Marvel to SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT publisher, 1953: “It is our intent to protect our rights by suit or otherwise in the event the Wertham book contains any defamatory matter about any of our publications.”
Via Warren Bernard at TCJ.

Related: Wertham distorted his data.

“When [Martin Goodman] sold the business, the person who was buying the business from him didn’t want to buy it unless I was under contract. And I wasn’t at the time. So he said to me, ‘Stan, I’d like you to sign a contract so that this guy will buy the business.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to make any terrible demands.’ The guy is my friend. He gave me a contract, I signed it. I trusted him. After I signed it, Joan and I had dinner at his house, he walked us up the stairs to one of his rooms, and he said, ‘You’ll never have to worry about money again. I’m so grateful.’ He never gave me a cent, other than the contract. We kept renewing it and renewing it. I was really quite disappointed. The thing that hurt me the most was all my friends thinking I was an idiot.”

—Stan Lee

Stan Lee, before and after the launch of the Marvel Age of Comics.

Here’s what happened between these two pictures: Seduction of the Innocent was published; there were Senate subcommittee hearings about comics’ contribution to juvenile delinquency; the entire Timely staff was fired; Joe Maneely died; Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko returned; the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Hulk, Iron Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, Doctor Strange, and dozens if not hundreds of characters were introduced; Steve Ditko left; Martin Goodman sold the company; Jack Kirby left; Martin Goodman retired as publisher; Stan Lee became president and publisher.

And here’s what was happening at the moment of each photograph.

(1954)
Martin Goodman moved operations to Madison Avenue, above the Boyd Chemists drugstore and cafeteria. With a carpeted office and a short walk to Central Park, he was headquartered at ground zero of 1950s consumerism, where legions of well-dressed martini-lunchers, responsible for approximately half of the advertising dollars in the country, ducked into newly built towers and straightened their ties at the elevator banks. At 655 Madison, most of Goodman’s new office space was dedicated to his magazine line (the creatively titled Magazine Management, Inc.), which had evolved from its pulp roots into a mixture of true confessions, movie gossip, crossword puzzles, and, under the editorial stewardship of Bruce Jay Friedman, mildly smutty action-adventure titles like Stag, Male, For Men Only, and Men’s World. But off to the side, Stan Lee was overseeing more than sixty different titles and, in the words of Friedman, “a sea of employees.”

(1972)
In a surprise twist, Goodman’s successor, Sheldon Feinberg, gave Lee a double promotion, to president and publisher of Marvel Comics. Lee would no longer have his hands tied. He could publish black-and-white comic magazines; he could have final say on covers; he could bring back the Silver Surfer. “It’s time for Phase Two to begin,” Lee proclaimed in his “Bullpen Bulletins” column. “No man, no group of men, no publishing company can rest on its laurels—and Marvel’s still much too young, too zingy, too bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to settle back and bask in the sun of yesterday’s success… . If you think we turned you on before, the best is yet to be—wait’ll you see what’s coming! Hang loose! Face front! Marvel’s on the move again!” Restless from all the time spent in Martin Goodman’s shadow, Lee quickly began casting around for new, more sophisticated ventures. He started to line up luminaries like Anthony Burgess, Kurt Vonnegut, and Vaclav Havel to write a line of adult comic books (Tom Stoppard expressed interest as well). He asked former Mad editor (and father figure to the underground comix scene) Harvey Kurtzman to edit a satirical magazine called Bedlam. Lee also turned to the legendary Will Eisner, who wrote to prospective contributors that he’d be publishing a Marvel-funded magazine that was “neither sophomoric, nor foul- mouthed or tasteless.” Lee invited underground publisher Denis Kitchen to New York to discuss packaging an anthology title that would feature left-of-center artists like Kim Deitch, Art Spiegelman, and Basil Wolverton.

http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Marvel-Comics-Sean-Howe/?isbn=9780061992100

Above: from a 1974 Cadence Industries newsletter.

In 1968, Martin Ackerman’s Perfect Film & Chemical Company purchased Marvel Comics from founding publisher Martin Goodman. After Ackerman was ousted from the Perfect FIlm board and new CEO Sheldon Feinberg stepped in, it was decided that a new name was needed, to distance the company from Ackerman’s controversial reign.

“After kicking it around with Martin and Jack for a while we  I decided to call our quaint quartet The Fantastic Four.” Original manuscript for Origins of Marvel Comics, 1974.

What do Archie Bunker and H.P. Lovecraft have in common?

They’re both covered in this memo from Roy Thomas to Stan Lee, from 1972. There’s a note in Stan Lee’s writing: “I’ll ask M.G.”—since Stan Lee replaced Martin Goodman as publisher by May, this must have been written only weeks before Goodman’s departure.

655 Madison Avenue: Home of Marvel Comics

Rapidly expanding, Martin Goodman moved operations to Madison Avenue, above the Boyd Chemists drugstore and cafeteria. With a short walk to Central Park, he was headquartered at ground zero of 1950s consumerism, where legions of well-dressed martini-lunchers, responsible for approximately half of the advertising dollars in the country, ducked into newly built towers and straightened their ties at the elevator banks. At 655 Madison, most of Goodman’s new office space was dedicated to his magazine line (the creatively titled Magazine Management, Inc.), which had evolved from its pulp roots into a mixture of true confessions, movie gossip, crossword puzzles, and, under the editorial stewardship of Bruce Jay Friedman, mildly smutty action-adventure titles like Stag, Male, For Men Only, and Men’s World. But off to the side, Stan Lee was overseeing more than 60 different comic-book titles and, in the words of Friedman, “a sea of employees.”

Text from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be appearing on a panel with the legendary Victor Navasky at the Brooklyn Book Festival, this Sunday, September 23rd, at 11 am.

Mr. Navasky has just published The Art of Making Magazines. In commemoration, I present to you the above Mort Kunstler illustration from STAG, an example of the kind of work that Martin Goodman, publisher of Marvel Comics, featured in his magazines in the early 1960s. While the magazine editors raced around, a neglected Stan Lee sat sequestered at a tiny desk and edited a handful of monster comic books—and, at the time that this illustration was printed, the second issue of a new comic called THE FANTASTIC FOUR.

St. Francis McArdle (180 Remsen Street)
Ink and Pressure: The Delicate Art, History and Future of Publishing. Authors Victor Navasky (The Art of Making Magazines) and Sean Howe (Marvel Comics: The Untold Story) take a look at the nuts and bolts construction of a comic book empire and the intricacies of what it really takes to make magazines. Moderated by Melissa Maerz.

Marvel Comics founder Martin Goodman, with wife Jean, circa 1950.