FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS OF MARVEL COMICS, in 1939, through the final months of Publisher Martin Goodman's tenure around 1971, the company was trapped at the lower end of the market by Goodman's penny-pinching ways.
It can't be a coincidence that the most prominent publisher in the Marvel Universe is J. Jonah Jameson, a shameless skinflint who balks at the concept of paying his freelancers.
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| Marvel publisher Martin Goodman wasn't shy about his copycat tactics nor his contempt for his audiences. |
Some of Martin Goodman's cost-cutting ideas ended up backfiring on him. His biggest business error was dissolving his own Atlas Distribution company and signing a contract with the American News Company. When Stan Lee questioned the wisdom of the decision, Goodman replied airily, "Stan, you wouldn't understand, it has to do with finance." Within weeks, ANC, under investigation by Federal Authorities for anti-trust violations, decided to close their doors, and Goodman was left without a distributor for his magazines and comics.
Another of Goodman's tricks was to take previously published stories, change a few details and publish them as originals in his magazines. Twice, Goodman found himself in trouble with the law for such antics ... On 24 January, 1942 The New York Times reported the Federal Trade Commission had ordered Martin Goodman "not to publish reprints of previously published stories without disclosing the fact that they have been published before." Then, on 14 October 1946 the Federal Trade Commission again charged Martin Goodman with misrepresenting the originality of the contents of his publications. It's possible Goodman may have complied with the order, or perhaps he just took greater care not to get caught again.
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| Classy, eh? These ads were aimed at low-paid manual workers who were far more likely to suffer hernias in the course of their working lives. |
In another incident, during 1954, Goodman was trying (again!) to publish a cheap knock-off of the highly successful Esquire magazine, Swank. Editor Bruce Jay Friedman, later a successful novelist and screenwriter, was going for Class on a Budget, optioning stories by Graeme Greene, and William Saroyan. But when Friedman saw the make-readies for the first issue the inside front cover was an ad for men's trusses. Fuming, Friedman "stormed into Goodman's office and said , 'I thought we were competing with Esquire - this sets the tone in the wrong way.' The advertising guys were summoned and they fought me tooth and nail to keep the truss ad, because they'd lose revenue. The truss people always paid. So I put my job on the line and said, 'the truss ad goes or I go' ... the compromise was struck that we'd run an electronics school ad in the front. But gradually they worked the truss ads back in."
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| Also aimed at unskilled workers, the home tuition ads offered them a promise of elevating their station in life. |
Yet, even the electronics school ads, which would show up in the later Marvel Comics as well, were aimed at low-paid unskilled workers. So, same market, really.
This all just goes to show that Goodman believed the readers of his magazine line were blue-collar males and we'll see later that he believed his comics readers were pretty much the same, though some ads targeted little kids.
When it came to the business of advertising in Goodman's comics, the line was divided into two groups.
At the beginning of the 1960s, the Red Unit included the boys' comics:
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These had a combined audited monthly circulation of 1,888,804.
The Yellow Unit collected together the titles that were aimed at the girls' market and included:
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and had a more modest circulation of 1,103,213.
When an advertiser bought a slot in a Marvel comic of the period, their ad would run across all the titles in the Unit for that month. There would be discounts for repeat ads, and advertisers would expect to pay a premium for prime spots in the comic - back cover, inside front cover and inside back cover, in that order. The distribution of ads throughout the comics of the period would be fixed, month to month, each title using the same pagination template. This meant that Stan often had ads in the middle of stories, as you'll see from the pagination sheets I've included below.
By contrast, DC's comics had a slightly better class of advertiser, though the ads were squarely aimed at little kids, primarily promoting toys and sweets. And DC used a similar method to Marvel, dividing their titles into two units, though they had sub-units based on frequency of publication (Marvel was stuck with bi-monthly in most cases until 1962 or so). In the early 1960s, DC's Red Unit was made up of:
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| MONTHLIES |
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| BI-MONTHLIES |
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| 8 TIMES A YEAR |
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The combined circulation of these titles was audited at 2,993,892 a year.
DC's Blue Unit comprised of:
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| MONTHLIES |
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| BI-MONTHLIES |
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| 8 TIMES A YEAR |
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and had an annual audited circulation of 3,055,710. Unlike Marvel, you could advertise in DCs comics by the group, by the unit or by selected titles. Also unlike Marvel, distribution of the ad pages throughout DC comics would vary from month to month which meant that ads would rarely, if ever, interrupt the stories. So unlike Marvel, DC never lost sight of why their readers were buying the comics.
GOODMAN'S LOW-RENT ADVERTISERS
It's not hard to see why Martin Goodman's publications catered for the low-end of the advertising market. Coming from a pulp tradition, the way Goodman saw it was that any advertising was a bonus and as long at the client paid, who cares what they wanted to advertise. As a businessman, Goodman had no love for his own product. He constantly undervalued what he produced. Captain America co-creator Joe Simon called him a "cloak-and-suiter", old-school slang for the kind of businessman who only thinks short-term, penny-wise and pound foolish, often costing themselves money in the longer term. An example of that was when Goodman gave away the film rights to Captain America for free, thinking the 1944 serial would boost sales of the Captain America comic. There was never any evidence to show that it had.
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| Martin Goodman had a history of undervaluing his company and its intellectual property assets, often selling to the first, and usually lowest, bidder. |
It was the same with the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon series of the mid-1960s. "We wrote an unbelievable contract with the Goodmans," series producer Robert Lawrence told The Jack Kirby Collector, "because they didn't know what they had and where to go. Believe it or not, in this contract I was able to obtain participation in the merchandising rights and continuing interest in it." Again, Martin was happy to chisel a few bucks at the front end, but give away the store in the long-term. And don't even get me started on him selling Magazine Management to Perfect Film and Chemical for $7 million. In 2009, Disney bought Marvel for $4 billion, commenting that the publishing house was actually worth $10 billion more than that to them.
So it comes as no surprise that Goodman served the bottom feeders of the advertising world, selling his ad space cheaper than DC, because at the beginning of the 1960s, Marvel books didn't reach as many kids as DC's mags.
Let's start with the late 1950s, right after Goodman's disastrous dissolution of his Atlas distribution network and having to cut his comics line from 53 titles to 16 to get Independent News Distributors (DC) to put his books on the newsstands.
1958 - MARVEL
There weren't any Marvel superhero comics in 1958, but Goodman did have his westerns and mystery titles (the boys' comics or Red Unit) and the romance and teenage titles (the girls' comics or Yellow Unit).
While the editorial pages - comic strips and the regulatory two pages of editorial text - the ads remained in fixed positions across the range. Here's the page plan (pagination) for Two-Gun Kid 43 (Aug 1958):
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And here's what the non-comic-strip pages looked like in the same issue:
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I've included the text story pages to give you a sense of how much, or how little, comic material you were getting for your 10 cents back then. Twenty-three pages, to save you the mental arithmetic. And you can see from the pagination that Stan often had to have his stories interrupted by a page of advertising.
Of the twelve advertisements in Two-Gun Kid 43, just four could be said to be aimed squarely at children. The body-building ads would be directed at slightly older wimp-y kids that read comics. The other stuff - ads for selling opportunities, and low-cost items like "20 Dresses for $3.50" would find an audience with readers from low-income families. And there's a page of classified ads, for low-income companies, something that would last well into the 1980s. Interestingly, the Stephens Credit Sales ads would also show up regularly in the DC comics of the period, a rare instance of the same ads showing up in both companies' pages.
Meanwhile, around the same time in the Yellow Unit, Love Romances 77 (Sep 1958) slavishly followed the same pagination template:
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However, because of the different audience, the ads featured were slightly different, though as you can see, they don't always follow the obvious gender division.
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There's the Stephens Mottoes ad along with the female equivalent of the body building ads, the weight-reducing ads. And if you don't want to take dietary supplements to reduce weight, you can wear a girdle (while applying your pimple cream). Though I do wonder what sort of ten-year-old kid would be interested in ads like this. Could it be that Goodman was working with the just one ad agency for his Magazine Management publications and his Atlas/Marvel comics?
1958 - DC
DC also divided their titles into two groups, the Blue Unit and the Red Unit, though these weren't as clearly defined as the Marvel Units. For example, two natural companion titles, House of Secrets and House of Mystery were in different units, so I struggle to see an obvious logic here.
However, DC did carry a slightly better class of ad, though definitely aimed at a younger demographic. They also seemed less concerned with including two pages of text to qualify for second-class subscription mailing rights. Their page plans were flexible, allowing DC's editors to place their ads between stories.
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DC also carried house ads, both for other DC comics and for DC-related promotions, like the Superman-themed rides at the New Jersey Palisades Park. To accommodate some odd-sized ads, DC would include Henry Boltinoff cartoon strips (often reprints) to fill the rogue spaces. They also had more comic strip than Marvel. Twenty four pages ... twenty six and a half, if you want to count the Boltinoff cartoon pages.
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You'll see a couple of ads for toys - roller skates and Daisy BB guns. They avoided the low-cost classified ads, but still carried the same sales opportunities ads as Marvel. This would begin to change of the next year or two to expand the toy ads and add the iconic Tootsie Roll ads.
Strange Adventures 95 (Aug 1958) used a different page plan to that month's Action Comics.
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But you can see that DC's Red Unit carried pretty much the same ads as the Blue Unit, with the exception of the Charles Atlas ad on the inside front cover. More story pages (twenty six) in this issue means fewer ads.
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I always found the idea of those "community" ads strange. I couldn't have known it at the time, but I now wonder if they were included to try to appease the anti-comics brigade of the 1950s.
1960 - MARVEL
I had originally prepared a set of these for every year from 1958 to 1963, but I don't want to test your patience, so I'm skipping over the odd-numbered years to get through this faster. Here's the page plan for 1960's Red Unit title, Two-Gun Kid again. Identical to the pagination for 1958, with all the ads in the same places.
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The ads are similar, too, but we're seeing more ads for training programmes, like this issue's Commercial Trades Institute one, offering tuition in refrigeration engineering, along with an ad touting work in foreign countries. Again, not for ten-year-olds.
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Over in the Yellow Unit, the placement of the ads remains the same, though Stan's moved the text story pages around a little.
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Stan could have avoided having his comic stories interrupted if he'd deployed more five-page strips, but it's that killer two-page spread at 16-17 that would give any editor a headache. We'll lay this one at Goodman's door, because he clearly hadn't thought this through terribly well.
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The tuition ads are for two different art training offerings. A lot more half page ads than in the Red Unit, and some oddly out-of-place promotions for wrist radios and play tanks, which would suit a boys' comic better.
1960 - DC
Interestingly, DC's Blue Unit has another shared ad with its Marvel counterpart this month. But this time, the Tommy Tomorrow and Congo Bill backup stories have been replaced by a 13-page Supergirl tale. Again, the stories - 26 pages in total - run uninterrupted.
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The ad for presidential signet rings we saw in Two-Gun Kid 55 also appears here. I'm genuinely at a loss to understand who would want to buy one of those. A green Lantern ring, maybe. Or a Flash ring with the costume inside, certainly. Also, there's a full-page house ad for the first Superman Annual, featuring the always-welcome lettering stylings of the great Ira Schapp.
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Meanwhile, in DC's Red Unit, there's twenty-four-and-a-third pages of comic strip. Say what? It's because it was around this time that DC started make the final page of their comic strips two-thirds of a page. Why did they do this? Who knows. Maybe to accommodate third-page ads that never materialised. Maybe to save a bit of money on artwork. In this issue, the slots are filled with one-third page Schapp-lettered house ads, something I always loved as a kid, even though I rarely saw the advertised comics in the wild.
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Just five pages of paid advertising in Strange Adventures 119, compared with ten pages in Marvel's titles around the same time. It's another demonstration of how Goodman would find ways to chisel his audience to the tune of a fraction of a cent here and there.
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Another point of interest is an early appearance of the "150 Civil War Soldiers for $1.49" ad. These would grow and diversify over the next couple of years until you could get pretty much any army you wanted for about a penny per soldier.
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| This is what you got for your $1.49. Swiz, right? That's the equivalent of £15.99 in today's money. Quite a lot of cash for a kid to find. |
The reality is that these were a pretty sorry bargain. Far from being actual toy soldiers 5-6cm tall, they were tiny, FLAT, excuses for soldiers. There's an entertaining blog on this very subject you can check out ... but not till you've finished reading my blog.
1962 - MARVEL
A couple of years passed and Marvel hadn't changed at all, still using the same page plan, still giving us 23 pages of story and ten pages of paid advertising. Two-Gun Kid was on hiatus during 1962, so I had to choose another Red Unit title to represent Marvel's advertising content for the month of August, Strange Tales 99.
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Likewise, the advertisers hadn't changed a lot either. Honor House was still peddling the same old low quality novelties - a full page of them in the Treasure Chest of Fun ad and a couple of half pages touting Wrist Radios and Insect Collecting kits. And a Be An Auto Mechanic ad ... not sure how many ten-year-olds would sign up for that.
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Likewise, the Yellow Unit titles continued doggedly to plough the same furrow. Though the page plan was identical to the Red Unit titles, the advertisers did vary a little from previous years. Love Romances 101 had this page plan:
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The ad pages featured many of the usual suspects, Weight Gain ("Don't let them call you skinny!") and Weight Loss ads ("Don't be fat!"), a School of Nursing ad (I'm fairly sure you can't get licensed to be a nurse after ten weeks of home study) and some out-of-place offerings from Honor House.
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That Honor House luggage ad looks especially tacky. What's the betting that those "suitcases" are made of cardboard? And what's with all the photo ads? Photos of you, photos of stars ... I think I'll just stick with eight Latest Twist Hits for a dollar (love "Peppermint Twist" ... my mum had the original by Joey Dee and the Starliters, Part 1 on side one and Part 2 on the flip side. I don't think the advertised version is the original).
Marvel wouldn't really start with their own house ads till the following year, and I'll be leaving their superhero years for next time.
1962 - DC
Finally, we get to the last batch for this blog entry. I'm looking at Action Comics 291 as the DC Blue Unit example for 1962. The page count for new comics strip has come down a little. Both the Superman and Supergirl stories weigh in at eleven and two-thirds pages, with the extra third-page occupied by ads. There's a half-page Henry Boltinoff cartoon, Varsity Vic, and a letters page.
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By this time we're starting to see a big increase in the number of house ads - three half pages and a third-page, mostly focussed on the Superman Family titles but squeezing in a plug for the Batman Annual. The rest is seven pages of paid ads, and whatever you count that Community one-page strip as.
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So far, DC are still avoiding interrupting their main comic strips with ads. There's two full-page ads for toy soldier sets, Convoy Terror and Revolutionary War. I always wanted one of those Magic Art Reproducer gadgets. Even as a ten-year-old I was dead keen on drawing and aspired to be an actual artist one day.
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| This is what you got ... you point the front of the little black box at the art you want to copy, then peer down the little hole to see the art superimposed on your paper. Bit of a faff, really, and from all accounts, not very good. |
Over in the Red Unit (we're using Strange Adventures 143), we get an extra comic strip page - a lead strip at eight and two-thirds pages and two backup strips at seven and two-thirds pages each. The extra third-pages are taken up with house ads. I especially like the ad for DC Comicpac ... I wonder if any of those survived intact.
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The same house ads for Superman Family titles also appear here, along with two different toy soldiers ads - Convoy Terror and the iconic 100 Toy Soldiers (Packed in this Footlocker).
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I'd imagine that the difference in the types of ads that ran in the Marvel titles and in the DC titles would have been that Marvel's lower circulations meant their ads rates were lower, so more small fry companies could afford to advertise. In my reasearches, I found some indications that Martin Goodman had connections to companies that manufactured and sold cheap novelties, so this might explain the preponderence of Honor House advertisements in his publications.
But over the next couple of years Marvel's audited circulation would begin to rise, at a staggering 1 million extra copies a year, until they drew level with DC and overtook them around mid-1967. Yes, I'm aware of the apocryphal tale of Martin Goodman switching up his pages count in 1971 and wrong-footing DC, but Marvel were outselling DC long before that. And remember, I'm going by the audited figures that appeared in the advertising trade publication N. W. Ayres and Sons Directory, so let's not have any quibbling in the comments.
Next time, I'll take a look at how Marvel's advertising changed as its circulations began to climb from 1963 onwards.
Next: More tales from Madison Avenue
When I was a kid, the only ads in US comics I paid attention to were for toys, in-house ads for comics or posters, ones with nice photos of women, and the rest I just skipped over, not being interested in 'Grit' or how to sell shoes, or be an electrician (or whatever). And you still haven't acknowledged my comment in your previous post, ya buggah!
ReplyDelete(I have now!) ... So, you're proving one of my points, Mr R ... many of the ads - especially in the Marvel books - weren't intended for children. I'm pretty sure few kids want to be refrigeration engineers ... and what the heck is "Grit" anyway? As a kid I literally thought this was an opportunity for us to sell gravel to our neighbours.
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