Marvel Comics Cover Gallery - 1957

THERE USED TO BE A REALLY USEFUL WEBSITE, a few years ago, called Silver Age Marvel Comics Cover Index (SAMCCI). You could scroll through and see all - well, most of - the covers for a given month. I think you can still find the site via Wayback Machine, but the owner never completed the index, so not all the covers were there.

So, I thought I'd have a crack at presenting Marvel's Silver Age Marvel covers in a similar format, though I've cheated a little and plan to present each month as a single composite image, partly because it's easier for me and partly because of the technical limitations here on Blogspot.

The last Atlas-distributed comic and the first (unbranded) Marvel comic distributed by Independent News were cover-dated for the month of October 1957, on sale 15 July 1957.

I figured a good place to start would be 1957, which was the last year Martin Goodman's comics were released by his Atlas distribution company. As has been well-documented here, Goodman screwed the pooch when he got greedy and tried to chisel a few extra dollars by folding his Atlas company and switching the American News Company. ANC went out of business the following month, leaving Marty with no way to get his magazines to the stands so he had to beg Independent News (owned by DC Comics and operated by Goodman's golfing acquaintance Jack Liebowitz) to distribute his books

DC limited Marvel's output initially to eight titles a month, and the Atlas line was instantly slashed to 16 bi-monthly titles. Editor Stan Lee had to stop commissioning new material until the massive backlog was used up, throwing many Marvel artists and writers out of work. Several key Atlas regulars, like Gene Colan, John Romita, John Buscema, Joe Sinnott and Vince Colletta started working for other companies and it took Stan years to lure them back to Marvel.

But slowly, Lee began to rebuild the lineup, introducing superheroes in 1961 and, by 1965, rehiring most of the artists he'd lost in that 1957 disaster.

To give you an idea of the huge fall from grace suffered by Magazine Management's comics group because of Goodman's folly, here's a month-by-month round up of all the titles Atlas was publishing in its final year of operation. By comparision to the beginning of the year, October looks very sad indeed.

JANUARY 1957

The Atlas titles cover-dated for the first month of 1957 included several examples of each of the common genres. Martin Goodman was never one for leading the field, so he favoured a mix of westerns (9), mystery (10), war (8), romance (3), teen humour (4), and a Casper the Friendy Ghost ripoff, Homer (1).

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There were 35 Atlas comic titles published in January of that year. Navy Action must've been quite successful, because Goodman debuted Navy Tales. And if Two-Gun Western was doing okay, why not go four better and add Six-Gun Western to the lineup? Kid Slade, was a continuation of the numbering from Matt Slade Gunfighter - I'm not clear if it's the same character or if Martin Goodman just wanted "Kid" in the title. 

It's worth noting that the mystery titles (Astonishing, Journey into Mystery, Journey into Unknown Worlds, Marvel Tales, Mystery Tales, Mystic, Strange Tales and Uncanny Tales) and the "girls" titles (Love Romances, Millie the Model, Patsy and Hedy), along with Kid Colt Outlaw, were mostly monthly during this period.

One aspect of the covers of Goodman's comics I'd mentioned in the very first post of this blog was that the colours used were often muted, lots of greys and browns with the occasional splash of red. At the time, I'd speculated that this might be because with the early 1960s superhero titles, Goodman was trying to avoid the bold primaries used by DC so as to fly under Liebowitz's radar. But after looking at all these Atlas titles, I just think that was the house style.

FEBRUARY 1957

No new titles in February, but 44 old ones ... some older than others. This month there were eight westerns, 14 mystery, six war, five romance, five teen humour, two jungle girls, two crime, along with Melvin the Monster and The Yellow Claw.

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Quite a few copycat titles here. World of Mystery and World of Suspense (there was World of Fantasy in odd months, too). A lot of western "Kids". Strange Stories of Suspense, Strange Tales of Suspense and Strange Tales of the Unusual. Tales of the Marines is a continuation of the numbering from Devil-Dog Dugan, which makes it technically a first issue. Martin Goodman firmly believed that a title with a strong buzzword ("Suspense", "Tales", and "Strange" were three of his favourites) and attention-grabbing cover art was what sold a comic. I'm not sure he ever opened one of his own books.

Showgirls is a bit of a puzzle. The Overstreet Guide says that the title is a continuation of Sherry the Showgirl, but the timings and the cover dates don't support that. Showgirls 4 was published in place of Sherry the Showgirl 4 (which doesn't exist). The title continued two months later as Sherry the Showgirl 5. Then in June Showgirls 1 came out, the same month as Sherry the Showgirl 6.

MARCH 1957

The odd numbered months seemed to have far fewer Atlas titles. Coincidence or plan? Who can say? March offered comic readers 33 comics - three "Battle" titles to choose from, out of seven war comics. There was also eight westerns, three romance, four teen humour, ten mystery and Homer the Casper Copycat.

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The teen humour books are a weird bunch. Falling somewhere between the existing Atlas romance titles and Archie comics, it's difficult to see who the audience for this was. The Millie cover gags seem to be aimed more at a male audience than a female one. Whereas the Patsy Walker cover gags have a little less leering about them.

APRIL 1957

On sale around Christmas 1956 and New Year 1957, there were 45 titles cover-dated for April, the largest monthly output during those end days for Atlas. Of these, eight were war titles, nine were westerns. There were also five romance titles, five teen humour, 13 mystery, two crime, two jungle girl and The Yellow Claw.

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Caught 5 would be the last issue, a sign that crime comics had run their course. Marines at War was a title change for Tales of the Marines - maybe Goodman forgot that he liked to have "Tales" in a comic title.

MAY 1957

On offer during the January of 1957, were 34 Atlas titles cover-dated for May. The western comics were leading the charge at ten books, followed by the mystery mags with nine titles. Then six war books, five teen humour books, three romance mags, and Homer the Potential Lawsuit.

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Western Trails was a new title, featuring Ringo Kid. It's hard to say whether Ringo Kid was doing well and Goodman wanted more of him on the stands or if Atlas just had some inventory material Goodman wanted to use up. The consecutive job numbers on the strips in issue 1 tend to favour the former.

JUNE 1957

On sale in February, the June cover-dated Atlas titles gave us four new titles - The Adventures of Homer Ghost, Commando Adventures, The Kid from Texas, and Showgirls. This is kind of unusual, because Martin Goodman would have had to register the new titles with the US Post Office for subscription reasons, which cost money. This is why he had historically changed one title to another, rather than starting any new comics on the roster from issue 1.

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The June genres included nine western books, eight war titles, eight mystery mags, four romance titles, five teen humour comics, two jungle girls, one crime book, plus that second Homer Ghost title and Melvin the Monster, a copy of Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace newspaper strip, if slightly more mean-spirited. Jann of the Jungle was cancelled this month.

JULY 1957

Going on sale around the end of March and beginning of April, the 34 July issues allowed for 12 western books, seven war titles, six mystery titles, four romance mags, four teen humour comics, and Melvin the flippin' Monster.

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This month's output of the Atlas range gave the first indication that all was not well with Martin Goodman's company. Several titles came to a halt, including Adventures into Mystery, Combat Casey, GI Tales, Kid Slade Gunfighter, Navy Tales, Six-Gun Western, Wild Western, World of Mystery and World of Suspense. Melvin the Monster would also see its last issue, just one month after the previous bi-monthly one, as though Goodman was trying to clear the decks before the boom was lowered. But that was nothing compared to the following month.

AUGUST 1957

This would be pretty much the last opportunity for Goodman to publish as much Atlas inventory material as he could, so August's output consisted of a mammoth 42 titles, almost matching April's record. Mostly going on sale in late April to early May, we were given ten mystery titles, nine war comics, nine western mags, six teen humour books, five romance titles, and two comics featuring Homer the Ghost.

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The majority of the month's output would be last issues, as might be expected, including Astonishing, Battle Action, Battlefront, Combat Kelly, Commando Adventures, Frontier Western, Journey into Unknown Worlds, Kid from Texas, Lorna the Jungle Girl, Lovers, Marines at War, Marvel Tales (once the company's flagship title), Mystery Tales, Mystic, Mystical Tales, Navy Action, Showgirls, Sherry the Showgirl, Stories of Romance, Strange Stories of Suspense, Strange Tales of the Unusual, Western Gunfighters, Western Kid, and Western Outlaws.

Journey into Mystery went on hiatus for a year, Hedy Wolfe was the first and last issue, as was the The Romances of Nurse Helen Grant. All in all, a bit of a publishing bloodbath.

SEPTEMBER 1957

By contrast, the Atlas output for this month was pretty sorry-looking. Compared to April's year-high of 45 titles and the previous month's 42, May/June's September cover-dated output was a slender 25 comics. This broke down to eight western mags, four war books, four romance titles, four teen humour comics, a crime title and a trio of odd number 1s - A Date With Patsy, Marvin Mouse and Black Rider, which I'm guessing were already in the pipeline before it all went pear-shaped with American News Company.

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The Black Rider book contained three Jack Kirby stories, two of which have an "L" job number and one having an "M" job number, suggesting that these were drawn at different points during Kirby's brief 1956 period working for Atlas before going to DC for a couple of years. Seeing that the end was closing in, Goodman likely cobbled this together and included it with the final Atlas titles, if only to get the inventory material off the ledgers.

On the other hand, A Date With Patsy looks like an attempt to use up inventory material from Patsy and Her Pals. And for some weird reason, Goodman changed the title of Melvin the Monster to Dexter the Demon, re-lettering all the interior strips in the process. My guess would be that Hank Ketcham, or perhaps the syndicate, sent Goodman a cease-and-desist letter, and this was his way of dodging the bullet and getting the last few inventory strips out of the red column.

OCTOBER 1957

The last three Atlas titles appeared during July of 1957, along with the first comic distributed by the DC-owned Independent News, Patsy Walker. I'm not aware of any of Goodman's comics carrying an American News identifier on the cover.

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Cartoon Kids looks like an opportunity to gather up the last few cartoony inventory items. Dippy Duck had been intended as an ongoing title and had been trailed in the previous month's Marvin Mouse with sample story carrying a line of (Stan Lee) hand-written text along the foot of final page saying, "Don't miss Dippy's further adventures in his own magazine: 'Dippy Duck!' Now on sale!"

I'm at a loss to explain Nellie the Nurse. Cast in the same mould as the Millie the Model and My Girl Pearl comics of the period, it just seems to be a slightly tamer version of the Bill Ward cartoons from men's magazines, and doesn't travel very well. "Martin Goodman always thought there was something inherently sexy about nurses," Stan Lee said to Roy Thomas in an interview for Comic Book Artist 2, Summer 1998. "I could never get inside his thinking there."

NOVEMBER 1957

This was the first tranche of titles that would be distributed by Independent News. Because DC's Jack Liebowitz didn't want Goodman to try to crowd DC comics off the stands by sheer weight of titles, he limited the former Atlas line to just eight titles a month. Even then Goodman gamed the system by publishing 16 bi-monthly comics. What was more interesting was the selection of titles Goodman decided to keep on his roster. It's almost certain that he would have picked the best-sellers, but would have balanced that by ensuring that he also had a good spread of genres.

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For November, Goodman kept two romance books, two westerns (Kid Colt seemed to be his character of choice), two teen titles, a war comic and a kiddy title. This mix and number of titles would be the limit of the line for a few years to come.

DECEMBER 1957

When you compare the other bi-monthly titles Goodman decide to publish, you see a bit of a pattern. If nothing else, Goodman knew circulation, so it will not be a coincidence that he paired genres together in the same month. My instinct would have been to publish the two bi-monthly romance titles in alternating months, but Marty chose to publish two romance titles one month then two war comics the next. I reckon Goodman must have believed that the two titles in each genre would support each other by being on the stands the same month.

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So in December, we got two mystery comics, two westerns, two teen humour and two war.

Looking at the line as a whole, it meant that Goodman's 16 bi-monthly titles broke down to four westerns, four teen titles, three war books, two mystery, two romance comics and Homer the Happy Copyright Infringement.

Over the next couple of years, Goodman would be forced to cancel an existing title if he wanted to try a new book. This meant a big gamble as he'd have to sure that the replacement comic could "catch on" and sell more copies, or at least make a better sell-through figure, than the title it was replacing. No more just chucking mud at the wall to see what stuck.

I plan to do cover galleries for the remaining years of Marvel's Silver Age, so you'll be able to see how the 16 title rule slowly relaxed as it became clear that Marvel's sell-through numbers were better than DC's and it would have been business suicide for Liebowitz to stick rigidly to limiting Goodman's comic output.

Next: Moonlighting with Steve Ditko

Marvel Comics: The Rise of the Cover Blurb

BACK IN THE 1960s, comic publishers didn't have marketing budgets. There was nowhere for them to advertise their comics, except for in other comics. The only method they had available to them was to print way too many copies and try to get them in front of their customers, by dumping them onto the newsstands in great numbers. "Returns" of 50% weren't unheard of and, indeed, was considered normal. 

This newsstand comics rack was what the Summer 1949 (cover-dated August) comics industry output looked like. Click on the image to expand it, and you'll see titles like Crime Does Not Pay, Superboy, Crime Patrol, Millie the Model and a whole bunch of Classics Illustrated.

These "returned" comics would have the cover title logos torn off and sent back to the wholesalers for credits against the next issue. The mutilated returned comics were then supposed to be trashed, but many newsdealers simply put them out for sale again at 5c.

Newsvendors would tear the cover logos from unsold comics and send the logos back to their wholesalers to receive credit against future issues. They were then supposed to destroy the "unsolds" but invariably would offer them to customers at half price. Many of these mutilated comics have survived to the present day, though are considered to grade at "Poor" by most collectors.

So, all a publisher could do to get kids to pick up their comics off a spinner rack was to make the cover as attention-grabbing as possible. There were as many approaches to this as there were publishers and while the up-market guys like DC Comics would often show a modicum of restraint, some of the bottom feeders were anything but subtle.

DC's approach, from the 1940s right through to the 1960s, was to come up with an interesting - sometimes misleading - cover scenario, then write a story around it. Very often, they'd include explanatory speech balloons to tell the prospective customer what was going on, even if the cover art made that abundantly clear. EC, on the other hand, almost never used speech balloons, and rarely added cover lines. Dell/Gold Key didn't have any cover lettering at all on their sumptuously painted covers. And some poverty-row publishers would put the most outrageous and grisly art possible on their covers, which ended up causing huge problems for the whole industry by 1954.

A sample of comic covers, dated the year I was born. Harvey, also publishing Casper and Little Dot in the same period, took a pretty extreme approach with their horror comic covers. DC opted for the dramatic scenario with explanatory speech balloon, while Atlas (Marvel) followed EC's lead and offered situation covers with restrained, if any, cover text boxes.

Over the course of their history, Marvel Comics would try many approaches to the way they designed their covers, as publisher Martin Goodman, a notorious trend-follower, would regularly change his mind about what made a "selling" cover.

During the Golden Age of the 1940s, comics would sell between 200,000 and 400,000. Some individual titles would do even better. Superman was selling over a million copies a month in the early 1940s, Action Comics (the original home of Superman) was selling about 1.5 million copies during the post-war years and Whiz Comics (featuring Captain Marvel) topped that with sales of 2 million. In 1939, we know that Martin Goodman printed 80,000 copies of Marvel Comics 1 (Oct 1939) then, when that sold out almost immediately, went back to press to print another 800,000 copies, at the same time overprinting the cover date with "Nov".

The DC Comics of their formative years were restrained to the point of underselling. Where the later Superman titles would be a gab-fest of unnecessasry speech ballons and Ira Schnapp (beautifully) lettered text boxes, these 1940/41 comics were clean, allowing the strong image to sell the book.

The earliest DC Comics just let the cover image do the talking, avoiding speech balloons, and shrieking text boxes telling you what was happening inside the comic. It was a remarkably restrained approach, but it did seem to be the norm for the era.

The Marvel Comics from the same period aped the DC's by not using balloons or coverlines, but instead of DC's strong single images, the Timely books were a maelstrom of lurid and chaotic action. This probably came from Martin Goodman's history as a pulp publisher, but Alex Schomberg's hyper-kinetic covers were very much a forerunner of Jack Kirby's exaggerated action style that would later define the peak years of Marvel's 1960s output.

Just like their more affluent cousins over at DC, the Golden Age Timely Comics avoided text on their covers ... but by contrast, every square-inch of the cover space was crammed to bursting with frenetic action, often with the Timely characters depicted at a larger scale than the foes they were fighting.

Though dialogue balloons on comic covers weren't unknown during the 1940s, they were uncommon. Other publishers were prone to adding more in the way of shouty cover lines to their publications. The anthology titles published by companies like Quality, Fawcett and Nedor didn't have the instantly recognisable heroes that DC and Timely had, so would tell prospective readers about the stories they could expect to find inside their books.

The other publishers sort of followed DC's and Timely's lead and didn't overload their covers with text, but did tell customer what the comic contained. These covers from Quality, Fawcett and Nedor are all from November 1942.

Then, as the Second World War drew to a close, DC's Action Comics began including speech balloons on the covers. None of the other DC titles followed that lead immediately, but inevitably, someone further up the food chain must've issued an edict, because with the April and May 1951 cover dates, just about all DC covers became speech balloon gab fests, establishing the over-explanatory style they became famous for.

Blah, blah, blah ... in the spring of 1951, DC's covers all suddenly sported expository speech balloons on every cover - describing the situation to prospective customers whether the cover image needed it or not. It would set the tone for DC Comics for almost two decades.

Strangely, at the same time, Atlas publisher Martin Goodman, was roundly ignoring DC's lead and putting out his comics with a unique and distinctive cover style.

COMIC COVERS - ATLAS STYLE

Unlike DC Comics' heroes, the Timely characters struggled after World War II. It's true that by the end of the 1940s, DC's non-Superman/Batman titles folded or were turned into western books, but the core of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman marched right on. Captain America, Human Torch and The Sub-Mariner - positioned, as they were, very much as the nemeses of the Axis Powers - had no one to fight when the real world hostilities ended. So the core titles were either cancelled, or morphed into horror comics, following EC's New Trend line.

The Timely line of comics ground to halt in mid-1949. Captain America was a horror comic for its last two issues. The Human Torch's and Sub-Mariner's own titles were cancelled and the characters' original home, Marvel (Mystery) Comics, became Marvel Tales, another horror anthology.

It took Goodman a year or so to sort out what he wanted to do with his comic line, now that the superheroes were gone. In the end he concentrated on his girls' comics (Millie the Model and Patsy Walker), his western comics  (KId Colt and Two-Gun Kid) and his horror titles, lead by the new incarnation of Marvel Mystery Comics, Marvel Tales.

While the Western and girls' (and war) comics rolled on, Martin Goodman must have noticed the sales on his horror titles were growing, so ordered editor Stan Lee to come up with more titles. It seemed like Goodman couldn't get enough horror, and by 1951, the renamed Timely comics was pumping out horror titles under its new Atlas Comics imprint. In order of publication, these were:

• Amazing Mysteries 32-35 (May 1949 - Jan 1950)
• Marvel Tales 93-159 (Aug 1949 - Aug 1957), was Marvel Mystery Comics
• Suspense 1-29 (Dec 1949 - Apr 1953)
• Adventures into Terror 43-44 (first two issues), then 3-31 (Nov 1950 - May 1954), was Joker
• Journey into Unknown Worlds 36-59 (Sep 1950 - Aug 1957), was Teen Comics
• Mystic 1-61 (Mar 1951 - Aug 1957)
• Astonishing 3-63 (Apr 1951 - Aug 1957), was Marvel Boy
• Strange Tales 1-100 (Jun 1951 - Sep 1962)
• Adventures into Weird Worlds 1-30 (Jan 1952 - Jun 1954)
• Mystery Tales 1-54 (Mar 1952 - Aug 1957)
• Spellbound 1-34 (Mar 1952 - Jun 1957)
• Journey into Mystery 1-82 (Jun 1952 - Jul 1962)
• Uncanny Tales 1-56 (Jun 1952 - Sep 1957)
• Menace 1-11 (Mar 1953 - May 1954)
• Men's Adventures 21-26 (May 1953 - Mar 1954), was war comic of same title
• Strange Stories of Suspense 5-16 (Oct 1955 - Aug 1957), was Rugged Action
• Strange Tales of the Unusual 1-11 (Dec 1955 - Aug 1957)
• Adventure into Mystery 1-8 (May 1956 - Jul 1957)
• World of Suspense 1-8 (Apr 1956 - Jul 1957)
• World of Fantasy 1-19 (May 1956 - Aug 1959)
• World of Mystery 1-7 (Jun 1956 - Jul 1957)
• Strange Worlds 1-5 (Dec 1958 - Aug 1959)
• Tales of Suspense 1-38 (Jan 1959 - Feb 1963)
• Tales to Astonish 1-34 (Jan 1959 - Aug 1962)
• Amazing Adventures 1-6 (Jun - Nov 1961)
• Amazing Adult Fantasy 7-14 (Dec 1961 - Jul 1962)

Probably because these titles were the backbone of the company during the early 1950s, Stan Lee gave them a bit more attention than the other genres, quite rapidly evolving a unified cover style for the titles. This would consist of one main cover image, then smaller images down the left-hand side depicting scenes from the other stories in each (anthology) issue. It was the nearest thing to a house style Atlas had during the 1950s, which Lee was probably responsible for. 

At this point in the company's history, Lee was Art Director as well as Editor-in-Chief, and so was very hands-on when it came to designing the covers, though he would lean heavily on production man Sol Brodsky. As Lee told Marvel Age magazine in 1985, "Sol and I were the whole staff of Atlas Comics. I bought the art and scripts and Sol did all the production. My job was mainly talking to the artists and the writers and telling them I wanted the stuff done. Sol did ... the corrections, making sure everything looked right, making sure things went to the engraver and he also talked to the printer. He was really the production manager. And then little by little we built things back up again."

Later, Stan would offer Jack Kirby the post of Art Director - Kirby refused - and John Romita would step up in 1973 and be responsible for, among other things, designing all Marvel's covers.

No sign of any restraint here - the Atlas Comics covers of 1951 - 1952 were awash with  blurbs and speech balloons, in some cases so much that there was hardly enough room for the art. Click picture to enlarge.

Yet, this would only last for a couple of years before being phased out in favour of single image covers with far less text.

By 1954, the Atlas covers used far fewer words and no speech balloons at all. The cynic in me wants to say that Martin Goodman was trying to save on lettering costs, but the fact is cover lettering was done by in-house staffers, supervised by the genial Artie Simek.

The reasons for this will never be known, but it's likely that Martin Goodman - often months or years behind a trend - saw the EC Comics covers on a newsstand and ordered Stan to make the Atlas covers look like that.

This style would persist until the Great Atlas Implosion of 1957, when 60% of the Atlas titles were cancelled because of Martin Goodman's bad distribution decision. Lost in the mellee were: Adventure into Mystery, Astonishing, Journey into Unknown Worlds, Marvel Tales, Mystery Tales, Mystic, Spellbound, Strange Tales of the Unusual, Uncanny Tales, World of Mystery and World of Suspense, as well as a whole slew of western, war and humour titles.

Atlas, no longer called "Atlas", would limp along with just eight titles a month for the next few years, with no discernible changes to the cover format, starting with the below titles.

Odd Months	Even Months
Gunsmoke Western	Battle
Homer the Happy Ghost	Navy Combat
Kid Colt Outlaw	Patsy and Hedy
Love Romances	Patsy Walker
Marines in Battle	Strange Tales
Millie the Model	Two-Gun Kid
Miss America	World of Fantasy
My Own Romances	Wyatt Earp

But as the next couple of years rolled by, and Stan's star artist Joe Maneely died in a tragic underground accident, Stan began to re-think his approach.

Fresh from a legal dust-up with DC senior editor Jack Schiff, Jack Kirby washed up in the former Atlas' offices in 1959, looking for work. Steve Ditko was already there, and Stan's as-yet unnamed line of comics began to take on a new shape and a new editorial direction. The horror books, emasculated by the Comics Code and pale shadows of their former (already mediocre) selves, looked to monster and sci-fi movies of the 1950s for their inspiration and were soon featuring gigantic menaces like "Monstro", "Zog" and "Rro", mostly drawn by Jack. Ditko continued to follow a gentler path, and turned in more humanistic, often sentimental, tales that would spotlight moral issues like greed and betrayal, with titles like "Revenge of the Wooden Woman" and "One Look Means Doom".

Most of the pre-hero Marvels went for a big monster image by Jack Kirby and a screaming cover blurb that featured the monster's (often nonsensical) name. Most didn't have speech balloons, but occasionally there would be some dialogue lettered on the cover. The above are from mid 1961, around the time that the cryptic "MC" started appearing on the covers.

By the beginning of the 1960s, many of the stories in these "pre-hero" Marvel Comics appeared to take a lead from the "true confessions" style slick magazines Goodman was publishing at the same time, sporting titles like "I Opened the Door to Nowhere" and "I Brought the Roc to Life".

But in August 1961, Martin Goodman introduced a game-changing comic, Fantastic Four. As I've noted elsewhere in this blog, the first Marvel superhero comics did their level best not to look like superhero comics. Marvels were being distributed by the DC-owned Independent News Distributions (indicated by the "IND" on Marvel covers of the period) and I'm pretty sure Martin didn't want to annoy DC's Jack Liebowitz by appearing to be publishing competing superhero books.

The earliest superhero efforts from Marvel looked for all the world to be no different from the monster books. The FF wore street clothes, The Hulk actually was a monster and Thor's costume was not that of a traditional superhero. Even Spider-Man was completely different in look to any of DC's characters.

But very quickly, Goodman got a lot braver, and Stan gave the FF costumes, and rapidly added more superheroes to the remaining monster books. May 1963 saw the introduction of the unique Marvel corner box, and by the end of that year, the mystery stories were all but replaced by superheroics and the Marvel Empire began its rise.

Later in 1963, Marvel took a more upfront approach to the way they presented their superheroes on their comic covers. Costumes and action were to the fore, though there was still little consistency when it came to putting dialogue on the covers or not.

Later on the same year, Stan began to talk about the "Marvel Age of Comics" on the covers. Starting with some of the August 1963 covers, Stan placed a fairly discreet box that read, "Marvel Comics Group ushers in the Marvel Age of Comics". But over the next few months, these blurbs got bigger and bolder, so that Amazing Spider-Man 6 (Nov 1963) had a bold line in bright green along the bottom of the cover that said, "The Marvel Age of Comics is Here". 

This move coincided with Stan taking over the scripting of the lead strips in the anthology titles. Except I don't think it was a coincidence. I think it was a determined effort on the part of Stan to take control of the Marvel Universe, and prevent the fledgling Marvel from descending into the kind of directionless mess that Atlas became just before the Great Implosion of 1957.

And by the end of 1963, the speech balloons on Marvel covers had largely faded away. The last balloons on covers were Journey into Mystery 99 and Amazing Spider-Man 7 (both Dec 1963), the January 1964 issues of Strange Tales (116), Tales of Suspense (49), Fantastic Four (22) and Tales to Astonish (51). After that, Stan would let his hyperbolic blurbs do the talking and that's the way things would stay until mid 1970, when the balloons began to creep back ...

In mid-1963, Stan Lee brought his Marvel hyperbole to the covers, adding claims that this was "The Marvel Age of Comics" to much of the Marvel line. These would evolve over the next few months to become a standard component of Marvel's covers.

The big challenge that faced Lee (and Kirby) in the mid-Sixties though was, How do you ensure all your superheroes get a fair shake and your customers can find them easily on the newsstands? Especially if the titles of the books didn't change from Strange Tales and Journey into Mystery. The answer was simplicity itself. Just put two covers on the front of the comics.

As each of the former mystery books began to showcase two superheroes, Stan had his artists draw two images for each cover. He had used the idea before, not only on the occasional mystery book, but also on the earliest Fantastic Four and Spider-Man comics.

For a glorious period, between March 1964 and the end of 1965, Stan would split the covers of the former mystery books and present two awesome images on each cover, trumpeting the extra-value "two stories inside" nature of the comics. This was also around the same time (February 1964) that speech balloons were finally banned from Marvel's covers, a move which certainly made the Marvel books appear a lot less juvenile than their rivals'. 

Barely 18 months later, Marvel stopped splitting the covers between the two strips inside and started to devote alternating covers to the characters inside. Whether sales or aesthetics drove this is unknown. Then, just as Marvel stopped the practice, other lesser publishers began to imitate it.

Maybe Martin Goodman or Stan didn't think the dual covers were helping sales, because as 1966 began the anthology books started alternating their stars on the covers. And that would be the status quo for the next two years when, in 1968, the anthology books literally split, like amoebas, and all the anthology characters got their own titles. Then, in 1971 Marvel introduced the "frame cover ...

The change in cover format introduced in 1971 did away with the familiar and well-loved Marvel Corner Box, and brought in solid-colour frames around the comic's cover artwork. I can see why this may have been a good idea from an editorial and marketing point of view - no consecutive covers would have the same dominant colour - but I wasn't wild about it as a teenage fan.

With the November 1971 cover-dated issues, publisher Goodman made some big changes. He upped the page count across the board to 48 and raised the price of Marvel’s comics from 15c to 25c. And in the process, the cover format was completely re-vamped. Out went the familiar Marvel corner box and in came the idea of framing the cover art with a solid colour border. This allowed the art department more control over choosing suitable background colours to set the titles’ logos against. And in addition, a top bar was added to each cover, tagging it as a Marvel Comics Group publication in bold 24pt type.

Then, in an even more astonishing turn-around, the following month the page counts of all Marvel titles dropped back to 36 pages and the price was reduced at 20c. Whether it was the intention or not, arch-rivals DC Comics were completely wrong-footed. They’d raised the page-count and cover price in line with Marvel’s. But as publishing companies bought their printing time and paper months ahead, DC had no choice but to stick with the bigger, more expensive mags, while Marvel undercut them on the newsstands.

The “frame” covers must have been a success for Marvel as they were used, with little change, for the next couple of years. It had the advantage of making the Marvel books instantly recognisable on the newsstands and allowing the art department to ensure that the individual covers were all given distinct colour schemes from month to month. 

1960s vs 1970s - The over explanatory DC covers of the sixties were replaced with a more grow-up approach in the seventies. Speech balloons didn't disappear altogether, but they were used less to explain the obvious and more for dramatic effect. It didn't help. Marvel had already overtaken them ...

Though it wasn't the defining feature of Marvel Comics, the company's approach to cover design had far-reaching effects, both for Marvel, and for the industry as a whole. Eventually, DC would follow suit and banish the childish Mort Weisinger style covers where speech balloons described what was plainly apparent from the cover art. But for them - by then - it was too late, and Marvel had leap-frogged them in sales and were the new market leaders.


Next: An unscheduled DC interlude

WAR: What Is It Good For?

WHEN I WAS in primary school, back in the early 1960s, I was surrounded by tangible evidence of the Second World War. In South East London, where I was growing up, much of the area we ranged across in our youthful travels was still decimated by the efforts of the Luftwaffe. Bombsites were everywhere and offered a wealth of adventure to fearless eight-year-olds who had no concept of the dangers of these precarious structures. Most of our leisure time was spent on the streets, playing-acting conflict (cops and robbers, cowboys and indians and, of course, war games) and imagination was our answer to the dearth of actual toys.

Bombed out buildings like this formed  playgrounds for us kids during the early 1960s. Every neighbourhood bore the scars of WWII and no one seemed to have the money to tear these accidents-waiting-to-happen down.

Some of us were lucky enough to own capguns, mostly in the six-shooter western style. The truly fortunate might have a rifle. Most of us just used sticks.

I had one of these capgun Lugers around 1962, though mine was in much better condition than this one. Having the gun was one thing, but affording to buy caps for it was quite another proposition.

One game I remember well I first came across while visiting my grandparents in Glasgow, probably around 1963 or so. The game involved a designated shooter who would lie in wait at the foot of a grassy bank. The other kids would all charge the shooter's position, whooping and yelling. The shooter would then shoot them down, one by one. The one who "died" in the most spectacular way would be chosen to be the shooter for the next round.

This was the grassy bank outside my grandparents' flat where we'd play the shooting game. It really doesn't seem to have changed much since the early 1960s.

I enjoyed that game so much that I brought it back to South-East London with me, where it became just as popular amongst the other kids on my estate.

When we weren't playing at war, we were reading about it in our British weekly adventure comics, watching it on television or seeing war movies at our local cinema, whether it was at a feature in the evening with our parents or with our mates at Saturday Morning Pictures.

Combat! was a long-running television show that focussed on the US military, and featured many top-name Hollywood actors, like Lee Marvin. Hogan's Heroes, on the other hand, saw the funny side of the Nazi POW camps.

Aside from history shows like All Our Yesterdays, the Second World War was also represented by fictional shows, both dramatic and comedic. Probably one of the best war shows was Combat! which ran from 1962 to 1967. But the one I remember best is Hogan's Heroes, which made the Nazi military holding American and Allied soldiers prisoners of war figures of fun. It wasn't a show I followed, but it did seem to be on the tv all the time during the 1960s.

The Longest Day featured an all-star cast and was one of the biggest box-office hits of 1962. John Wayne and Robert Mitchum represent the US forces, Sean Connery and Richard Burton showing the flag for the UK. Gert Frobe played a small role as a German NCO.

Hollywood film studios considered WWII something of a cash cow. Just between 1962 and 1964 there were over thirty English-language war movies released, funny and serious, including The Longest Day (1962), PT109 (1963) and Father Goose (1964).

There were quite a few comics from UK publishers that made the Second World War their chief topic. And many adventure and sports comics would also feature a variety of war stories. The tradition continues up to the present day, with 2000AD also featuring war stories like Rogue Trooper and Bad Company, both talking their inspiration from earlier earthbound conflicts.

And of course comics, both home-grown and US imports, were stuffed full of war stories. Some comics, like Victor, were dedicated to the genre, but war stories even turned up in sports comics like Tiger. And in the states, WWII had been a major subject for comics publishers pretty much from VE Day onwards.

Captain Hurricane in the Valiant wasn't my cup of tea, though I would occasionally read a friend's copy. Art in the main was by R. Charles Roylace, though the above example may well be by a fill-in artist. Pretty much all the war stories in the comics of the 1960s followed this format, some with more, some with less comedy content.

In British comics, the genre was pretty much defined during the 1960s by Captain Hurricane, who appeared in Valiant. Like most other WWII stories in the comics of the time, Captain Hurricane was full of comedic Germans, who shouted, "Gott in Himmel" and "Englisher schweinhund!" a lot. Every speech balloon, in fact. Mostly, no one was killed, just roughed up a bit. Stories would often end with Hurricane walking away from a pile of German soldiers, all with black eyes and cauliflower ears, dusting off his hands and congratulating himself on a job well done. These stories were not of great interest to me, and I must have only read a handful of Valiants all through my childhood.

Though they weren't publishing war comics, Timely books featured a lot of war in them. Unlike DC, Timely's heroes took on the Axis forces head-on.

I wasn't greatly taken with the war stories from the other side of the Atlantic either. For the most part it was the superheroes that caught my attention. Had I been aware of the earliest Marvel Comics, I would have understood that the first exploits of the Marvel Comics characters I would come to obsess over had their roots firmly in the events of World War II.

Unlike market-leader DC Comics, Timely seemed quite happy to let their superheroes tangle with Nazis and Japanese. Captain America Comics 1 (Mar 1941) famously had the hero socking Hitler on the jaw on the front cover several months before the US entered WWII. And the long run of Alex Schomberg covers on Marvel Mystery Comics featured an unbroken run of The Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner trashing both the German and Japanese forces for the duration.

One of the first, if not the first, identifiable war comic was Wings, from Fiction House. Others who tried war as a subject for an anthology comic failed and it wasn't until the beginning of the 1950s that Martin Goodman's Atlas had a success with War Comics.

Actual war comics, as a stand-alone genre, wouldn't come along for another couple of years, though there were a couple of early niche examples. Wings Comics, debuting at the end of 1940 and running 124 issues through to 1954, concentrated on air combat stories. And U.S. Marines came along in 1943, but only managed four issues, ending the following year. But it was actually Martin Goodman's Atlas Comics, under the editorship of Stan Lee, that really kicked off the war comic genre with, appropriately, War Comics 1 (Dec 1950). Once Goodman saw the sales figures on that book, he had Stan launch a fleet of war comics, including:

• Battle 1-70 (Mar 1951 - Jun 1960)
• Men's Adventures 9-20 (Aug 1951 - Apr 1953) continued from drama title Men's Adventures; continued as horror title Men's Adventures
• Combat Kelly 1-44 (Nov 1951 - Aug 1957)
• Man Comics 11-28 (Dec 1951 - Sep 1953) continued from drama title Man Comics
• War Adventures 1-13 (Jan 1952 - Feb 1953)
• Battle Action 1-30 (Feb 1952 - Aug 1957)
• War Combat 1-5 (Mar-Nov 1952) continued as Combat Casey 6-34 (Jan 1953 - Jul 1957)
• Battlefield 1-11 (Apr 1952 - May 1953)
• War Action 1-4 (Apr 1952 - Jun 1953)
• Men in Action 1-9 (Apr-Dec 1952) continued as Battle Brady 10-14 (Jan-June 1953)
• Battlefront 1-48 (Jun 1952 - Aug 1957)
• Combat 1-11 (Jun 1952 - Apr 1953)
• 3-D Action 1 (Jan 1954)
• Marines in Battle 1-25 (Aug 1954 - Sep 1958)
• Navy Action 1-11 (Aug. 1954 - April 1956) continued as Sailor Sweeney 12-14 (Jun-Nov 1956) continued as once again as Navy Action 15-18 (Jan-Aug 1957)
• Battle Ground (first four issues "Battle-Ground") 1-20 (Sep 1954 - Sep1957)
• Marines in Action 1-14 (Jun 1955 - Sep 1957)
• Navy Combat 1-20 (Jun 1955 - Oct 1958)
• Devil-Dog Dugan 1-3 (Jul-Nov 1956) continued as Tales of the Marines 4 (Feb 1957) continued as Marines at War 5-7 (Apr-Aug 1957)
• Navy Tales 1-4 (Jan-Jul 1957)
• G.I. Tales 4-6 (Feb-Jul 1957), continued from humour title Sergeant Barney Barker
• Commando Adventures 1-2 (June-Aug 1957)

Right on the heels of Goodman's War Comics 1 came Bill Gaines' Two-Fisted Tales 18 (Dec 1950), carrying on the numbering from EC's first run of Haunt of Fear (15-17), though Gaines' title wasn't a full-on war comic. Gaines would catch up the following year with Frontline Combat, which centred on both WWII and Korean war tales. Both books were edited by Harvey Kurtzman and more than any other comics, set the tone for quality war stories from that point on.

EC's Frontline Combat was the publisher's first war anthology. The earlier Two-Fisted Tales contained war stories but also had pirate tales and other boys' adventure subjects.

It's probably fair to say that the EC books were the inspiration for the DC war comics, mostly edited by Robert Kanigher, and often written by him too. All enjoyed long and successful runs, though again, it wasn't a genre I followed and I was mostly aware of these books through the house ads in the DC superhero comics I was buying.

The DC house ads of the 1960s were always appealing and none more so than the ads for Star Spangled War Stories, with their sensational stories of WWII infantrymen battling dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures in a hostile island environment.

The "golden age" of DC war books from from the early 1950s to the late 1960s, though many of the titles lasted longer:

• Our Army at War 1-301 (Aug 1952 - Feb 1977)
• Star Spangled War 3-204 (Nov 1952 - Feb/Mar 1977)
• All-American Men of War 2-117 (Dec 1952 - Sep/Oct 1966)
• Our Fighting Forces 1-181 (Oct/Nov 1954 - Sep/Oct 1978)
• G I Combat 44-288 (Jan 1957 - Mar 1987), acquired from Quality Comics

One of the last of the successful DC war titles was Weird War Tales. Honourable mention should be given to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's war anthology Foxhole which debuted in the middle of the 1950s war boom.

A later DC war comic that enjoyed a long run was Weird War Tales and I should make mention of Simon & Kirby's war title Foxhole which, while not the first, is certainly one of the highly-regarded war titles of the era.

Of all the war genre comics available to me during the early 1960s, the only title that even vaguely interested me was the dinosaurs vs G.I.s issues of Star Spangled War Stories. But for some reason I never read any of them as a kid. It wasn't until much later (last year, in fact) that out of curiosity I picked up a copy of the DC Showcase Presents collected volume and gave it a read. And a thankless task it was too.

Though I never read any DC war comics during their 1960s heyday, I always had an abiding curiosity about the War That Time Forgot series, and snapped up a hardback copy of the Showcase Presents collection when I saw it on Amazon for £0.80 ... I still haven't finished reading it.

These tales were clearly written with a transient young audience in mind. Scripter Robert Kanigher must have realised that few kids were loyal to any one brand or even title and would just buy comics whenever the covers appealed to them. And the DC circulation guys must have told him that covers with dinosaurs were always good sellers. As a consequence "The War That Time Forgot" is another concept-in-search-of-a-story. Each 13-page story had no continuing characters, workman-like art by DC's star war artists Ross Andru and Mike Esposito and an identical plot: Some US soldiers find themselves on an unnamed Pacific island where dinosaurs have survived. The entire story would be just scene after scene of giant reptiles trashing subs, tanks, jeeps and (mostly Japanese) soldiers. After reading three or four in the collected album I was losing the will to live.

ANDRU & ESPOSITO ... AND KANIGHER

During the last 1950s and early 1960s, Ross Andru (born Rossolav Andruskevitch) and Mike Esposito were DC Comics' go-to team for just about any series that needed to be delivered on time and drawn competently. 

Ross Andru was born into a musical family. His father had played the french horn with the Ballet Russe and the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. Michael Esposito also was from a musical family - Esposito Sr fronted the band Ralph Perry and his Orchestra. Both had attended the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York under Burne Hogarth, after serving in WWII. Hogarth had singled Andru out in 1948 and gave him work assisting on the Sunday Tarzan strips. That lasted a couple of years until Hogarth left the strip.

Andru and Esposito were an editor's dream - hard-working sons of immigrant families
who drew fast and well and never missed a deadline.

It was around that time that the pair teamed up and began providing art for Key Publications' Mister Mystery, Standard's The Unseen and Joe Yank and Hillman's Western Fighters. But by 1951, they fetched up at DC Comics where they got to work on DC's burgeoning war comics, with their debut stories in All-American Men of War 6, Star Spangled War Stories 13 and Our Army at War 14 (all Sep 1953).

The team would be a mainstay on the war books for the next few years, often working over Editor Robert Kanigher's scripts. Then in 1958, a couple of years after DC had successfully reinvented Golden Age super-hero The Flash for a new audience, the company decided a makeover was needed for Wonder Woman and assigned Kanigher to the task. Kanigher turned to his most reliable art team and Andru and Esposito spent the next decade chronicling the adventures of the Amazon superheroine.

Andru and Esposito began drawing Wonder Woman with issue 98 (May 1958), Metal Men with Showcase 37 (Mar 1962) and finally The Flash with issue 175 (Dec 1967, though their first cover was 177, pictured above).

A few short years later, Robert Kanigher pitched an idea for DC's Showcase comic. The Metal Men was accepted and Andru and Esposito were once more drafted in to provide the art. The series was promoted to its own book and ran 29 issues with the same creative team. From there, Andru and Esposito took over The Flash from outgoing artist Carmine Infantino , who had been promoted to the position of DC's Art Director, then editorial director.

Though Mike Esposito regularly moonlighted at Marvel Comics during the 1960s, under the name "Micky Demeo" so as not to upset the notoriously prickly Robert Kanigher, Ross Andru would only turn in one job for Marvel during that decade, a fill-in issue for Amazing Spider-Man when it looked like regular penciller John Romita wasn't going to make deadline. In the end the fill-in wasn't needed and eventually saw print in Marvel Super-Heroes 14 (May 1968). A couple of years later, Ross Andru took over the regular pencilling job on Spider-Man, the majority of them inked by Esposito, and with Gerry Conway, created The Punisher.

In the 1970s, Ross Andru became Marvel's main Spider-Man artist, even working with Mike Esposito on Marvel Team-Up. Probably the crowning achievement on Andru's Spider-Man tenure was the high-profile DC-Marvel crossover, Superman vs The Amazing Spider-Man in 1976. 

In a 2010 interview, Gerry Conway said, "Ross Andru could place a character anywhere he wanted. He had a terrific sense of spatial relations; he could track a battle easily across rooftops, from panel to panel. He drew some great sequences where he maintained the same stationary background, a rooftop or a street, across an entire page, but move the characters from panel to panel. I know there are artists today who do that, but many of today's artists are figure-oriented. Space and context doesn't seem as important to them, whereas it was extremely important to Ross. He used to go around New York City taking pictures of the buildings so he could be accurate about where he put Spider-Man."

For all that success, I was never a fan of Andru and Esposito's work, finding it lacking in personality. But perhaps that's what endeared them to the DC (and later the Marvel) editors. Maybe their slightly bland style could fit just about any kind of series without them having to change the way they drew. And certainly no editor would even complain about an art team who always turned their work in on time.

Editor-writer Robert Kanigher pictured during the late 1940s.

Andru and Esposito's most frequent editor and scripter Robert Kanigher got into the comics business in 1941, contributing scripts to Fantastic Comics 15 (Feb 1941), Big 3 4 (Jul 1941) and Zip Comics 15 (Apr 1942). The following year he sold a script to Fawcett for Captain Marvel Adventures 29 (Nov 1943). In 1945 he began his association with DC Comics, which was to be his professional home for the next forty years. His first sale was a script for Wonder Woman in Sensation Comics 44 (Aug 1945), and it would be a character he would come to have a long association with, writing for the character from 1947 though to 1968. Kanigher would also write many Flash, Green Lantern and Hawkman scripts during the Golden Age of Comics. In 1956, it was Kanigher who was assigned by Julius Schwartz to write the first re-vamped Flash stories for Showcase, and Kanigher also created The Metal Men, who made their debut in the same title. Kanigher would also edit the main DC war comics up until he retired in 1968, then continue to write for those books for the next 20 years. 

Famously short tempered and overly-protective of his scripts, Kanigher would regularly lambast those he saw as transgressors. John Romita recalled of Kanigher in an interview, "He used to compliment me whenever he'd see me in the bullpen. 'Like the stuff ... like the stuff...' That was about the amount of conversation we had. Then one day we were in the elevator together, and he said, 'Like the stuff.' I, like an innocent fool... I used to do some adjustments to his pages. If he had a heavy-copy panel, I might take a balloon from one panel and put it in the next. Just because I was distributing space. I was so stupid and naive, I said to him, 'It doesn't bother you, does it, that I sometimes switch some of the panels around and move some of the balloons from one panel to another?' He started to chew me out in the elevator! 'Who the hell do you think you are, changing my stuff? Where do you come off changing my stuff? You don't know anything about this business!'"

Ross Andru died 9 November 1993. Mike Esposito passed 24 October 2010. Robert Kanigher died in 2002.

JUST NOT FOR ME ...

As far as war comics were concerned, it wasn't a genre I had much interest is as a ten year old, not until until later in the 1960s, when Stan Lee's makeover of Martin Goodman's comic line became Marvel Comics and Lee & Kirby brought a new character-driven dynamic to the otherwise standard superhero and adventure titles they were publishing. Stan and Jack set out their war stall in competition with DC's mighty five titles and at last got me interested in war stories. But Marvel's war comic wasn't so much a different take on war adventure tales as it was a social manifesto.

And that's what I'll be talking about in my very next blog entry ...

Next: Sgt Fury and his Howling Whatchamacallems!