow baggage, no Great Tradition that a counterculture would feel any need to repudiate.

They were cheap and easy to share, but without the square everywhereness of TV and radio: you could flaunt your devotion to comic books, or conceal it. Comics of the Silver Age—as collectors call this era—could never be described as realistic, but they did take place in a world more like ours than the universe of older cape comics.

Ben Grimm hated his rocklike body. Spider-Man could not have come to such vivid life without the iconic buildings of New York to climb.

In , the Village Voice published a rapturous piece about Marvel. The fact is that Marvel Comics are the first comic books in history in which a post-adolescent escapist can get personally involved. No one could stop him: he had some say over who got credit and who got paid. What they later disputed, in decades of interviews and litigation, was who came up with characters and plot.

Cognoscenti give Kirby more kudos than casual fans do, and more than they give Lee, especially after a vitriolic custody fight, in the nineteen-eighties, between Marvel and Kirby over his original art. Chris Claremont started working at Marvel as a teen-ager, in the late sixties, then wrote Uncanny X-Men continuously from to Auteur models of artistic creation—Emily Dickinson alone at her desk—have little room for such an encourager and organizer.

Perhaps above all, Lee was a grand self-mythologizer. More generous observers might compare Lee to an orchestra conductor, coaxing talent from others. The industry that Lee had left behind was always changing. Fans like that could impede change, seeking out only what they already knew they loved; as collectors, they could also generate boom-and-bust cycles, like the one that almost crushed Marvel again, in the mid-nineties.

On the other hand, creators working in these later years could count on long-term emotional investment in changing characters, rounding out figures in what once seemed the flattest of media. These characters, such as Ben Grimm and Sue Storm, lasted beyond the generation of artists who produced them and readers who consumed them: they had room and time to grow. After , Lee spent the rest of his life as the ebullient face of a medium to which he had nearly stopped contributing.

He tried repeatedly to succeed in Hollywood, with Marvel properties or with his own new ideas. In , at seventy-five, Lee gave up his remaining rights in Marvel properties in exchange for a high-six-figure retainer and a cut of film and TV profits.

But he might have felt that he missed out. The twenty-first-century Lee could have simply retired. Instead, he seems to have wanted to stay relevant, even though he no longer had the team or the skills. It launched a few clunky Web series—one starred the Backstreet Boys—and then effectively morphed into a multimillion-dollar self-dealing and check-kiting scheme before folding.

In , Interpol arrested Paul in Brazil. And then Lee did it again, or let it be done to him. Thor first appeared in the pages of Journey into Mystery, a horror series created under Atlas Comics. When Marvel creators took over the series, the tone took a shift towards the fantastical. Check out Ant-Man's first appearance, as he discovers an insect-sized world of possibility.

Shellhead's first appearance! Although he wouldn't get a solo series till , Iron Man starred in Tales of Suspense, a Cold War Era comic of a science-fiction bend. In a moment of duress, industrialist Tony Stark achieves his full potential.

After a successful first appearance in Amazing Fantasy 15, Spider-Man got his own series the following year. Readers have always resonated with high school student Peter Parker, a goodhearted kid who gains the abilities of a spider. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko bring the web slinger to life, reminding us that there's more to heroism than super powers and a mask. The X-Men are the archetypal 'Outsiders', hated and feared by a society that does not yet understand.

In their inaugural issue, Charles Xavier's first class of mutants takes on Magneto, Master of Magnetism. Perhaps the most anti-heroic of the Silver Age heroes, Daredevil has always had personal reasons for donning the mask.