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.

New World Pictures newsletter announcing Marvel acquisition, 1987.

“The teenager Jim Steranko began stealing an arsenal’s worth of guns and a small parking lot’s worth of motor vehicles. In February 1956, Steranko and a partner were arrested for the thefts, committed throughout eastern Pennsylvania, of twenty-five cars and two trucks. (He was careful to avoid criminal activity in his hometown. ‘None of the things we did were done in Reading, maybe one or two. I stole a submachine gun in Reading, but that was all.’)”

io9.com has just posted yet another excerpt from the book—this time, it’s 6500 words about 1966!
http://io9.com/5952658/the-true-story-of-life-at-marvel-comics-in-the-glory-days-of-jack-kirby-and-stan-lee

“Great appeal to black audience”: Marvel breaks down its demographics, c. 1973.

“After reading FF #1 now, I realize it doesn’t seem as great as it was thought to be at the time. But you’ve got to compare it to the ‘So you wanna play, huh?’ type of stories in those days to realize difference….”

—Stan Lee, notes for ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS, circa 1973

(Note Dave Obst’s involvement in Origins. Obst was Woodward and Bernstein’s agent for All the President’s Men.)

STAR WAAUGH!

Patton Oswalt reviewed Marvel Comics: The Untold Story for GQ:
“A jittery, hilarious, anecdotal, and exhaustive history of the company…. If you’re a comics fan, this is essential reading. If you’re not, then it’s merely fascinating. Howe has written a biographical history of modern America’s id.”

Inside the Marvel Bullpen

The New York University student film We Love You Herb Trimpe, shot at the Marvel offices in early 1970, provides visual evidence of the Bullpen: Trimpe, an Alan Alda lookalike, has decorated his station with a poster of General George S. Patton (World War II biplane models linger just above the shot). John Verpoorten and Marie Severin chat and tease as they work but never look up, the desks pushed together so tightly that everyone would have to stop working in order for anyone to squeeze out of the room.

(Text from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story)

The phone calls from drug-addled Doctor Strange fans gave way to weirder visits, like the appearance at 635 Madison Avenue of two members of the Process Church. As usual, Lee was gracious, and if he had any discomfort when he figured out his guests praised both Jesus Christ and Satan, he masked it well. “He was predictably thrilled by our garb,” the Process Church’s Timothy Wylie remembered, “and, if I remember rightly, listened intently to our spiel about the reconciliation of opposites. He was both intelligent and funny and kindly agreed for us to use some Marvel material in one of our magazine cartoon pastiches.”

http://seanhowe.com/Marvel.html

NEW YORK COMIC CON REMINDER!

I’ll be at the HarperCollins booth (#1005) on Saturday, October 13, from 11:00 to 11:30 am, next to a stack of copies of MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY. Stop by and say hello!

(Image from StrangeTales #18, May 1953; Art by George Tuska.)

NEW YORK COMIC CON:

I’ll be at the HarperCollins booth (#1005) on Saturday, October 13, from 11:00 to 11:30 am, next to a stack of copies of MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY. Stop by and say hello!

Another excerpt from the book, this one covering what Marvel was up to in 1992, is now up at The Comics Journal:

http://www.tcj.com/sean-howe/

Well, today’s the big day!

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is finally out there in the world. I hope you enjoy it. (And if you do, please consider posting a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads!)

If you’re in New York, join us this evening at PowerHouse. It should be fun!

“I would tell any cartoonist who has an idea, think twice before you give it to a publisher.” —Stan Lee, 1971

Here’s one of the many fascinating documents I came across in the process of researching Marvel Comics: The Untold Story: Stan Lee forcefully criticizing the comic industry’s treatment of creators.

On the evening of Wednesday, January 20, 1971, Stan Lee joined a number of comic veterans—including Gil Kane, Will Eisner, and Archie Comics publisher John Goldwater—at the Lambs Club in Manhattan for a discussion about the state of the industry. Jack Kirby had quit Marvel the previous spring, and Lee himself was only a few months away from taking a sabbatical to collaborate on a film script with Alain Resnais. His disillusion with the world of comics is striking, as is the spirited nature of the debate with the other panelists, some of whom seem to feel he’s putting too much blame on publishers.

“I would say that the comic book market is the worst market that there is on the face of the earth for creative talent and the reasons are numberless and legion,’ says Lee. “I have had many talented people ask me how to get into the comic book business. If they were talented enough the first answer I would give them is, ‘Why would you want to get into the comic book business?’ Because even if you succeed, even if you reach what might be considered the pinnacle of success in comics, you will be less successful, less secure and less effective than if you are just an average practitioner of your art in television, radio, movies or what have you. It is a business in which the creator, as was mentioned before, owns nothing of his creation. The publisher owns it….”

The above documents pick up the conversation about halfway through. Near the end, you can practically hear Stan Lee prophesizing his escape hatch to Hollywood: “Isn’t it pathetic to be in a business where the most you can say for the creative person in the business is that he’s serving an apprenticeship to enter a better field? Why not go to the other field directly?”

HOW AN UNDERGROUND NEWSPAPER CHANGED MARVEL COMICS (part 1 of 4)

The following essay, by D.A. Latimer, appeared in the East Village Other in March, 1969.

Comics make a lot of money, they sell better than the Reader’s Digest, the Daily News, and Fiery Crashes Monthly put together. They have to make this kind of money, or else it wouldn’t be worthwhile publishing them at all—from the publisher’s standpoint, anyway. The trouble is, for the last fifteen years or so, they just haven’t been worth publishing from the reader’s standpoint. You see, back in the mid-fifties sometime, this very perverted cat named Dr. Frederic Wertham published one of the all-time great works of erotic fiction, under the guise of critical comment of comic books: he called it—now sit tight, fellow pedophiles—Seduction of the Innocent, larded it with carefully cropped, blown up, and retouched cartoon panels, and accompanied these with vast slobbering reams of pseudo-psychosexual case histories about sadists, arsonists, and father-rapers who had got that way from reading Little Lulu and Millie the Model. Wertham was a pornographer of the old school: he sold his thing to all these people who wouldn’t dream of jerking off like common perverts, and they became so inflamed with a sensation that they could only cool off by tromping on the comic book industry. And the industry became so uptight at the prospect of losing money that it commenced printing tripe—but tripe—and has done nothing of any account for the last decade and a half.

Lately, though, it appears that the permissiveness fostered by eight years of Democratic government has infiltrated even unto such as Stan Lee and Carmine Infantino, moguls of Marvel and DC Comics respectively. Comics over the last few years have been mincing apprehensively back into contact with the world, which is a most encouraging development for what McLuhan appropriately terms the coolest of all possible mediums. They need encouragement. And just to warn the Werthams of the world that social relevance does not necessarily entail depictions of graphic sexual activity, this week I’d like to sketch out a short history of The Token Negro In American Comic Books. For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll consider only DC and Marvel adventures comics. Archie Comics some while back dabbled uncomfortably with a brawny young hunk of black-haired beefcake called Angelo Angelino—he was Mr. Lodge’s groundskeeper for an issue or two—but they seem to have discontinued this disturbing element (which is pretty much alright, since it turns out, after their debut on television, that the Lodge family has a crackerish southern accent). And to go into an investigation, at this late date, of why the world of Mickey Mouse was kept carefully segregated from the world of Donald Duck, well, that would be disrespectful to the shade of Disney. So we’re hung with Marvel and DC, and we’ll dig Marvel first.

The only black character with anything like top billing in the Marvel lexicon is a cat named T’Challa, one fo the Avengers. On a kind of sabbatical from the chieftainship of an African tribe called the Wakanda, T’Challa works with the Avengers in the guise of—now dig this—the Black Panther. No, no—while the Panthers have been around longer thant T’Challa, the gentleman in no respect resembles Bobby Seale. He doesn’t even come off like Moms Mabely for Blackness, and he sure got nothing even in common with Jomo Kenyatta. You ever once hear a spade talk like this, outside of Othello: “If words were actions, rash one, I should long since have perished in my native Africa.” PVUNK! Another super-baddie bites the dust. Wakanda (not the river in Kesey’s Oregon, fool) is a super-city located in an artificial under the African veldt, and the Wakanda tribesmen are super-spades who run around in loincloths, toting stun-guns. Like I say, it’s encouraging to see comics coming back in touch with the world.

(Continued here.)