The coming of the 1960s saw the future Marvel Comics in a bad rut. The company had barely escaped going under in the comics decline of the ‘50s, due in part to the return of comic book legend Jack Kirby, and now they did mostly monster books. Something had to happen to reignite the company’s brand or their days were surely numbered.
How DC Saved Marvel (With Some Help from Stan and Jack)
A fateful game of golf between Marvel’s publisher Martin Goodman and National Comics (DC Comics to most folks) publisher Jack Liebowitz changed everything. Liebowitz gave Goodman the tip that his book Justice League of America was selling better than most. Ever eager to follow a profitable trend, Goodman contacted Stan Lee and directed him to get a superhero team book up and running.
Stan Lee tapped his long time associate Jack Kirby to work do the book’s art and together they worked out the characters who would change the face of comic books forever—the Fantastic Four.
The Fantastic Four
Lee and Kirby’s new super-team was different in many ways from what had previously been done in comics. To begin with, they didn’t hide their identities. As Lee put it in his 1974 book “Origins of Marvel Comics”, “…if I myself possessed a superpower I’d never keep it a secret…why should our fictional friends be any different?”
The team seldom functioned like traditional Superhero teams either. Quite often its member bickered or even outright came to blows over disagreements. It was even normal to see them be condescending or insulting to one another. This realistic approach to superhero interaction became a staple at Marvel Comics
In addition, the group included a teenager who acted very different from the traditional comic book sidekick. Instead of a hero worshipping, Johnny Storm was a rambunctious and trouble making kid who was more worried about dating than fighting crime. It was an idea Stan had played with since his first comic work back on Captain America Comics.
Perhaps the biggest innovation of the Fantastic Four was the Thing. Deformed and surly, looking like an ape made out of orange rock, the Thing changed the idea of what a superhero is forever. He was a flawed and ugly character whose powers weren’t welcomed and whose society feared him. In many ways, he set the tone for the Marvel age of comics.
The Marvel Method
Lee and Kirby had worked together many times before and they had a system worked out for how they did comic books. Stan would plot an issue and give it to Jack who would then break it into story points and draw the entire issue. When Jack had finished his art, Stan would fill in the narration and dialog. It was a style that gave tremendous freedom to both writer and artist and it became the way things were done at Marvel for many years.
The Coming of the Hulk
The success of the Fantastic Four led Lee and Kirby to create a new superhero character. Taking a cue from the Thing’s popularity, Lee decided to more deeply explore the idea of the misunderstood monster. Lee took the ideas behind Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and mixed them with a cautionary tale of the burgeoning atomic age.
The result was the incredible Hulk. With its story of the brilliant scientist and inventor of a new form of Atomic Bomb (a Gamma Bomb) Bruce Banner being transformed by his creation into an unchecked force of destruction, The Incredible Hulk was a comic that captured the fear and wonder of a generation that had grown up in the shadow of the Bomb.
With the success of The Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk, the former Timely Comics and Atlas News Group took a new name, based on the first comic book they had published, and became Marvel Comics. The Marvel Age was under way.
Read the previous article in this series:
Marvel Comics: The Atlas Years
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Douglas Allen Rhodes - Douglas Allen Rhodes lives in Akron, Ohio. He is a former Marine, an ex-convict, and an alumnus of Kent State University where he ...
