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

Daredevil ... and other disabled defenders

LATE TO THE PARTY in the mid-1960s was the final addition to Stan Lee's classic superhero lineup, Daredevil. And with this one, Stan took his concept of "a hero with a flaw" even further and gave Matthew Murdock a disability: he made him blind.

I've mentioned in an earlier entry in this blog that in 1965 I marvelled at the idea of a blind superhero. Maybe because losing one's sight is one of our great primal fears - often the cover subject of the more extreme 1950s horror comics - and certainly something that scared me silly when I was a kid. Perhaps because of that, that issue of Daredevil, where he battles the Matador, made quite an impression on my ten year old self.

Nowhere on the cover does it mention Daredevil's Unique Selling Point. However, Stan does mention that the interior art is by Wally Wood. Is this the first time Stan cover credited an artist?

Though I'm quite sure that Daredevil 5 (Dec 1964) was the first issue of that title I saw, I don't really remember the order of the issues that led me to being a fan of the character. Certainly, the guest appearances in Fantastic Four 39 and 40 (Jun & Jul 1965) are in there somewhere and there's little doubt that Daredevil 7 (Apr 1965) is one of the great superhero stories of the 1960s ... but what I hadn't realised back then was that, as astonishing as the idea of a disabled superhero was, it was by no means unique in the history of comics.

BATTLING TOUGH ODDS

In fact, the concept of a blind superhero was first used back in the pre-comic days of the pulps. The Black Bat (the second character to bear that name - the first was a plain-clothes, Saint-style detective debuting in 1934) was the alter-ago of crusading district attorney Tony Quinn, who is blinded when acid is thrown in his face in a revenge attack by mobsters. Quinn puts on a bat-like costume and fights crime, beginning in the June 1939 issue of Black Book Detective. It seems likely that DC's Batman, who hit the stands shortly afterwards, bore just a coincidental similarity, as Thrilling Publications and DC entered into an amicable arrangement where both characters could exist on the newsstands side-by-side.

The Black Bat's costume bears more than a passing resemblance to Batman's, though in fairness it should be pointed out that both characters appeared on the stands at around the same time.

Actually, more similar to The Black Bat than Batman was DC's later hero Dr. Mid-Nite, both attacked by vengeful gangsters - both rendered blind in the attack, both becoming masked vigilantes waging a war on criminals. Dr. Mid-Nite's special ability is that though essentially blind in daylight, he can see perfectly in pitch black. 

Though he was very much the second attraction in the long-running All-American Comics, after Green Lantern, Dr Mid-Nite never rated a cover appearance. The first time he was cover-featured was on All-Star 8 when he was inducted into The Justice Society of America.

Dr. Mid-Nite enjoyed a long run in All-American, lasting until the title was cancelled with issue 102 (Oct 1948), and was a long-serving member of the Justice Society, appearing in most issues of All-Star Comics, from 8 (Dec 1941), his first appearance, through to the end of the Justice Society's run in the final issue, 57 (Feb 1951).

Another Golden Age character who battled against tough odds was the original Daredevil, who first appeared in Lev Gleason's Silver Steak Comics 6 (Sep 1940) and went on to have a long and successful run in his own title, Daredevil Comics, starting in July 1941. Though the character was created by Jack Binder for editor Jack Cole, it was legendary creator Charles Biro who took over and wrote and drew the character for the rest of his ten year run.

Though Daredevil started off in Silver Streak Comics in a yellow and blue leotard, by the time he got his own title, the costume had transformed into red and blue and his inability to speak had been dropped without explanation. Comics, eh?

Bart Hill became Daredevil after a childhood trauma, where he witnessed his father's murder by criminals and was himself branded. The boomerang-shaped scar drove the youngster to develop his facility with boomerangs, though the experience left him mute. Adopting a blue and red costume and the name Daredevil, he waged a vigilante war against crime and criminals.

By the January 1950 issue, with superheroes in a sharp decline, Daredevil had been edged out of his own book by his kid side-kicks, The Little Wiseguys, and there was little scope for any further disabled heroes until super-characters made a return towards the end of the decade.

AND ... YOU'RE BACK IN THE SIXTIES

At the beginning of the 1960s, in response to DC's burgeoning line of superheroes, Stan Lee had bucked boss Martin Goodman's trend and done something different rather than just copying what was selling. He created a line of superheroes with flaws, the first of which was the ever-popular Ben Grimm, also known as The Thing, who viewed his enormous strength and orange, lumpy skin very much as an affliction.

Ben Grimm saw his transformation into the Thing in Fantastic Four 1 (Nov 1961) as a disability, and Tony Stark's life-threatening heart condition, shown here in Tales of Suspense 40 (Apr 1963), would certainly class him as disabled. It wasn't immediately clear in X-Men 1 that Professor X is wheelchair-bound, and Stan and Jack don't show him in his wheelchair until page 8 - though given that he changes from armchair to wheelchair mid-sentence, this may have been a mistake on Jack's part. (Click image to enlarge)

Right behind him was Tony Stark, who in Tales of Suspense 39 (Apr 1963) took some shrapnel in the heart and was cursed to wear an iron chest plate to keep him alive and which also turned him into the superhero, Iron Man. Then, not six months later, Professor Xavier, wheelchair-bound leader of The X-Men debuted in X-Men 1 (Sep 1963), though the similarly afflicted Chief, leader of the Doom Patrol, had appeared three months earlier in My Greatest Adventure 80 (Jun 1963). I'm not including Dr Don Blake here, as his disability disappeared when he transformed into Thor, much like the earlier Freddie Freeman/Captain Marvel Jr.

So it's not like it was a giant step to introduce Daredevil in 1964, as the accidently-blinded Matt Murdock whose other senses are greatly enhanced by the radioactive cannister that struck him across the eyes. If, like me, you were unfamiliar with the unsighted heroes who had gone before, this was pretty radical concept.

All through the first issue of Daredevil (Apr 1964), Stan Lee plays cat and mouse with the reader, hinting that Daredevil is Matt Murdock, and suggesting that his blindness might be cured somehow some time, until finally revealing that Daredevil is, indeed a blind superhero.

Stan Lee cleverly withheld the secret of Daredevil's abilities until very late in the story. So we readers see the yellow and red costumed hero beat up on some shady gangster types, then we cut to Matt Murdock's back story. Where we learn that as a young boy, Matt idolised his father, a fading heavyweight boxer by the name of "Battling" Murdock (we never do learn his real name in this first issue). But Murdock senior wants to make sure his boy studies hard and makes a real success of his life, and so struggles to keep his son in law school, signing with a very shady promotor known as The Fixer. It all comes to a head as Murdock Sr rushes home to tell Matt of his newly "revitalised" boxing career, and at the same time, Matt is injured while trying to saving an elderly blind man from being run over. In the ensuing accident, Matt is struck by a container of radioactive material that tumbles from the truck, blinding him.

Stan throws in a red herring on page 9, where Murdock Sr suggests to Matt that his eyesight might be restored in a few years time, "after the tissues have healed". And of course, Battler Murdock has success after success in the ring, little realising that The Fixer has arranged for his opponents to take "dives". Finally, Murdock Sr has a shot at the title but is told by the Fixer that it's the end of the line and this time he'll be losing. A basically honest man, Murdock can't bring himself to deliberately throw the fight while his son is watching, and somehow manages to win. But The Fixer doesn't like not getting his own way, and has Murdock murdered right outside the boxing arena. And it's this that spurs the blind Matt Murdock to become a superhero and avenge his father's murder.

Bill Everett, pictured at the 1970 New York Comic Convention.

What is kind of curious is that Stan hired Bill Everett to draw the first issue of Daredevil. Everett had worked for Marvel on and off since 1939's Marvel Comics 1, creating, then writing and drawing, The Sub-Mariner for this and other Timely titles. 

As the Timely superheroes wound down at the end of the 1940s, the Sub-Mariner vehicle Marvel Mystery Comics became the horror title Marvel Tales and Everett switched seamlessly from one to the other. Everett also drew stories for Marvel's growing line of romance comics, and took over Timely's last stab at a superhero, Marvel Boy, from Russ Heath. Though he'd be a regular contributor to the Atlas mystery titles throughout the 1950s, Everett also drew briefly for Eastern Color (New Heroic Comics, Personal Love) and Orbit-Wanted (Wanted). 

Marvel Tales was a retitling of the Sub-Mariner vehicle Marvel Mystery Comics, and Everett provided the cover for the earliest issues. In the mid-1950s, The Sub-Mariner had a brief revival, still drawn by Everett and right at the end, there was Everett turning in one of the very last covers of the Atlas era.

Right up until the Great Atlas Implosion of 1957, Everett was one of Stan Lee's main artists, drawing mystery, romance and war tales with equal facility, reviving The Sub-Mariner for a short run between 1954 and 1955, turning in around 20 pages a month as well as two or three covers.

Once the Atlas work dried up, Everett left the comics field and took a managerial job at a paper company in Massachusetts. In an interview with Roy Thomas for Alter Ego in 1970, Everett revealed how he came to pencil the first issue of Daredevil: 

"I must have called Stan, had some contact with him, I don't know why. I know we tried to do it on the phone. I know he had this idea for Daredevil; he thought he had an idea ... With a long-distance phone call, it just wasn't coming out right, so I said, 'All right, I'll come down this weekend or something. I'll take a day off [from his job as art director at Eton Paper Corporation] and come down to New York' ... I did the one issue, but I found that I couldn't do it and handle my job, because it was a managerial job. I didn't get paid overtime but I was on an annual salary, so my time was not my own. I was putting in 14 or 15 hours a day at the plant and then to come home and try to do comics at night was just too much. And I didn't make deadlines – I just couldn't make them – so I just did the one issue and didn't do any more."

It seems that Bill Everett's art for Daredevil 1 was so late that it caused problems getting the book ready in time for press, according to latter-day Marvel publisher Joe Queseda: [Marvel Production Manager Sol Brodsky and Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko inked] "a lot of backgrounds and secondary figures on the fly [and] cobbled the cover and the splash page together from Kirby's original concept drawing."

The splash page of Daredevil 1 was pasted together in the Bullpen by Sol Brodsky, using a Jack Kirby drawing of Daredevil. It's not clear why Bill Everett didn't provide a splash page himself, as I'd have thought that would have been, for many reasons, the first thing he drew. Or perhaps he did and Stan Lee didn't like it.

And the idea that Jack Kirby designed the Daredevil costume was remembered by Mark Evanier in his blog, News From Me: "[Jack Kirby] seems to have participated in the design of Daredevil's first costume. ... Everett did tell me that Jack had come up with the idea of Daredevil's billy club ... Jack, in effect, drew the first page of that first Daredevil story. In the rush to get that seriously late book to press, there wasn't time to complete Page One, so Stan had Sol Brodsky slap together a paste-up that employed Kirby's cover drawing ... Everett volunteered to me that Jack had 'helped him' though he wouldn't – or more likely, couldn't – elaborate on that. He just plain didn't remember it well, and in later years apparently gave others who asked a wide range of answers."

When Everett returned to The Sub-Mariner in the mid-1950s after a five-year hiatus, his art style was even more polished than it had been - certainly one of my favourites of that era.

In the end, Bill Everett's art for that first issue is curiously old-fashioned and more than a little cartoon-y, quite unlike anything else Marvel was doing at the time. It was a world away from Everett's classically rendered Sub-Mariner art, especially the smoothly-polished style he was using in the 1950s. So I'm not sure it was such a bad thing that, with the second issue, Everett was replaced by EC mainstay Joe Orlando.

Behind a Jack Kirby/Vince Coletta cover, penciller Joe Orlando brought some creative and modern-looking storytelling to his first work for Marvel Comics.  The scene in which he breaks up the car-theft ring (centre) is dynamic, and Orlando's scenes of Matt Murdock's civilian life have the look of a romance comic.

Daredevil 2 (Jun 1964) was again written by Stan Lee and placed the character firmly in the burgeoning Marvel Universe, with a guest appearance by The Thing and the rest of the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man's old foe Electro for a villain. It's a pretty good second issue and, though Stan hasn't quite worked out what Daredevil's U.S.P. is, there's still a good balance between action and drama with a bit of comedy provided by Ben Grimm's guest appearance.

I'm sure Stan thought getting Joe Orlando on-board as penciller was a bit of a coup, but saddling the EC great with Vince Colletta as inker was a body blow that Orlando's pencils just couldn't recover from.

WHO THE HECK IS JOE ORLANDO?

Joe Orlando got into comics after being discharged from the US Army in 1948, when he started working on "Bob Brown of Notre Dame" in Charlton's Catholic Comics, a religion themed anthology, beginning with issue v3#1 (19, Jul 1948) and various strips for the same company's Cowboy Western. Then, for whatever reason, the work dried up at Charlton and Orlando didn't work for a few months, until he fetched up at Fox, where he contributed to the Jungle Lil (Apr 1950) and Jungle Jo (May 1950) one-shots, met Wally Wood and worked with him for the first time.

Joe Orlando's earliest work was for Charlton. Cowboy Western 23 (Jul 1949) featured his art on the cover. Jungle Lil 1 (Apr 1950) had one story pencilled and inked by Orlando. Avon's Rocket to the Moon one-shot (1951) was entirely pencilled by Orlando and inked by Wally Wood.

Orlando would continue to work with Wood at other companies, Orlando pencilling and Wood inking, first at Avon, on the one-off title Rocket to the Moon (1951), then at Youthful Publications on Captain Science 4 & 5 (Jun & Aug 1951), and Space Detective 1 & 2 (Jul & Nov 1951). But all this was just a prelude to a life-altering transition for both artists.

Captain Science 1 and Space Detective 1 were pencilled and inked by Orlando and Wood, covers and interiors. Then, mixing it up a little, Space Detective 2's cover was pencilled by Wood and inked by Orlando.

Wally Wood had already been working for Bill Gaines' legendary EC Comics. His first story for Gaines had been "The Living Corpse" in Crypt of Terror 18 (Jun-Jul 1950), followed very quickly by "The Black Arts" in Weird Fantasy 14 (Jul-Aug 1950). So it seems highly likely that it was Wood who introduced Joe Orlando to the EC editors. Orlando's first job for EC was "Forbidden Fruit" in Haunt of Fear 9 (Sep-Oct 1951), a grisly tale of the terrible fate awaiting a couple who fail to heed warnings and steal the food of a fellow desert island castaway.

Joe Orlando's art for the EC line, even in his debut story, "Forbidden Fruit", is slick and confident, with a gorgeous smooth inking style and strong pencilling and storytelling.

From there, Orlando worked almost exclusively for EC, becoming one of their mainstay artists and contributing to almost every EC title: Haunt of Fear, Panic, Shock Suspenstories, Vault of Horror, Weird Fantasy and Weird Science, as well as the later "New Direction" titles: Impact, M.D. and Valor, and the short-lived "Picto-Fiction" magazines: Crime, Confessions and Terror Illustrated.

Joe Orlando drew for every phase of EC Comics, right up to the end, contributing many classic stories for the line, but curiously few covers.

If Orlando deserves to be remembered for one stand-out EC story, then that must surely be "Judgment Day" in Weird Fantasy 18 (Mar 1953). At a time when comics were under scrutiny for being "subversive", Al Feldstein wrote a story where an interstellar ambassador from Earth, Tarlton, visits a planet of robots, and notices that the robots are divided into those with orange casings and those with blue. Yet while observing the manufacturing process of the inferior blue robots, he notes, "The internal units, my friend, the same designs, original designs. No improvement. No difference. Exactly like yours." One of the blue robots then comments, "The [blue] sheathings make that difference to the orange robots, Tarlton. It limits us to the rear of mobile-buses ... places us in different recharging stations ... forces us to live in a special section of the city."

At the end of the seven-page story, a saddened Tarlton tells the orange robots that they're not ready to join the Great Galactic Republic yet. Until they learn to live together as equals, as mankind has done, only then will real progress be possible. Then he boards his space craft and takes off his helmet, "... and the instrument lights made the beads of perspiration on his dark skin twinkle like stars."

Astonishingly, when Gaines and Feldstein sought to reprint this story in Incredible Science Fiction 33 (Jan 1956), the Comic Code administrator Judge Charles Murphy wanted the black astronaut changing to a white man. Gaines refused, saying that it would make nonsense of the story. The Judge then wanted the beads of sweat removed from the artwork, presumably because a black man's sweat may somehow give offence. Gaines again refused, threatening this time to sue the Comics Code. Judge Murphy backed down.

But it was the last colour comic Gaines would publish.

Probably the bravest thing I've ever seen in comics. Back in the 1950s, racism was a daily way of life. Anyone who railed against that risked being branded a "pinko" or worse. Yet in Weird Fantasy 18, of all places, Bill Gaines, Al Feldstein and Joe Orlando took a stand against discrimination, more than a decade before anyone else really dared to. And they were all white guys.

After the ignominious collapse of EC Comics in 1956, Orlando packed up his portfolio and moved across the street to Martin Goodman's Atlas Comics, where he cranked out stories for such titles as Astonishing, Battle, Journey into Mystery, Marvel Tales, Spellbound and Strange Tales for a much lower page rate, for the next two years. At the end of 1957, the great Atlas Implosion again left Orlando out of work, so he found pencilling work at Prize Comics, on All For Love, Black Magic and Justice Traps the Guilty, as well as contributing an increasing number of features to Mad Magazine. It was when Prize published its last comic book in 1963 that Joe Orlando washed up on the shores of Martin Goodman's Marvel Comics.

HE WHO DARES ...

Quite how Joe Orlando ended up at Marvel at the tail-end of 1963 isn't very clear. Stan Lee has always been very open about wanting artists who knew how to break down a story with minimum supervision, or even input, from him. Some artists liked that approach and some didn't. Some felt  the "Marvel Method" gave them enormous freedom to develop their strips that they wouldn't have had elsewhere, and some felt - wrongly in my opinion - that they were doing all the work and that Stan was getting paid for doing nothing. So Joe Orlando, with his enormous storytelling experience and artistic reputation must have seemed like an excellent recruit for Marvel Comics. And putting Orlando straight onto a new character like Daredevil was a big vote of confidence from the Marvel editor.

For his third outing, Daredevil faced The Owl, a Wall Street financier whose dodgy deals finally catch up with him. Rather than face court and disgrace, he becomes a fully paid-up supervillain and hides out in an inconspicuous owl-shaped house on a cliffside overlooking the city.

Daredevil 3 (Aug 1964) was Stan's chance to start giving the character his own style and identity. For a start, Daredevil wasn't up against any old Spider-Man castoff. He had his very own super-foe to play off, The Owl, another in Stan's long line of animal villains. And Stan had Orlando design a weird little napsack for the hero to carry his civilian clothes in, which unfortunately looked a bit daft.

After years of crooked deals and tax dodging in the financial industry, "The Owl" finds himself arrested and indicted. Seeking a lawyer at random to defend what he thinks is a flimsy case, The Owl, engages Nelson and Murdock. But The Owl doesn't bother turning up for court the next day, and is now a fugitive. The Owl hides out in an owl-shaped building a couple of miles outside the city to plot his next move ... which is recruiting a couple of thugs - "Sad Sam" Simms and "Ape" Horgon and underlings. Inexplicably, the next time we see The Owl and his henchmen, they're lurking in the office next door to Nelson and Murdock, in some kind of bizarre attempt to retain the services of Matt Murdock. Daredevil discovers them and a fight ensues. The noise attracts the attention of Karen Page and The Owl captures both of them, and places them in giant bird cages. Of course, Daredevil escapes and another battle ensues which ends with The Owl plunging into the waters of the Hudson and sinking without a trace.

It's all a bit creaky and the story has a couple of holes you could drive a truck through, but it was still a big improvement over issue 2. For me the biggest let-down was still the inking of Vince Colletta. Stan must have felt that putting a long-time Marvel inker like Colletta was just an insurance policy to make sure Orlando didn't go off in any unexpected directions ... and there was the problem.

Orlando had mostly inked his own stuff, apart from his very earliest pencils which were inked by Wally Wood, and his own inking style was polished and very smooth. Colletta either didn't understand Orlando's style or didn't care, and his scratchy style refused to mesh with Orlando's pencils, giving a very unsatisfying result. There are flashes of brilliance from Orlando, but for the most part his art is lost in a murky swamp of "hay".

Daredevil 4 (Oct 1964) had a better story, even if it was one of Stan's old plots recycled. But sadly, the art wasn't getting any better, with Orlando's delicate pencils being hammered by Colletta's heavy-handed inking.

Things got a bit better with the fourth issue of Daredevil, an issue I wouldn't see until much later as it had fallen victim to the great Thorpe & Porter distribution snafu of 1964. This time, Stan and Joe put Daredevil up against a more cerebral villain, Killgrave, The Purple Man, who has the ability to make people do what he tells them to.

Stan had used the idea before - most notably in the Ant-Man story in Tales to Astonish 44 (Apr 1963) and also in the Iron Man story in Tales of Suspense 41 (May 1963), where Dr Strange (no, not that one) takes mental control of Iron Man. But in DD4 it's done quite a bit better, with a more interesting resolution, as Daredevil figures a way to block The Purple Man's power because he's virtually immune to it himself.

But for whatever reason, the Orlando-Colletta team wasn't firing on all cylinders. I've not found any reasons given in any of the interviews I've read, but whether Orlando left or Stan wasn't happy has gone unrecorded anywhere. But I can make a best guess ...

In the new letters column in issue 5, "Let's Level with Daredevil", Stan explained that Bill Everett had drawn the first issue of Daredevil "as a personal favour for Stan. Then, another buddy of Stan's, valiant Vince Colletta, offered to ink the mag for a few issues if jovial Joe Orlando would pencil it. Both these guys gave up lots of their own free time to help out until we could find a steady artist."

That may well be true. If Stan had pushed Orlando out, then it's unlikely that his immediate successor, Wally Wood, would have accepted the gig, given Joe and Wally's history together. So it probably was a case of Orlando pinch-hitting for Stan until a permanent artist could be found.

In any event, Wally Wood's tenure on the title wouldn't be much longer that his EC stablemate's ... and the split between Wood and Marvel would be a mite more acrimonious. But that's a story for next time.

Next: Hooray for Wally Wood