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

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