What If: Da Vinci drew comic covers?

MY A-LEVEL ART TEACHER, MR HUSSEIN, would always talk about the importance of composition when it came to paintings and drawings. In fact he went to far as to spend one entire lesson showing us how to find the geometrical shapes in classical paintings, then he encouraged us to use the same techniques in our artwork.

Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man can be used to demonstrate how the Golden Rectangle works.

There was also much talk of Golden Triangles, and Golden Rectangles, and even something called the Fibonacci Spiral, but I'd stopped listening by that point. It wasn't until I became involved in the magazine industry years later that I began to grasp the basic building blocks of design and was astounded to realise how this all played back into Mr Hussein's art class back in 1971.

You can even apply the Fibonacci Spiral - another way of interpreting the Golden Rectangle - to the Vitruvian Man - but we'll get into that a bit more later.

Then, when I started writing this blog and looking back at comic covers throughout the history of the medium (who hasn't thrilled to Separated at Birth - A comic covers interlude and Separated at Birth 2 - Another comic covers interlude?), I began to notice similar patterns beginning to emerge.

These were most noticeable, at first, on some of the DC covers, possible because they are simple and direct. But as I became aware of it, the geometric shapes the artists were using to create their covers around just leapt off the page.

I think this was the first comic cover where I noticed a strong geometric shape - c'n you tell what it is, yet?

At DC, during the early Silver Age, the editors mostly dictated what they wanted the covers to show. Often, the covers would be created before the interior story and art, and the covers would dictate the interior content. Some editors would recycle cover ideas, Julius Schwartz probably being the worst offender. But to the best of my knowledge, there wasn't an Art Editor laying out cover designs and handing them to the cover artists. Some artists had a good nose for design, and some didn't.

Over at Marvel, in the early part of the 1960s, there was no formal art editor, either. Stan Lee would check over covers - which were usually drawn after the interior art - as they came from the art department (headed by Sol Brodsky) and make suggestions, order changes or even reject cover art. It wasn't until later that first Marie Severin and then John Romita would create design layouts for cover artists to follow.

So I think it's fair to conclude that at least in the early part of the Silver Ager, cover artists at both DC and Marvel were just trying to create striking and attention-grabbing cover art, and probably were adopting these geometric cover layouts without much conscious thought.

Here then, without too much comment from me, are some of the more obvious examples. You can probably have a lot of fun looking for the hidden layout shapes among your own collection, and see whether you can spot any trends.

TRIANGLES

For me, I think, the easiest shape to spot behind the layout of a single image, like a painting or a comic cover, is the Triangle.

The Canigiani Holy Family by Renaissance superstar artist Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (better known as Raphael), painted between 1507 and 1508.

This is one of the strongest and most common layout configurations. Often used to convey a sense of strength, balance or stability, it's so predominant that I doubt the artists knew, in many cases, that they were using it.

Three DC covers with strong triangular layouts. Cover artist Curt Swan always had a strong sense of design, so I'm not sure that anyone handed him a hasty pencil sketch and said, "Do it like this." Click to enlarge.

Meanwhile, over at Marvel, Jack Kirby would often use a triangular layout on his covers, most noticeable on some of his most powerful cover designs. The earliest example I could find was the cover of Journey into Mystery 85 (Oct 1962), which introduced Thor's arch-enemy Loki in an eye-grabbing example ...

The triangular layout definitely brings a touch of power and dominance
to the scene of Loki's challenge.

And look at this Kirby cover, depicting Thor in a simple, but powerful, take on the triangular design.

Journey into Mystery 125 (Feb 1966) shows a powerful image of Thor ... graceful, stable, the classic immoveable object.

On the Captain America title, Kirby would return again and again to the triangular layout, conveying a variety of different moods ...

Once Captain America took over Tales of Suspense, Kirby cut loose with some wonderfully arresting covers, some of his best ...

It was so effective that Kirby's successor on Captain America, Jim Steranko, would also use the same geometric layout style.

Jim Steranko has always displayed an eye for graphic layout. Here, his deceptively simple covers would have just leapt off the newsstands.

And on Fantastic Four, too Kirby was working that triangle. Look at these fabulous covers, for examples of how strong the layout can be.

The Thing cover on Fantastic Four 51 (Jun 1966) is considered a classic. Kirby like it so much he more or less re-used the image as the splash page of the story, too, and revisited the idea a few more times during his run on the title.

But the technique wasn't exclusive to Jack Kirby ... others also, besides Steranko, used strong triangle configurations in their cover art. 

Here's Gene Colan, John Romita and Herb Trimpe all grabbing a piece of the triangle-shaped cover fun.

Beyond the simple triangle, there's also a more complex shape, often referred to by classical art scholars as The Golden Triangle ... 

Dogs Fighting in a Wooded Clearing by Frans Snyders (1579-1657) demonstrates the more complex Golden Triangle layout.

... and I found a few examples of comic covers that fit that class of geometric layout, as well. Here's a Superboy from the early 1960s:

The mighty Curt Swan makes this cover design look deceptively simple, but when the Golden Triangle shape is overlaid, you can see how clever the design is.

Here's an example from Jack Kirby ... I wonder if Jack even knew that this was a Golden Triangle. Probably, as he did briefly attend The Pratt Institute in New York, though I've not been able to figure out which department of the School of Art Kirby was in. 

Unconscious or deliberate use of the Golden Triangle ... you decide.

And here's a later example from Marvel, John Buscema on the cover for Avengers 51 (Apr 1968):

I think its fair to say that John Buscema more than any other comic artist (except maybe Burne Hogarth) was the most influenced by classical art.

And finally, remember that Superboy cover I showed at the start of this section? Well, that uses two triangles as its basic layout, just one example of how shapes can be repeated, or even combined to produce something a little more complicated or interesting.

Although I'm sometimes critical of the content of DC's covers, I've always loved Curt Swan's draftsmanship. On Superboy 109 (Dec 1963), he also demonstrates that he's a master of design.

No one ever said you couldn't have more than one geometric shape underlying a picture's composition. In fact, artist will often repeat shapes, or even combine different ones to achieve a striking visual design ... but more on that later.

CROSSES

Another common type of layout is where the major elements in a picture follow the lines of a cross. It's not hard to find strong examples of a cross composition in classical art.

The Swing was commissioned from Jean-Honere Fragonard, to depict the mistress of a member of the French Court. I don't think it's a coincidence that the lines intersect where they do ...

Once it has been pointed out, you can quickly apply the same principle to comic book covers, where it's often (but not always) used to evoke a sense of conflict.

I found a couple of early Silver Age examples of the cross composition from DC ... and wouldn't you know it? The artist is Carmine Infantino ...

I think these two examples from early issues of The Flash make a good illustration of the concept.

But it's Marvel that I'll focus on ... and where better to start with a conflict-based concept than Sgt Fury and His Screaming Ab-Dabs, and these classic early covers by Jack Kirby?

I can see a circle in the layout of Sgt Fury 6 as well, and I'll offer some examples of compound compositions later on in this entry.

Kirby would also apply the cross composition to superheroes comics, as well. Here's a couple of examples from Journey into Mystery with Thor.

In JiM 95 (Aug 1963) you can see that the attack line runs from Thor's evil duplicate to the real Thor ... the line that goes through the real Thor's body is the defence line ... the concept isn't used in quite the same way in JiM 104 (May 1964), but still a strong design.

How about these Fantastic Four covers, all showing a strong element of conflict, or threat of conflict?

All quite similar in concept to JiM 95 ... with a clear attack line and defence line in each case. Interesting how on FF 58 (Jan 1967), Wyatt is not the quite the same line as the rest of the FF ... because he's not actually part of the team.

To round off, here's a couple of Amazing Spider-Man covers by the first two artists to draw the series, the late great Steve Ditko, and his worthy successor John Romita.

It's quite remarkable how two artists who'd never worked together, and probably hadn't even met, could come up with two such strong cross-based designs for the same character.

And because my classical art example at the beginning of this section was a bit cheeky, here's a stronger version of the cross-composition by Renoir, where all the eyelines quite literally line up.

The Luncheon of the Boating Party by Pierre Auguste Renoir, painted around 1881, is a hugely influential painting and a keystone work of the Impressionist movement.

CIRCLES

In this context, not all the circles I'll show you will be perfect circles ... some will be more oval. But let's not quibble ... for a design which swirls around a central point is probably one of the most effective, and probably my favourite. Let's start, as always, with some examples from classical art ... something a bit newer, this time.

Henri Matisse painted "Dance" in 1910, a commission for Russian businessman Segei Shchukin. It's considered a key milestone in Matisse's career and in the development of the Modern Art movement.

Looking first at the DC comics of the first half of the 1960s, I came across quite a few that showed a strong circular composition. Look at these covers from Gil Kane and Sid Greene (who's probably better known for his inking).

While you'd expect Gil Kane to turn in a well-designed cover - and he did many - who knew that inker Sid Greene was such a deft draftsman?

And, of course, it wasn't hard to find examples from the top two DC artists of the day, Curt Swan and Carmine Infantino.

I did like Curt Swan's Superfamily covers of the early 1960s ... such a shame that DC's Dark Overlord Mort Weisinger plastered them with inane speech balloons.

And at Marvel, we find Jack Kirby leading the charge, using the technique to great effect on the first Marvel team books.

The first three covers on The Avengers series from 1963 look nothing alike ... until you realise that all use a circle as their underlying design ...

It's almost like there's no other way to go, when you have a large number of characters to feature and limited space to do it in.

And it's the same with the first three covers on The X-Men, which came out at exactly the same time as The Avengers ...

But Kirby would happily use the same composition on the solo character books. Here's a run of Captain America from later in the silver age ... just one circle after another.

Three cracking Captain America covers from 1968 ... we know that Kirby rushed the art for CA 112 through when Stan was afraid Steranko would miss his deadline, but that cover is a masterclass in composition.

Then, though I'm not drawing any conclusions from this, I came across the pencils for a Kirby Captain America cover that were heavily reworked into a circular composition by John Romita ... a rare example of Kirby missing an opportunity.

I can see why Stan might have rejected the first version ... it's hard to see that it's Captain America sliding down the zip-wire. The fact that the reworked version just happened to fall into a satisfying circular composition may just be a happy bonus.

Just so we're clear, John Romita was no stranger to the circular design concept when it came to comic covers. Here's a few he did during his extraordinary run on Amazing Spider-Man ...

It's quite difficult to find a bad John Romita cover, as he was a natural designer, but these covers are among his best, ranging from 1966 to 1968.

And to end on, a random sampling of Jack Kirby through the years, working that circle like there's no tomorrow.

And if any more proof were needed, here's a gaggle of Kirby covers that span the years 1963 to 1966, all effortlessly crafted for maximum impact.

It may be that I find the circle the most appealing of these layouts because that shape is the most organic, occurring naturally both in our world's ecosphere (see what I did there?) and in the wider universe.

COMBINATION COMPOSITIONS

While I was trawling through my collection and the Internet, looking for covers that demonstrated the use of the geometry in laying out a piece of art, I kept coming across illustrations that didn't fit comfortably into any of the three pigeonholes I've described above. There were even pictures that seemed to fit into more than one category. But classical artists have been using combinations of shapes to lay out their art since the Renaissance, pretty much. 

Speaking of the Renaissance, let's use a famous painting by Botticelli as our example of combination shapes underlying a picture's structure.

Nascite di Venere was painted by Sandro Botticelli some time during the 1480s, and is probably one of the most popular examples of Renaissance art.

There may well be a few covers I've shown above that you might think could be used to illustrate combination compositions ... but here's a few I've singled out as the better examples.

What could be more bonkers than a later Silver Age Superman cover? But forget that, and concentrate on how the simplicity of the design makes a complex artwork accessible.

Towards the end of his tenure, it seemed that Weisinger's editorship resulted in ever-more outlandish situations. One is among the best (or worst) examples of that, was Superman 184 (Feb 1966), where primitive humanoids wave doritos-on-sticks at the Man of Steel. This was why, by 1966, I was a full-on Marvel reader.

Meanwhile, though DC editors struggled to understand what the fuss was about, Marvel were using the same techniques to creat more arresting and - to be fair - saleable covers for their comics. Here's a couple of early Avengers that would have made my ten-year old self part with his pocket money.

Could it be any clearer? The goodies are in the oval shape and the baddies are in the triangle. Shut up and take my money.

The art for Avengers 9 (Oct 1964) demonstrates how effortlessly Kirby was able to knock out a cover that told you exactly who was in the story (all you really cared about when you were ten) and gives you a pretty broad hint at who is on which side.

Kirby is once more using the geometry of the cover to show you who is fighting who is fighting whom. Good and clear, great sense of danger.

A couple of issues later, Stan put his top solo hero Spider-Man up against The Avengers (or, spoiler alert, so it seemed). Yes, I know diverse hands were involved in tinkering with the art - names from Steve Ditko to Bob Powell have been accused on being involved, but it's reasonable to say that the basic composition of the cover is Kirby's.

SO ... ABOUT THE FIBONACCI SPIRAL

Leonardo Bonacci, also know is Fibonacci, was a mathematician of the Middle Ages, credited with bringing the arabic numeral system to Europe and introducing the concept of zero to modern mathematics. The Fibonacci Sequence is a series of numbers where each successive number is the sum of the previous two. Omitting zero for clarity, the sequence goes:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, etc ...

You might be thinking, "Yes, and?"

Well here's the thing. The Fibonacci numbers also appear in biological settings, such as branching in trees, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone's bracts. Spooky, huh? And the sequence also turns up elsewhere in maths - computer algorithms such as the Fibonacci search technique and the Fibonacci heap data structure, and graphs called Fibonacci cubes used for interconnecting parallel and distributed systems.

But wait ... the sequence also shows up in classical art as a basic for the composition of many pieces of art, from different parts of the world, possibly - though I can't confirm this - without the artists even knowing they were using it. The sequence has been used to create the "perfect" rectangle, sometimes referred to as the Divine (or Golden) Rectangle. Here's an illustration of it (nicked from WIKIpedia):

The longer edge is 34 units and the shorter edge is 21 units. But look how you can start drawing lines and each smaller square is part of the Fibonacci Sequence. Now, to create the Fibonacci Spiral, you open your compass to 21 units, place the point in the bottom right corner and draw a quarter circle from bottom left to top right. The make your compass 13 units and draw another quarter circle from top left to bottom right. Carry on like that and you end up with:

And that is the shape that turns up again and again in the composition of classic art pieces. Here's a classic (no pun intended) example:

La Grande Odalisque by Jean Auguste Dominique, 1814.

But you can go back and apply it to Renaissance pieces like:

Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci, c.1506

And even paintings from completely different cultures, like Tsunami.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa - more popularly referred to as "Tsunami" - by Katsushika Hokusai, 1831.

Admittedly, when it comes to finding comic covers that look like they are based on the principles of Fibonacci, it's a bit more challenging. Is that because comic covers are by definition simple and direct? Possible, but even with a fairly casual search, I managed to find a few examples that look like a pretty good fit.

The first one I found was an early Ditko Spider-man cover ...

Amazing Spider-Man 10 (Mar 1964), by Steve Ditko.

What do you think? Convincing? How about this one?

Amazing Spider-Man 15 (Aug 1964), by Steve Ditko.

I thought these two Daredevil covers, both by John Romita, made a pretty convincing example, as well.

Daredevil 12 (Jan 1966) and 15 (Apr 1966).

And I think the classic cover for Fantastic Four 48 (Mar 1966) is a strong contender as well.

This is probably the most convincing example I found ... and it's Jack Kirby, which surprised me a little. Look how the family members of the FF are grouped together in the lower right rectangle, with Ben Grimm on the outside. Can't be coincidental.

And finally, these two covers from different periods of the Silver Age ...

I always loved the cover to Strange Tales 142 (Mar 1966), and now I think I know why. The cover for Thor 182 (Nov 1970), just at the outer edge of the Silver Age, is a nice example, as well.

None of these are exact fits to the Fibonacci Spiral, but they are pretty darn close. I could spend ages working my way through the Grand Comicbook Database, scouring for ever-more convincing examples of covers that conform to classical art composition ... but I do have things I need to do, like eating and sleeping.

WHO SAYS COMICS AREN'T ART?

There's no hard rules about any of this. You could argue that I'm just seeing structure where none was intended. But at the same time, I think it's not an unreasonable position to say that artwork that follows some kind of underlying geometric design is more attractive, effective and easier for us to decipher than a picture that is just a chaotic collection of artefacts on the page.

That said, I'm conscious that not all the components of any of the about art fits perfectly to the geometric designs I've been looking at. And I think that's an important point. If the artist did try to place the elements exactly to a geometric shape, then I think the artwork wouldn't work as well, perhaps becoming a bit mechanical in the rendering. It's those little overlaps and deviations that make the final piece arresting.

So that's it. I don't want to labour the point, but you can have loads of fun, trawling through the covers reproduced on the Grand Comicbook Database, and spotting all the various shapes for yourself.

Next: So what does an Editor actually do?

Exposed: Myths of Marvel's Silver Age - Part 3

THERE'S ONE LAST MYTH of the Marvel Silver Age I want to look at before I put the subject to rest. It has been reported many times, by many historians, that Marvel's sales figures didn't match DC's until the beginning of the 1970s. And that could be true. But in my researches for this blog, I have come across some data that throws some doubt on the commonly reported story.

Legend has it that Marvel publisher Martin Goodman brilliantly out-manoeuvred DC Publisher Carmine Infantino, by first raising, then dropping, the cover price of the standard Marvel comicbook. The truth is a less dramatic tale of corporate interference and incompetence.

Then, when I looked a little deeper into the circumstances of Marvel's ascendency - that of a brilliant and effective subterfuge on the part of Marvel publisher Martin Goodman - I began to have some misgivings about the accuracy of the legend as it's been reported over the decades ...

THE DC vs MARVEL SALES WAR

The story I've read in many different histories of American comics is that Marvel finally overtook DC in sales after a Machiavellian trick by Marvel publisher Martin Goodman. This story has been reported on WIKIpedia (mis-quoting Les Daniels' Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics) and in Sean Howe's Marvel: The Untold Story (HarperCollins, 2012), among others.

"As 1971 drew to a close, publisher Martin Goodman initiated an ingenious sales strategy," wrote Daniels, "a complicated series of changes in the size and price of the standard color comic book, that gave Marvel a commanding lead in overall circulation ... in November1971 the standard comic book price jumped to twenty-five cents. Rival DC made the same change simultaneously ... after only one month of the new prices, in December 1971 Marvel dropped back to thirty-six pages at the price of twenty cents ... Goodman [was able] to offer a larger percentage of the retail price to his wholesale distributors. As a result .... circulation increased."

"Martin Goodman hatched a devious plan to conquer DC once and for all," wrote Howe. "When Marvel and DC agreed to hike the price of comics ... their handshake deal called for the books to expand from 36 to 52 pages - but at a whopping 25 cents apiece. But after a month, Goodman immediately cut back to fewer pages at 20 cents, and offered newsstand proprietors a bigger cut of the profits, ensuring that Marvel would get better rack space. The slow-footed DC tried to make a go of their higher-price, thicker comics, but they took a bath on the manoeuvre, and by the time they crawled back to the 20 cent price point, they'd lost the battle and the war. For the first time in its history, Marvel Comics was the number-one comic book company in the world."

The Great American Novel website even adds a reason why DC stuck at 25 cents for a year: "In October 1971 Marvel used a sneaky trick: they raised their page count and price. DC heard in advance and did the same. But DC had to buy their paper a year in advance so were locked into the higher page count. The next month Marvel dropped their pages and prices again, while DC had to keep theirs high. For the whole year Marvel grabbed market share, kept a lot of it even after DC went back to normal."

The problem is that almost none of the above is true. Here's some reasons why I have issues with that story:

• Martin Goodman didn't hatch the plan, Independent News did.
• DC raised its page count and price first, with the August cover-dated issues (on sale June). Marvel raised their price on the November cover-dated issues (on sale July)
• DC and Marvel having a handshake deal to raise prices across the board is anti-competitive and highly illegal. It's conceivable that Goodman might've agreed to something like that but I don't think corporate DC would have
• Even if DC did buy their paper for the year ahead, it seems unlikely that the corporate leaders of Kinney would allow DC to continue on such a suicidal path, just to save a few bucks by bulk buying.

Here's some of the more obscure Marvels that went to 25 cents for just one 52-page issue (a couple lasted two issues) around November 1971. There's a full list further down the page.

If any of the "historians", who have parroted the above tale way too many times over the years, had done even the most cursory research, they would have found plenty of evidence to discredit the claims.

According to Carmine Infantino, who was DC's publisher at the time, the idea to raise the price for more pages "... was Independent News' idea. They made that decision ... When we went to 25 cents, we gave the distributor a 40% discount. Marvel goes in and cuts the price 20% and gives the distributor 50% off. They were throwing our books back in our face! The price structure was set up by [Paul] Wendell [National's President], [Mark] Inglesias [Kinney's accountant], and [Harold] Chamberlin [who ran Independent News]."

DC Comics, on the other hand, went to 52-pages for 25 cents with the August 1971 cover-dated issues. Here's a selection of some of the lesser-known DC titles that came out at the new price that August.

So, not Martin Goodman's idea at all. One bit of the above story that is true is that Goodman offered a bigger cut of the cover price to his distributors (in his account Daniels calls them "wholesale distributors" - said no one who worked in the publishing business ever). Fifty percent instead of forty percent.

Let me just break that down for you. Back in the day, when I worked at Marvel UK, the deal we had with Comag was that we got 50% of the cover price for each comic sold. Unsolds we didn't get anything for. Out of our half, we had to pay for editorial, production (neg films of the pages, etc) and printing. Out of the distributors' half, they paid for marketing (ha, right!), logistics (usually by truck) and gave the wholesalers 25% discount on copies sold. The wholesalers handled transport to the retailers and typically gave the newsagents 15% discount on copies sold. Those percentages might vary slightly depending on how good a negotiator you are.

That's for a Sale-or-Return model, common in the US and adopted pretty much across the board in the UK by the 1980s. So Martin Goodman's idea of giving the distributor 50% discount reverberated down the decades and was still affecting magazine distribution right into the 1990s, maybe even until now.

Space was always at a premium on most newsstands ... so much so that proprietors would prioritise the magazines they knew they could sell for the most profit. Sadly comics didn't count in that group and would often not even make it to the display racks.

From the other end of the chain, the numbers of comics that ended up on the newsstand's spinner rack was usually determined by the local wholesaler. Depending on the size of the business, newsstands would be allocated a bundle of comics of a certain number of titles. The following month's allocation would be based on the returns from the previous month. The wholesaler would mix and match titles to achieve the best outcome for each newsstand. However, all that said, comics were a low-profit, high-volume venture, and often retailers (and sometimes wholesalers) wouldn't even bother to put the comics on sale, preferring to give rack-space to magazines that made them a higher profit.

But aside from all that, I keep coming back to the question, Why did DC Comics, market leader for over twenty years, decide to raise their cover price to 25 cents in the first place? For an answer to that, we need to go back to the beginning of the 1960s.

The top four sellers during 1960, according to the Statements of Ownership published in the magazines. The high number for Dell Uncle Scrooge is probably helped by the fact that as a quarterly, it stayed on the stands for three months. Superman and Superboy published eight issues a year, so had half the newsstand time of the Disney title.

At that time, the big players in the comic book market were Dell, Archie and DC Comics. DC's top seller was Superman, at number three in sales charts, probably because of the Adventures of Superman that was still running on syndicate tv channels across America. (It was outsold by Dell's Uncle Scrooge and Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, both at around one million each.) Batman was in sixth place after Superboy and Mickey Mouse. Marvel - then not even identified by the "MC" box on the covers - barely cracked the top 50, with Tales to Astonish at number 43.

However, it's important to bear in mind that these were Statements, made by the publishers, to satisfy a demand of the US Post Office that the postal service was being used to distribute genuine publications that the customers had bought, and not junk mail that they hadn't, and so wouldn't qualify for second class post. No one checked whether the numbers were true or not. And some publishers didn't include the circulation figures in their Statements. Heck, DC didn't even print the Statements in their comics from 1963 - 1965. So those sales are a bit of a mystery.

Here's the Publisher's Statement from Archie Comics 127 (Apr 1962), showing the "average number of copies of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the 12 months preceding the date shown above was: 458,039." Click image to enlarge.

And in an interview with The Comic Book Artist 1 (Spr 1998), Charlton and DC editor Dick Giordano said, "I wouldn't take the Publisher's Statement numbers to church. I'm not sure where they came from but I'll tell you one thing I know for sure - because I can't get in trouble. At Charlton, they just made them up."

However, even with those caveats in place, things were about to change.

For reasons unknown, Dell decided to raise the price of their comics by 50% in March 1961. They probably felt that their market share, and their 30 pages of comics with no-ads, was so strong that this wouldn't affect their sales, but as we will see, they had made a mistake.

The first change was that Dell raised their cover price in March 1961 - ironically, the same month that the Statement for 1960 was printed in - from 10 cents to 15 cents. A whopping 50% price-hike couldn't have gone down well with the little tykes who bought Disney and tv-tie in titles. The only rationale I can think of is that perhaps Dell believed their comics were a parental buy, and adults wouldn't see much of a problem in a five-cent bump. But they were wrong.

DC's Superman family titles continued to rule the sales charts in 1962, holding the top four slots. Marvel's highest titles were Life (Modelling) with Millie and Tales to Astonish.

By 1962, things get a little hazy. Dell didn't report figures at all, so we don't know how much the high cover price affected them at this point. Superman had lost 70,000 sales and Superboy 50,000, though they were still the top sellers. Batman had haemorrhaged 75,000 sales. The other two Superman family titles Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen held the three and four slots, with Archie at number five. Comichron reports that 1962's highest selling Marvel was Modelling with Millie, but as the title wasn't published until 1963, this should probably be Life with Millie. Tales to Astonish had inexplicably lost around 25,000 sales, but would just as inexplicably regain them the following year ... I suspect subterfuge.

The highest sellers in 1963 were Dennis the Menace and Archie. A long way behind, Marvel's two top sellers were Rawhide Kid and Kid Colt Outlaw. Tales to Astonish had bounced back to around 185,000, about 10,000 copies behind the two western titles.

The following year would reveal just what a blunder Dell had made. Though the 15c price only lasted seven months, it was long enough to cause sales to plummet to about half their previous level. Further complicating things was the split between Dell and Western, leading Western to set up their own competing Gold Key line of comics. The net result was that - with no figures reported for DC from 1963-65 - Dell/Gold Key was knocked out of the top two spots by Fawcett's Dennis the Menace and Archie's Archie. In just two years Walt Disney's Comics and Stories had gone from over a million copies to less than half a million. Uncle Scrooge fared even worse, from outselling WDC&S to just 299,000 copies. Though we don't know the reported DC sales numbers for this period, we do know that Batman was seeing dropping sales, and that the DC brass would take the title away from editor Jack Schiff and have Julius Schwartz and Carmine Infantino revamp the character in 1964.

So it's not like publishers didn't know that raising the cover price of a magazine was a sure way to shed a huge chunk of their readership.

Classics Illustrated comics were an odd beast. Reprinted over and over again, with no ad revenue to fall back on, the comics underwent several price rises, finally ending up at 25 cents for 52 pages by 1968. The following year, the series was cancelled.

And if any more proof were needed, look at the case of Classics Illustrated. The series had started out in 1941, adapting literary classics to comic book format. They would then reprint regularly, some editions staying in print for over 25 years. Despite the fact that they had no new script and artwork costs, they continued to raise the prices of their comics. In 1941, they were charging 10 cents for a 52-page package. Some time around 1958, they raised the price for the same book to 15 cents - three years before Dell's price-hike. Finally, in 1968, the price of a Classics Illustrated comic went to 25 cents. It was a step too far, and within months Classics Illustrated was out of business.

AND ... BACK TO DC

By 1965, DC was beginning to report on sales again. Superman was still top of the heap with reported sales of over 800k, but the other DC titles that disclosed sales were starting to look shaky. Yes, they held eight of the top ten slots, but Gold Key were in severe decline and Marvel's split-title comics were gaining ground, up about 50,000 copies per month to around 230k each. Fantastic Four and Spider-Man had no Publisher's Statements that year, but they were almost certainly doing better.

The main Superman family titles occupied the top slots. The next two best-selling DC titles were World's Finest and Batman, enjoying a sales bump after Julie Schwartz's revamp. Marvel were still a long way behind, but they were gaining - fast - with Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales leading the charge.

But more important than this was the sell-through rate.

As described above, comics were on sale-or-return. This meant that any comics that weren't sold by the retailers could be returned - sometimes just the torn-off logo - for credit. Typically, a comic needed about a 50% sell-through to stay in profit. Below that, and the title was in trouble.

"Marvel was doing very well," Carmine Infantino told Comic Book Marketplace in 2000. "We knew it because DC - Independent News - was handling Marvel at the time and their numbers were coming in. Marvel had books like Spider-Man coming in at 70, 80, even 85 percent sales. And we had books coming in at 40, 41, 42 percent. Something was wrong and they [the management] didn't know how to fix it."

Even though it wasn't terribly difficult to identify what was different about Stan Lee's approach to comics, the DC editors either couldn't see it or didn't care. "[They] were so institutionalised, coming off all these wonderful accomplishments, taking credit for the invention of the superhero and maintaining it, and acting like no one else could do a superhero as well as they did," explained DC editor Joe Orlando in Comic Book Artist 1 (1998). "They were getting their asses kicked in by Marvel at the newsstand, and they were not reading the Marvel books, never analysing or trying to figure out what the competition was doing. They treated their competitor with total contempt." Orlando had tried - and failed - to do comics with Stan Lee a few years earlier, so he should have been able to explain it to the DC brass. There's no record of him trying.

Someone who did try was Doom Patrol scripter Arnold Drake. The writer had crafted a memo to DC Editorial Director Irwin Donenfeld in February 1966, warning the DC brass of the danger posed by Marvel Comics.

Drake's memo made a brave attempt to get Donenfeld to understand why Marvel was making inroads, but still missed the mark. He described how Marvel was aiming at an older demographic, and suggested that DC introduce three tiers of comics - Weisinger's Superman family titles would be for the little kids; Julius Schwartrz's Green Lantern and Flash books would be for the pre-teens, and Doom Patrol and other titles like it would be for the high school and college crowd. But this still failed to analyse how Stan Lee was appealing to a wider audience than National ... and how DC could replicate it.

Even so, the DC management were dismissive. "You're full of shit as a Christmas turkey," was Donenfeld's reply, according to Drake. "We outsell them 3 - 1!" Yet Roy Thomas and John Romita both have said that DC management was having meetings about Marvel, trying to figure out why they were gaining sales so fast, as early as the summer of 1965.

DC/National "had decided that Marvel’s secret was the 'bad drawing' of guys like Kirby and Ditko," said Roy Thomas in Alter Ego 17. "The fact that Drake’s memo was given short shrift even half a year later shows much about the mindset at the time."

DC must have been worried about the new, trendier upstart Marvel Comics, because they made, some might say, an embarrassing attempt to make their comics look more cool, with a checkerboard border across the top of their covers, starting with the comics on sale in December 1965. By the end of 1966, Superman was no longer the top-selling comic, Batman was.

In the end, Irwin Donenfeld must have conceded that something was wrong, because he ordered that, as of the February 1966 issues (on sale December 1965), DC would sport an identifying banner across the covers - the Go-Go Checks.

"What a ridiculous thing," Carmine Infantino told A Complete History of American Comic Books. "It was the stupidest thing we ever heard because the books were bad in those days and that showed people right off what not to buy."

And there, Infantino hit on exactly what the problem was. DC books "were bad in those days". And with all the evidence readily available, this seems like it was on DC's radar by the second half of 1965 at the latest. So though Donenfeld stated that DC were "outselling Marvel 3 - 1", in February 1966 ... that would have been based on the numbers for 1964, as he wouldn't have had 1965's sales figures at that point. 

Carmine Infantino told The Comics Book Artist (1998) how publishers got their sales figures. "The first numbers would come in after three months. Then at six months you'd get final sales figures, and one year later, you'd get final, final sales." So Infantino - publisher of DC Comics - is saying he wouldn't know the full results for a year until the end of the following year, because wholesalers would still be finding comics to return down the back of the sofa, or wherever.

So, all of these sales numbers quoted above - taken from the Publishers' Statements - aren't hugely reliable. Because they're not the sales figures. They're publishers' estimates. How can you report the sales figures for 1965 in the April 1966 comics? It can't be done, because at that point, you wouldn't know.

It certainly wouldn't be what advertisers would use when booking ad space. If you're an ad agency, looking to reach a certain number of people for your client's advertising dollars, you want to know for sure how many readers will see your magazine ad. Because your client is going to ask you.

And that's where ABC figures come in.

SO, HOW MANY COPIES DO YOUR COMICS REALLY SELL?

In the magazine business - where I spent half my working life - advertising is a significant source of income for publishers. And how much you can charge for your advertising space hinges largely on how many copies you sell. There are other factors, too ... like demographics (who buys your magazine, broken down by age, income and so forth). But mostly it's copies sold.

Now, an advertiser isn't just going to take your word for it. They need some third party to verify your sales, so they can be sure they're reaching the numbers of their target audience they need to to sell their product. You know, like some sort of Bureau that Audits Circulations. Then, when you've got all that information, you could publish it in some sort of British Rate And Data directory, so that advertisers could refer to it.

And that's exactly what we had. The Audit Bureau of Circulations gathered all the sales information and then published it in a guide called BRAD. They also included the magazine's advertising rates and page sizes, so that the agencies would know what dimensions their print ads should be made up to and how much they would be paying for them. Both ABC and BRAD are online now and you can find them easily via Google.

Audited circulation numbers would be published bi-annually in trade directories like Ayer's in the United States and BRAD in the UK. These directories would be used by ad agencies and other publishers to determine how well - or not - magazines were selling.

Likewise, the United States, they too had an Audit Bureau of Circulations, though their directory was known as N.W. Ayer and Sons Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals, which also contained circulation information.

The key difference was that the numbers circulated by the ABC, through trade publications like BRAD and Ayer, were audited. That means an independent accounting firm looked through all the numbers and determined what a magazine's actual sales were, then affirmed it in a legal document. Because, to claim your sales were higher than they were would be fraud and, in both the US and the UK, you go to jail for that kind of thing. Mostly.

So, while casting around for ABC numbers for Marvel and DC, I came across a bit of research by Jon Hoyle. He had applied to the ABC in the US and got ABC figures for Marvel and DC from 1950 to 1987. I'm only concerned here with the years 1965 - 1968, as this is when I think the tables turned for DC and Marvel. Now granted, he could have made them up - and it would cost me $50 per half year to order the same data from ABC to prove it one way or the other - but why would he? Besides, I was able to find some page scans from the Ayer guide for 1963, and they confirm Jon Hoyle's figures.

Here's the two relevant pages from the N.W. Ayer & Sons Directory, 1963 edition. On the left, National Comics Group, and on the right, Marvel Comics Group. Click on the image to enlarge.

So, the two numbers to watch are 6,049,602 for National and 2,992,017 for Marvel. These would have been the average combined monthly sales figures for each company's catalogue of titles for the first half of 1962.

And here's a snapshot of Mr Hoyle's numbers, as posted in rec.arts.comics.dc.universe. The "Full Year Average" and "Difference" columns I added myself, the Difference being how many more comics per month Marvel was selling in percentage terms (obviously a negative percentage signifies fewer copies sold).

	1st HALF		2nd HALF			FULL YEAR AVERAGE		DIFFERENCE
YEAR	DC	MARVEL	DC	MARVEL		DC	MARVEL
1960	6,695,210	2,322,162	8,056,093	3,058,312		7,375,652	2,690,237	-63.53%
1961	6,908,803	2,833,849	7,747,787	3,401,069		7,328,295	3,117,459	-57.46%
1962	6,049,602	2,992,017	7,250,513	3,587,987		6,650,058	3,290,002	-50.53%
1963	6,262,836	3,364,779	7,283,109	4,145,588		6,772,973	3,755,184	-44.56%
1964	6,671,121	3,903,821	7,461,786	5,322,151		7,066,454	4,612,986	-34.72%
1965	6,274,065	4,873,463	7,010,828	5,935,322		6,642,447	5,404,393	-18.64%
1966	6,987,445	5,980,401	7,687,633	7,300,363		7,337,539	6,640,382	-9.50%
1967	5,848,098	6,390,403	6,800,572	7,695,583		6,324,335	7,042,993	11.36%
1968	5,970,013	7,088,687	6,614,980	9,147,001		6,292,497	8,117,844	29.01%

The circulation figures for both companies match the scans from the N.W. Ayer Guide for the first half of 1962. Consequently, I think we can safely assume that the remaining numbers are also accurate. So when DC publisher Irwin Donenfeld hair-dryered Arnold Drake back in the February of 1966, his information was out of date. DC might have been out-selling Marvel 3 - 1 ... in 1960! But it doesn't look like they were doing anything like so well by 1965.

So, what does all this prove? Well, nothing, really. I'm sure that there is some fundamental difference between the way the Audit Bureau of Circulation arrives at its figures for how many copies of all its magazines a publisher sells in a given month and how the publishers themselves estimate it. But I don't have enough insight into their processes to offer an informed explanation. But what I do know is that there enough evidence here to throw some reasonable doubt on the story of how Martin Goodman reversed his price rise decision and threw DC Comics into disarray. That, I don't think is true.

Daniel's 1991 book carries a notice in the imprint that all material in it (meaning not just the reproduced artwork) is copyright Marvel Entertainment Group. So ... not the unbiased impartial account you might think it to be.

So where did that story come from? The earliest telling of it I've been able to find is in the hefty history Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the Worl'd's Greatest Comics by Les Daniels. Quoted at the top of this page, Daniels wrote, "Martin Goodman initiated an ingenious sales strategy ... Rival DC made the same change simultaneously." And we've seen that simply isn't true. So why would Daniels write that? Because he's not a historian. He was writing the officially sanctioned Marvel version of the story. And subsequent authors have just copied the anecdote without bothering to look at the dates of the comics they're talking about.

Even though we now know that it was DC that initiated the price hike to 25 cents for 52 pages, both companies had been experimenting with the 25 cent cover price for anything up to a year before, but Marvel tried it first.

Why did Kid Colt Outlaw go to giant-size for three months in 1966? Perhaps Martin Goodman was testing the waters. But in 1970, he tried again with a couple of 25 cent titles, both also reprint.

For three consecutive issues in 1966, Marvel upped the price of Kid Colt Outlaw to 25 cents for 68 pages. Then the title reverted to 12 cents. A few years later, Marvel started reprinting the X-Men as a regular 25 cent book, and added a new monster title Fear, reprinting 68 pages of pre-hero Marvel stories for 25 cents. Was this an experiment? Who knows ... but regular 25 cent books weren't exactly new to Marvel. They'd been reprinting their back catalogue in Marvel Tales, Marvel Collectors' Items (later Marvel's Greatest Comics) and Marvel Super-Heroes since 1966.

Like Martin Goodman, Carmine Infantino was trying out bigger, more expensive comics with some of his b-list and c-list titles. These must have sold okay, because within a few months DC had upped its entire line to 52 pages for a quarter.

Meanwhile, over at DC, Carmine Infantino was also testing the waters by converting some of his titles to 68 pages for 25 cents, the first appearing in late 1970. These too were mostly reprint, but there seems to have been some appetite to charge higher prices for comics on the part of both companies.

The first three DC 100-Pagers were part of a stand-alone run. All reprint, but a hundred pages for 50 cents seemed like a pretty good deal.

Then there's the 100-Page issues that DC was trialling at 50 cents. The first of these was the three issue run of DC 100-Page Super Spectacular, which began with issue 4, cover-dated simply 1971. On sale in June this would have been the equivalent of an August cover-dated comic. The next seven issues of the series were also part of their regular title's runs ... so DC 100-Page Super Spectacular DC7 was also Superman 245 (Dec 1971), but still all reprint. The title switched back to stand-alone for issues DC14 (Feb 1973) to DC22 (Nov 1973).

Giant-Size Super-Stars was the first of Marvel's Giant-Size series. Its second issue was titled Giant-Size Fantastic Four. By Issue 5, GS FF became all reprint and issue 6 was the last. The Marvel monsters were well-represented ... Giant-Size Creatures was Marvel's second Giant-Size issue - that became Giant-Size Werewolf with issue 2.

It would take Marvel until 1974 to respond with their own line of Giant-Size comics - 68 pages of mostly new material for 50 cents. Giant-Size Man-Thing remains a favourite to this day. The experiment wasn't a success and the final Giant-Size issues became reprint. None lasted beyond six issues.

Here's the two Bullpen Bulletin Pages, if you want to read the full text yourself ...
just click on the image to enlarge to reading size.

So, as we now know, DC then raised the page count and price on its entire line of comics with the August 1971 cover-dated issues. Martin Goodman followed a month or two later with the November 1971 cover-dated comics. Just why Martin even bothered to do that for a single month will forever remain a mystery. He could have just as easily gone to straight 20 cents for 36 pages, still offered the big discount to the distributors, and saved himself a lot of hassle. It seems that Goodman didn't share his full plan - if he actually had one - with his editorial team. The Bullpen Bulletins for November 1971 talks about all the superhero titles going to 52 pages and 25 cents, but actually, all the titles did, including the war, romance and monster mags. 

I wonder whether this was some sort of try-out for the combined Iron Man / Daredevil title that Stan mentioned in the Bullpen Bulletins.The timing seems to make sense as the lineup change kicked off in Oct 1970 and ended in Nov 1971.

It also mentions that Iron Man and Daredevil would be combined into a single magazine, but actually, they weren't. And there's also talk of Astonishing Tales featuring a 20-page Inhumans story, but it didn't. It featured Ka-Zar and Dr Doom in two ten-page stories.

Then, two months later, Stan was forced to print a retraction. He brushed it off as having to do with financial matters that we Marvelites wouldn't understand or care about, then went on to say that the new try-out titles, Marvel Feature, Marvel Spotlight and Marvel Premiere would all be giant-size 25 cent titles. Except Marvel Premiere wasn't.

Marvel's new try-out books were originally announced as 25 cent, 48-page books, but delays and printing bottlenecks - caused in all likelihood buy Marvel's over-ambitious expansion - meant that the window was lost, and while Marvel Feature 1 was a 48-page book, Marvel Spotlight 1 was a regular size. Confusingly, Marvel Spotlight 2 was 48 pages, then Marvel Premier 1 was 36 pages ...

Confusion was rife in the Bullpen, and it seemed that nobody knew what the plan was supposed to be. If this truly was the first time Marvel began to outsell DC, then it was more dumb luck than design. Because it certainly didn't look like Martin Goodman knew what he was doing.

However, there does appear to be strong evidence that Marvel's sales may have overtaken DC's even earlier than this. Especially give Carmine Infantino's assertion that no publisher knew the final sales figures of a comic until at least a year after its on-sale date.

After all this number-crunching, I'm going to tackle something lighter with my blog entry for May ...

Next: My Top Ten favourite DC Silver Age comics