Marvel's lowest ebb

Marvel Comics actually have a history of almost boasting about this period of their history. There have been editorials along the lines of "we were once on the absolute bottom rung of the American comic-publishing ladder, and look at us now!" But there's no denying that the summer of 1957 was not a good time for the company that had started out with great success in the superhero boom of the early 1940s as Timely Publications and by the mid-fifties was going by the name of Atlas.

The indicia at the bottom of the first page of their comics, incidentally, gave a different publisher name for each comic. All of them registered at office of publication 655 Madison Avenue, Atlas comics were apparently published by the likes of Warwick Publications Inc., Chipiden Publishing Corp., Sphere Publications Inc., Canam Publishers Sales Corp., Foto Parade Inc. and many, many more. I have no idea why that was necessary, but I assume it saved someone a few dollars in taxes somehow.

Whatever they were called, Atlas/Marvel had found themselves without a distributor, and had to go cap in hand to Independent News Distribution - which, far from being independent, was owned by DC Comics. Independent limited Atlas to publishing eight different titles a month. Even choosing to go for sixteen bi-monthly titles still required a big cull of the Atlas range. I think it's interesting to take a look at the sixteen comics that boss Martin Goodman and his editor in chief Stan Lee decided were the ones to stick with.

So, if 65 years ago you were browsing the American comic book stands in your local newsagent, what could you see from Marvel? You'd probably have trouble spotting them - the Atlas logo that used to adorn the top left corner of the cover has been replaced by the stark capital letters "IND." and there was a lot of other, more popular, competition on the shelves. Superheroes were still few and far between, though - DC had already launched their all-new Flash, which some people pinpoint as the start of the Silver Age of superhero comics, but it was still the very early dawn of that era and nobody else had followed suit yet. The Marvel comics went with six different genres and carefully monitored them to see which ones were selling. Here they are, in roughly ascending order of significance to Marvel's resurgence in the early 1960s and beyond.

Homer

Homer the Happy Ghost, a shameless clone of Casper the Friendly Ghost, seems to have been popular enough to justify his continued existence; the only one of Atlas's kiddie-comics to make the cut. But it seems he wasn't able to capitalise on the axing of his rivals; Homer was cancelled the following year when Marvel re-evaluated their range, and that was the end of trying to copy the popular Harvey Comics titles for many many years.

Girls' Romance

There were a lot of comics aimed at girls in those days - what had started out as a boys' industry had branched out into another gender by the late forties and discovered an apparently insatiable appetite for romance stories. They seem to be the same story over and over again (and these comics, as was normal at the time, had four or five short stories in each issue) - girl loves boy, something seems to get in the way of true love, but everything works out okay in the end. Marvel's titles seem to incline more towards 'good girl gets her just reward' than 'bad girl gets her comeuppance'. Our heroines are spared the worst possible fate for any woman, "becoming an old maid"!

War

The theme of the war comics being published in 1957 was generally "smash the commies", in stories set during the Korean War. But there was also an increasing interest in stories set during the second world war, which the young comic-readers of the time will only have heard about from their parents. There was usually a theme of clever individual soldiers outwitting the enemy, rather than graphic depictions of gunfights.

Westerns

There were occasional gunfights to be seen in the Western range, but more importantly there were individual heroes with distinctive costumes! Kid Colt and the Two-Gun Kid were very much prototypes of the superheroes who'd soon make a comeback. Wyatt Earp was a real person, of course, but his comic depiction had long since drifted away from reality. This issue of his title is the one where he shaves off his historically-accurate moustache, remaining clean-shaven until the comic was cancelled in 1960.

 

Patsy and Millie

Patsy Walker was Marvel's biggest star of the fifties. Marvel don't seem to have been all that interested in publishing a teenage boy comic in the style of Archie, but threw themselves quite enthusiastically behind Patsy - three of their precious sixteen titles were devoted to her! The high-spirited fun with recurring characters makes more interesting reading than the romance comics, even if Patsy's adventures can be almost as repetitive. She remained a central part of Marvel's line well into the superhero-dominated sixties. Millie the Model, reduced to only one title of her own in 1957, was just as enduring.

Fantasy

These comics seem to have been the ones that really went down well with the comic-buying audience. A year later, when Marvel re-appraised their sixteen titles, they launched four more comics of the fantasy style - resurrecting "Journey into Mystery" and introducing "Strange Worlds", "Tales to Astonish" and "Tales of Suspense". The comics dropped were "Homer the Happy Ghost", "Marines in Battle", "Navy Combat" and "Patsy Walker in Miss America". Suspense and mystery was the big thing, it seems!

The stories are a heady mix of vaguely sci-fi thrillers, perhaps finding their origins in the Crime Does Not Pay narratives, but with a twist ending usually along the lines of someone turning out to be an alien. The strange tales soon developed into monster stories, and then after that gradually gave way to superheroes once those had become fashionable again. 

Strange Worlds and World of Fantasy were dropped in the 1959 reshuffle (replaced by "Kathy" and "A Date with Millie" as the teen girl comics fought back against the monsters and aliens), but the other four titles lived on longer than any of the others on this list, albeit as the homes of Thor, Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man and their friends!

Looking down this list of comics, I have to say it's impressive that Marvel kept going at all. And it makes you appreciate just how much Stan Lee was starting from scratch when he dreamed up the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and all the rest!