Daredevil: Hooray for Wally Wood

THE VERY FIRST DAREDEVIL comic I ever saw - around Easter 1965 - was Daredevil 5 (Dec 1964), with its striking Wally Wood cover and interior art. It was also Wood's first work on the title, and for Marvel, taking over from his old EC colleague and occasional inker Joe Orlando.

Daredevil 5 was Wally Wood's first work for Marvel since the four stories he'd done for Atlas around the middle of 1956, shortly after the tragic collapse of EC Comics, and uncredited pencil job under Colletta inks for Love Romances 96 (Nov 1961), coincidently the same month that Fantastic Four 1 came out.

At the time I was mesmerised by the idea of a blind superhero and - not knowing Wally Wood from Adam - Stan's cover blurb trumpeting the arrival of "the brilliant artistic craftsmanship of famous illustrator Wally Wood" completely passed me by. This may not have been the first time Stan puffed up an artist on the cover of one of his mags, but he'd never done it with this much hyperbole before.

However, as much as I loved the very idea of Daredevil, I wasn't mad about Wally Wood's art in this issue. Admittedly, at the time, I certainly wasn't aware of the brilliant work he'd done on the EC science-fiction titles, but my sensibilities were more in line with the work of Kirby, Ditko and Heck, and this new guy, with his tiny figures and crowded pages, just wasn't ticking any boxes for me.

WHO THE HECK IS WALLY WOOD?

Wallace Allan Wood was born in Menahga, Minnasota on 17 July 1929. As a child he devoured the great newspaper strips, like Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant and Terry and the Pirates. In love with drawing, he once dreamed he found a magic pencil that could draw anything. Wood graduated from high school in 1944 and enlisted in the Merchant Marine. In 1946, he transferred to the US Army Airborne 11th Paratroopers and was posted to occupied Japan. After demob in 1948, Wood found work as a waiter, and lugged his bulging portfolio around New York, trying to get drawing work from any publisher who'd let him in the door.

Wally Wood

Wood's luck began to turn when he met John Severin in a publisher's waiting room in October 1948. Wood visited the Charles William Harvey Studio where Severin was working and was introduced to Charles Stern, Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman. Learning that Will Eisner was looking for artists, Wood hurried over and was hired on the spot to draw backgrounds on The Spirit. The following year, Wood became an assistant to George Wunder, who'd taken over drawing Terry and the Pirates.

A George Wunder Terry and the Pirates daily from 1949. This would have been the period that Wood was working as one of Wunder's assistants, inking backgrounds and perhaps lettering.

Also during 1949, Wood got a foot in the door at Fox Publications, doing lettering on romance comics. He quickly graduated to backgrounds, then inking. Towards the end of 1949, Wood was contributing illustrations to the pulp magazines Six-Gun Western, Fighting Western, and Leading Western, for Trojan Publishing's Adolphe Barreaux, as well as getting actual comics work from Fox. His first Fox art was a ten-page story, "My One Misstep", in My Confession 7 (Aug 1949). More stories followed in My Experience, My Secret Life (he did his first Fox cover for issue 23) and My Love Affair.

While at Fox, Wood turned his hand to any kind of comic ... romance, classics and crime.However, it wasn't long before his varied work for Fox caught the eye of other publishers in the field ...

Pretty soon, Wood was branching out into other genres, doing comedy (Judy Canova), crime (Martin Kane, Private Eye) and jungle (Frank Buck). "For complete pages, it was $5 a page ... Twice a week, I would ink ten pages in one day," Wood later recalled in a 1981 interview for The Buyers' Guide. It was inevitable that others would notice Wood's talent and with new art partner Harry Harrison, Wood started contributing art to the blossoming EC comics - at first on Pre-Trend titles like Modern Love 5 (Feb-Mar 1950) and Saddle Romances 11 (Mar-Apr 1950), and on the very earliest New Trend titles, starting with Crypt of Terror 18 (Jun-Jul 1950) and Weird Fantasy 14 (Jul-Aug 1950).

Wally Wood's first work for EC was good (Weird Science 5, Jan-Feb 1951), but within a few short months, his art style transformed into something phenomenal (Weird Science 13, May-Jun 1952). And at the very same time, his old boss, Will Eisner, hand-picked Wood to take over the art on The Spirit (27 Jul 1952) for a brilliant (but ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to update the strip for the Space Age.

Very, very quickly, Wally Wood went from being a jobbing artist to a master craftsman. The speed of his improvement was simply astonishing. And even more incredibly, despite the ever-increasing amount of detail in his pages, he turned out art faster and faster. He would be one of Harvey Kurtzman's go-to artists for the new MAD comic (which would become vitally important later on in his career), where he'd craft pitch-perfect parodies of the great comics strips he'd loved as a kid, like Superman, Terry and the Pirates, Flash Gordon and Prince Valiant. And in his spare time, he managed to find time to draw a couple of classic comics for Avon ... 

Even while working almost flat-out for EC Comics, Wood moonlighted at Avon, producing high-adventure, science fiction and horror stories with equal ease. The quality never faltered ...

By mid-1952, Wood was working exclusively for EC, earning a princely $50 a page (by contrast other publishers were paying $15-20 a page). For the May-June 1952 issues alone, he contributed:

• seven pages to Two Fisted Tales 27, 
• cover and seven pages to Shock Suspenstories 3, 
• a six-pager and an eight-pager to Weird Fantasy 13 
• a cover plus an eight-pager and a six-pager to Weird Science 13. 
• And, of course, four weekly eight-pagers for The Spirit newspaper strip. 

That's 76 pages - pencils and inks over an eight week period ... 38 pages a month ... all of it finished to an incredible standard. No artist today could compete with that schedule. Wood was like an unstoppable machine. 

His value to EC was cemented by Editor Al Feldstein, who wrote a love-poem to Wood, "My World", illustrated by Wood himself, which ran in Weird Science 22 (Nov-Dec 1953)

No other artist at EC was treated with the level of respect that Wally Wood enjoyed. His work got better month-by-month and Wood ultimately became the star of his own strip in the last issue of Weird Science.

In his mid-twenties, Wood was having the time of his life. He was earning an eye-watering amount of money. His work jags lasted for days until he collapsed at his drawing board. His marathon art sessions were fuelled with alcohol. But he was young and his body could take the extraordinary punishment.

Even when EC crashed and burned in 1955, after the the Comics Code killed the horror books, and Bill Gaines' attempts to do the sanitised New Direction books (including Aces High, Extra, M.D. and Valor) failed, there was still MAD. Gaines turned his comedy comic into a 25c magazine, raised the page rates even higher than they were on the EC colour comics, and for the next ten years, Wood cruised straight on as MAD's star artist, winning "Best Comic Book Artist" two years in a row at the 1957 and 1958 National Cartoonists Society Awards. But even that wasn't enough ...

For about 12 glorious months, Wally Wood inked Dave Wood and Jack Kirby's Sky Masters newspaper strip, selected for the job - no doubt - because of his stints on the Weird Science/Fantasy comics for EC and of course "The Spirit on the Moon" for Will Eisner.

In 1958, Jack Kirby asked Wood to join a space-oriented newspaper strip project as inker. The strip had begun life as "Space Busters" devised by Kirby and scripter Dave Wood (no relation), but they'd been unable to find a home for the strip. Early in 1958, DC editor Jack Schiff was approached by an agent, Harry Elmlark, who was looking for a syndicated space strip for the newspapers. Kirby and Dave Wood showed Schiff Space Busters, but he wasn't that impressed. But he did encourage Kirby and Wood to take another swing at it, very likely offering some ideas of his own. The project morphed into Sky Masters of the Space Force and that was when Kirby asked Wally Wood to ink the strip.

In the late 1950's, Wally Wood was still MAD's busiest artist, and was creating gorgeous illustrations for science fiction market-leader Galaxy. It was probably the very pinnacle of his career. But trouble was just around the corner ...

By this time, Wally Wood was working almost exclusively for MAD, but was also providing high quality illustrations for men's magazines and science fiction magazines like Galaxy. It all went well for a while, but then Kirby had a falling out with Schiff over payments and the whole thing turned legal. So Wally Wood left them to their squabbles - and dumped Challengers of the Unknown, which he'd also been inking over Kirby - and once again concentrated on his MAD work and his science fiction illustrations. But as the 1950s drew to a close Wood was feeling restless and a bit put-upon. He was suffering from chronic headaches and was drinking ever-more heavily to dull the pain. This, coupled with the crash of Sky Masters, led to him becoming tetchy and in 1964, as his art was beginning to suffer, MAD rejected one of his strips, Wood's first rejection since around 1950. Making matters even worse, the editor who rejected his art was Al Feldstein, the same guy who'd written "My World" ten years earlier. Feeling crushed, Wood phoned the editorial offices and quit MAD.

Artist Russ Jones, who'd been assisting Wood at that time recalled in a later interview, "MAD sent Woody a rejection slip on a comic strip lampoon, and it about killed him. Yes, the job was covered in liquid paper, but it was great compared to what Bob Clarke produced. I think the guys at MAD were just kidding around, but it backfired! I stood rooted when Wally called Bill Gaines and quit. Poor Bill ... he called many times to try and talk Woody back ... but no go. Poor Wally ... he threw out his biggest client. The whole affair was sad. No winners."

For Monster World 1, Wood wrote and drew an adaptation of the 1932 Universal horror, The Mummy. The next issue of the magazine continued the Mummy adaptations, but Wood was conspicuously absent, turning the work over to assistant Russ Jones and former EC stablemate, Joe Orlando.

With all his bridges burnt, Wood had nowhere else to go, so he returned to four-colour comics, first working for the lowest payers in the field, Charlton, on war books like D-Day 2 and War and Attack 1 (both Fall 1964), then a quick eight-pager for Warren's Monster World 1 (Nov 1964) - an adaptation of the Universal horror movie The Mummy, with assistant Russ Jones. It was at this low ebb that Wood - probably on Joe Orlando's advice - turned to Stan Lee for work and was assigned Daredevil. And that's why Stan was trumpeting the arrival of Wood on Daredevil as though it were the Second Coming ...

THE ARTIST WITHOUT FEAR

With his second job on Daredevil - issue 6 (Feb 1965) - Wood seemed to have a better grasp of what Stan Lee was looking for, but for my money, the pacing was still off. Too many pages in the story are covered in speech balloons, making me think Wood hadn't devoted enough space to the character exposition that Stan liked to include in his books. On the other hand, the action sequences were very well thought-out. Wood had wisely cut back from the amount of detail he would have included in his EC science fiction strips, rendering his fight scenes in a clean, spare style that far better suited the material.

Wood's work on Daredevil 6 was a slight improvement over the previous issue, but the civilian scenes were still way too wordy and the fight sequences, while well crafted lacked variety.

But something wasn't quite right. It was as though Wood didn't get the Marvel way ... Was he just phoning the work in? Probably not, though long-time collaborator Dan Adkins said of that period, "[Wood] got the highest rate in the industry. $200 per page at MAD magazine where he was the most popular artist. When he quit MAD magazine and went over to Marvel Comics, Marvel's starting rates at the time were $20 per page to pencil and $15 per page to ink. Out of respect to Wally, they paid him $45 per page to pencil and ink, but not the bonus money he was looking for."

When viewed as single units the Daredevil pages looked, well, same-y. Where Kirby or Ditko would mix long-shots and close ups depending on the needs of the scene and the emotion to be conveyed by each panel, Wood framed everything at the same distance.

Some time later in his career, I wasn't able to determine when, Wally Wood created the legendary 22 Comic Panels That Always Work ... but I wasn't seeing any evidence of that thinking in Wood's Daredevil stories.

The story itself united two b-class villains - The Ox from Amazing Spider-Man 10 & 14 (Mar & Jul 1964), and The Eel, last seen battling The Human Torch in Strange Tales 117 (Feb 1964) - with a new villain, Mr Fear, whose "fear gas" can turn anyone into a nervous wreck. It's an interesting idea, pitting The Man Without Fear against Fear itself ... but what should have been a definitive clash of opposites ends up being a fairly pedestrian filler issue. Fortunately, the title would move up a gear with the next issue.

Daredevil 7 (Apr 1965) was where Wally Wood took hold of the character and began to make Daredevil his own. First, he redesigned DD's costume, using the devil part of the character's name to inspire a more streamlined approach, and giving the hero a satanic look.

Daredevil 7 introduced a new costume for DD and demonstrated that the hero's will was almost as powerful as The Sub-Mariner's sea-born super-strength.

Next, Wood's story breakdowns and page design seemed much more confident. Yes, he was still using sequences of mid-distance shots for most of the fight scenes, but there was a much more concerted effort to mix up the long-shots, close-ups and splash panels.

The plot has Sub-Mariner return to the Surface World to bring a civil lawsuit against the air-breathers for depriving his people of the right to live on land. And he decides that Nelson & Murdock are the lawyers for him. But the attorneys tell him that there's no one to sue, as no individual, company or nation represents the entire human race. So Namor decides that causing a bit of mayhem and getting arrested will get him his day in court. This part of it sounds very much like a Lee plot device.

No sooner has The Sub-Mariner surrendered himself to the police and is arraigned for his crimes than word reaches him that the craven Warlord Krang has instigated a rebellion against Namor in their native Atlantis. The Sub-Mariner decides the needs of his realm are more pressing than his legal case against the humans and leaves the jail as though the bars were so much cardboard. The final battle, in which a hopelessly out-matched Daredevil fights Namor until he passes out, pretty much defined the hero's character for the next couple of decades.

But already, Wood was feeling he was being taken advantage of. The Marvel Method used by Stan, which worked pretty well for his other artists at this time, was rankling Wally Wood. He felt that he was doing at least half Stan's job without getting the credit or the payment that he deserved. Later, in an angry editorial in his self-published Woodwork Gazette, Wood described an editor he called Stanley, who "came up with two surefire ideas... the first one was 'Why not let the artists WRITE the stories as well as draw them?'... And the second was... ALWAYS SIGN YOUR NAME ON TOP... BIG."

Here's something interesting ... Wood's original layout for Daredevil 7 page 4. You can see that Stan has asked for changes and the finished art is slightly different from the first pencil rough.

Nonetheless, Wood sucked it up and carried on as, at this point in his career, he didn't have that many options open to him. 

Daredevil 8 (Jun 1965) introduced a new villain who, though a little bonkers, I always quite liked ... The Stilt-Man. It was also the second cover in a row to feature a newspaper headline as a way of explaining what was going on. Maybe Wood wanted that to be a thing, but it didn't pan out, or perhaps it was just coincidence.

Daredevil 8 gave us a cut-away plan of Daredevil's billy club. Later in the issue, it's also revealed that Daredevil's cowl contains sophisticated radio equipment to monitor police wavebands. Later in his career, Daredevil's powers would let him do that without the need for electronics. During the battle, Wood gives us some nice images of Stilt-Man towering above the city skyline.

The story has Matt Murdock engaged by a scientist who says his invention has been stolen by his employer. But as Murdock investigates the claims further, it becomes apparent that whoever has the invention is also The Stilt-Man. No prizes for guessing who the real baddie is ...

At the same time, Stan (I'm sure it was Stan) is planting seeds, suggesting that it might be possible to restore Matt's vision. In fact, Karen Page is shown suggesting that Matt consults an eminent Boston eye specialist, Dr Van Eyck. But Matt is reluctant, fearing it may compromise his powers, and Karen gets angry with him and storms out. And this sets up the situation for the next issue ...

Daredevil 9 drafted in Giant-Man artist Bob Powell to help Wally Wood by doing finished pencils over Wood's layouts. I'm not sure how that helped Wood, given that he was still (to his mind) co-writing the comic without credit or payment. The tale itself is fun, pitting Daredevil against knights in armour, a common Wood trope.

Some changes were in effect with Daredevil 9 (Aug 1965). Even though Wood was a proven speed-demon, he's assisted on this issue by Bob Powell, with whom he'd worked on the notorious Mars Attacks gum-card series. Powell had also stepped in when Joe Orlando found himself unable to work with Stan Lee on the Giant-Man strip a few months earlier.

The plot contrives to send Matt Murdock, at Karen Page's instigation, to a European dictatorship, run by an old college acquaintance of Murdock's Klaus Kruger, the Duke of Lichtenbad, whence eye specialist Dr Van Eyck has emigrated. Once there, Daredevil is caught up in a peasants' revolt and battles Kruger's palace guards, who are all togged up in medieval armour. It's quite a fun issue, and I was always a sucker for knights in armour ...

Issue 10 brought more changes in the creative duties. With Wood increasingly disgruntled with Stan Lee's way of working, Stan credited Wood with writing as well as drawing the story, with Bob Powell providing layouts. But the way Stan did it only served to enrage Wood further.

It seems likely that Wood was agitating behind the scenes to be given proper credit as co-writer on the Daredevil comic. And with this issue he gets his wish. Continuing his fondness for cutaways, this time round Wood gives us a diagram of The Organizer's headquarters.

The intro of the splash page of the issue says, "Wally Wood has always wanted to try his hand at writing a story as well as drawing it, and Big-Hearted Stan (who wanted a rest anyway) said okay. So what follows next is anybody's guess. You may like it or not, but, you can be sure of this ... it's gonna be different!" It's not the most gracious announcement I've ever seen, but there's another caption box at the end of the story that might give further insight into Stan's tone.

Apparently, after campaigning to be credited with writing Daredevil, Wood declined to script the second half of the story, leaving Stan to sort out the plot threads as best he could. "Now that Wally got writing out his system," says Stan's closing caption, "he left it to poor Stan to finish next issue. Can he do it? That's the real mystery! But while you're waiting, see if you can find the clue we planted showing who the Organiser is! It'll all come out in the wash next issue when Stan wraps it up. See you then!" So I can begin to see why there might be some growing acrimony between Stan and Wally. It's likely this is the point where Wood had told Stan that he was quitting

All that aside, Daredevil 10's not half bad ... there are a few stylistic differences, but broadly Wood does a pretty good job of making the characters all sound like themselves. And with Bob Powell doing the layouts, there's much more variety in the framing of each panel. 

The plot has a mysterious character, The Organizer, recruiting a quartet of crooks and giving them animal costumes and powers to carry out a series of crimes. They are Cat-Man, Frog-Man, Bird-Man and Ape-Man. Given Stan's penchant for animal-themed villains, I suspect he may have had something to do with the casting. Curiously, though there is an Ape-Man featured as one of The Owl's henchmen in Daredevil 3, Ape Horgan, this one appears to be a different person, Monk Keefer. Even more confusingly, the Cat-Man character in this tale has the civilian name of Townshend Horgan. Was he intended to be a relative of the first Ape-Man? Or did Wood (and Stan) just get a bit muddled with their characters' names? It's the sort of continuity glitch that Roy Thomas would obsess about fixing in Marvel's later years.

There's further dissension in the letters column. One reader, Larry Brown, complains that Daredevil is turning into Gadget Man and that "all these gadgets detract from the credibility." In the response, Stan says, "Want us to let you in on an inside squabble, Larry? Sturdy Stan agrees with you - he is also opposed to so much gadgetry. But Winsome Wally really digs those hoked up appurtenances, and - being Wally's the guy who has to draw them, Stan went along with him. But we'll see how the future mail goes." Thus were the battle lines drawn. There probably wasn't any walking back from this point.

We probably shouldn't be that surprised to see Stan taking potshots on the Daredevil letters page. He must have been pretty ticked off with Wally Wood. And while it's not like Stan to be anything other than gentlemanly, he couldn't have been best pleased at Wood's attitude, considering Stan likely saw himself as trying to help out an artist he admired who was going through a bad patch. And given the circumstances, Wood's tetchiness is not that surprising either, as from Wood's point of view, Stan was getting him to co-write the comic - perhaps more than co-write - take all the credit and pay him just $45 a page. After all, at MAD they gave him full scripts and paid him $200 a page.

Daredevil 11 was plotted and scripted by Stan, pencilled by Bob Powell and inked by Wood. In the circumstances, the most surprising thing is that Wood stuck around long enough to ink the story at all. In the event it's not a bad issue, and benefits from some of Powell's characteristic touches, like the cinematic four panels across the top of page 17 (above right).

Daredevil 11 (Dec 1965) left Stan trying to finish a story begun by Wally Wood. He actually does a pretty fair job, though at times there looks to be a bit to much text on the page. The pacing of the hectic story is much helped by Bob Powell's layouts and pencilling, as he is more adept at bringing variety to the panel framing than Wood had been. 

The issue closes with Matt announcing he's taking a leave of absence from Nelson & Murdock and Stan announcing that next issue there'll be new villains and a new artist, though he gives no hint as to who either might be.

Meanwhile, though Wood had inked this issue of Daredevil, he had already planned his escape route. A former Archie Comics editor, Harry Shorten, had approached Wood during 1965, trying to recruit him for a new venture, Tower Comics. Tower Publications had been a publisher of erotic and science fiction paperbacks from 1958, established by one of the co-founders of Archie Comics, Louis Silberkleit, and now, seeing the success of Marvel, wanted to get into the comics business. Wood called Shorten's offer "a dream set-up. I created all the characters, wrote most of the stories, and drew most of the covers. I did as much of the art as I could... But it was fun."

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents 1 (Nov 1965) was the first of the Tower Comics line. Much of the interior art was by Wood, and it betrayed the same limitations I saw in his Daredevil work, with nearly every panel being framed as a mid-shot. Most of the scripting in this issue was by Len Brown, though Wood co-scripted the Dynamo story in the back of the book.

Wood hired old colleagues from his EC days - Al Williamson and Reed Crandell - to help out with the art, and commissioned his own wife Tatjana Wood to colour the covers. He created the characters T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, NoMan, Menthor and Dynamo. Pretty soon, Gil Kane, Steve Ditko, George Tuska and Mike Sekowsky joined. Scripts were by Len Brown (who had worked with Wood on Mars Attacks and had helped conceive the THUNDER Agents), Larry Ivie and Wood himself. And the comics were mostly 25c, 64-page giants.

The only problem was ... the stories were just dull.

Tower Comics lasted from 1966 to 1969, when distribution problems cause Tower Publications to fold the line.

NOW WHAT?

To me it seems quite apparent that Stan was angry and disappointed with Wood's behaviour. It was highly unusual for him to contradict or criticise any of his team in print, but he did - however mildly - with Wood. You can see that, for Stan, the prospect of Wood joining the Bullpen was a big event. Though as my esteemed fellow Marvel blogger Nick Caputo mentioned in the comments last time, Stan did namecheck artists on Marvel covers before this, I think we can agree that line on the Daredevil 5 cover, "under the brilliant artistic craftsmanship of famous illustrator Wally Wood", goes a bit beyond the customary Lee hyperbole.

Add to this that many have said that Stan would often give work to those who needed it, whether Stan (or Marvel) needed it. There's a story that one day during the 1950s, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman found a stack of "inventory" stories that Stan had commissioned to help out freelancers financially, but hadn't published. Goodman got angry and told Stan he had to stop commissioning until the backlog was used up. In the early Sixties, Stan had given Joe Siegel, creator of Superman, work scripting Human Torch stories for Strange Tales, but that hadn't worked out so well. By 1968, it was getting hard for Siegel to find work, so Stan hired him as a proofreader in the Bullpen.

What would the Sub-Mariner solo strip in Tales to Astonish have looked like if Wally Wood had drawn it instead of Gene Colan? And why wasn't Everett asked to draw Sub-Mariner? After all, he created it. Or had he blotted his copybook (at least temporarily) with his deadline issues on Daredevil 1?

Stan probably saw Wood as being in a similar situation in the late summer of 1964, right after Wood had recklessly quit MAD magazine. So he gave the guy a job. This wasn't just charity. Stan knew a legendary artist when he saw one. And not only did he want Wood drawing Daredevil, but legend has it that he was going to give Marvel's new Sub-Mariner strip to Wood as well. In his Alter-Ego magazine, Roy Thomas said that, “Wally was slated to go from Daredevil onto the then-up-coming Sub-Mariner solo series in Tales to Astonish [#70, Aug. 1965].”

So it must have stung that Wood was so disgruntled with Lee and Marvel from the get-go, and by the time Wood quit, I'm fairly sure Stan wasn't that sorry to see him leave.

However, in the end, it didn't work out so bad for Stan and Marvel. The very next issue of Daredevil featured the art of John Romita - albeit over Kirby layouts - and that association worked out pretty well over the years.

Next: The Fab Four

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 1960s, there was no doubt that DC Comics were the undisputed sales champions of the comics business. Although slightly outsold by Disney's Uncle Scrooge title (854,000 per month), Superman (820,000) and related titles held seven of the top ten positions in the sales chart. The highest seller in Stan Lee's stable of soon-to-be Marvel Comics was Tales to Astonish at 185,00 a month. Today, of course, any publisher would have palpitations at the thought of that kind of monthly sale, but back in 1961, it was strictly small potatoes. To say that Marvel were a distant second would be overstate things. Outselling Marvel publisher Martin Goodman's titles by multiple margins were books from Dell, Archie and Harvey ... pretty much in that order.

This is the top ten selling titles for 1961, in chart order - not a Stan Lee title in sight.

Given those kinds of sales figures, DC Comics could be forgiven for feeling a bit smug. The sales on their Superman family of titles were solid, boosted in part by the popular Adventures of Superman tv show. DC's second string of characters - Flash and Green Lantern - were also enjoying strong sales, thanks to the sleek makeovers they'd had from editor Julius Schwartz and his stable of top-notch pencillers Gil Kane and Carmine Infantino and - probably more importantly - the smooth inking styles of Joe Giella and Murphy Anderson. They couldn't even see Stan Lee in their rearview mirror.

But that was about to change. Early in 1961, Marty Goodman had heard, possibly from DC publisher Jack Liebowitz (accounts vary), how well DC's new title Justice League of America was doing saleswise. The comic collected all of Schwartz's second string characters plus other DC third-rankers like Green Arrow and Aquaman and teamed them in book-length adventures. Goodman immediately ordered his editor Stan Lee to produce a copycat book starring his Golden Age big three - Captain America, Human Torch and Sub-Mariner. But at this point in his career, Stan had realised that Goodman's imitation tactics had created no boost to sales whatsoever, and that slavishly copying other publishers' ideas was getting Marvel nowhere. The story of how Lee - on the verge of quitting the business - was persuaded by his wife to do as Marty asked, but do it his own way is detailed in my previous blog entry. Stan gave Marty his supergroup, but included only The Human Torch in the line-up - and then took a chance and wrote what he would want to read if he were a comic buyer. The result would have an impact on DC's sales in just a few years.

In a different blog entry, I'd questioned why FF artist Jack Kirby - who claimed he alone had created and written the Fantastic Four stories - would put The Sub-Mariner in issue 4 when the copyright was likely held by Bill Everett. On reflection, one possible explanation might have been that Goodman hauled up Lee and demanded to know why The Sub-Mariner wasn't featuring in their new superhero team book. So Lee directed Kirby to include Subby in issue 4 so as to have something to show his publisher.

Lee and Kirby revamped Golden Age hero The Human Torch as a member of the Fantastic Four, as per publisher Martin Goodman's instructions, but balked at putting Captain America and Sub-Mariner in the team. Shortly afterwards, Prince Namor was introduced as a villain, possibly to stifle Goodman's complaints.

MUST BE DOING SOMETHING RIGHT

The comics business has never been an industry to spend money on advertising or marketing. Usually, they've just created a title, delivered it to the newsstands and crossed their fingers. And that had always worked just fine. Kids bought comics based on whether they'd heard of the character - Superman, Tarzan and Disney characters being the most recognised - or if their friends told them a comic was good. In 1960, the best-selling comics were Disney stuff, Tarzan and Superman, based on the sales figures reported in 1961. But as the 1960s progressed, something strange started to happen. The average sales of DC Comics went into freefall and Marvel's began a relentless upward climb. And all this by word-of-mouth.

Okay, not only word-of-mouth.

As big a threat to comics sales as television was, it had also proved to be a boon - sort-of. Comics have always been a source of material for both big and small screen entertainment. During the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood constantly looked to comics - both newspaper strips and comic books - for characters to license. As early as 1936, newspapers' Flash Gordon starred in three successful movie serials, quickly followed by the similar Buck Rogers, Jungle Jim, Mandrake the Magician, Adventures of Captain Marvel, Batman, Captain America and Superman. As the serial era wound down, Hollywood found that television could make low-budget entertainment even cheaper, and some characters, like Jungle Jim and Superman switched to tv.

The Adventures of Superman was filmed in black and white from 1952 and went to colour in 1954. However it would be a good few years before the tv audience was able to see Superman in blue, red and yellow, as the show wasn't transmitted in colour until 1965.

Starring George Reeves as Superman/Clark Kent, The Adventures of Superman made its debut in 1952, tightly controlled by DC comics and distributed via syndication rather than by the more common network method. Though production ceased in 1958, the show continued in syndication until well into the 1960s, and was the main factor in keeping the profile of the character and the sales of the main Superman comic title high. Even as late as 1967, Superman was outselling Amazing Spider-Man by almost two-to-one.

This process would be repeated in 1966 when the Batman tv show (I know, I know) increased the sales of DC's Batman comic by 100%. However, the effects on comic sales was much shorter lived for the Batman comic than it had been for Superman. By the third season, sales had dipped down almost to pre-tv show levels and by 1968, Amazing Spider-Man was outselling Batman.

However, even as early as 1964, the sales figures must have been making DC accountants feel uneasy. Marvel was already rapidly closing the gap on rivals DC and by 1965 had equalled DC in average sales. And that with just the 16 titles they'd been limited to by the draconian distribution deal Jack Liebowitz had forced Marty Goodman to sign in 1957.

Something had to be done. So DC did it. They gave us Go-Go Checks.

Words fail me ...

Go-Go Checks were introduced on all DC Comics at the end of the year in 1965. For anyone not familiar with the phenomenon, DC simply added a band of black and white checks to the top of every cover in their line. That's it.

Yes, there's Go-Go Checks. But nothing else had changed. The cover themes were as daft as ever, and were still driving (sometimes very awkwardly) the stories inside. Even at 11 I felt DC just didn't "get it".

Now I'm probably biased, because by 1965, I was a die-hard Marvel reader. Even at the age of 11, I could tell that Stan Lee's stories in the Marvel books were far more sophisticated and interesting than the kids' stuff that DC were offering. In all fairness, the eight-year-old in me still has a fondness for the Weisinger-inspired silliness of the Superman family titles, but all-in-all I was over that by 1965 and was instead devouring the Lee-Kirby Fantastic Four stories.

The companies' flagship titles, the month that DC added Go-Go Checks. Marvel was offering us Fantastic Four vs Galactus and the Silver Surfer. DC had Superman changing into a dragon and scaring some college professors.

Which makes it all the more astonishing to me that the DC management weren't able to see that it would take more than some "trendy" livery on their covers to combat the threat of Martin Goodman's jumped-up comics company. In 1964, Liebowitz had been smart enough to see that a radical overhaul of the Batman titles was needed to bring the character out of its sales slump and save Batman from cancellation and oblivion. So how come he didn't understand that it was Lee's whole creative approach that was elevating Marvel's circulation and positioning them to take over as the market's sales leaders? I guess we'll never know.

The Go-Go Checks lasted from April 66 till July 1967 and all during that period, DC's top-selling comic stuck doggedly to the outdated and rather boring Weisinger-style stories. You could argue, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But the formula was broke. DC just hadn't realised it yet.

During the 15 months that the DC comics sported the Go-Go Checks, and even after, the Superman stories followed the same formula that editor Weisinger had enforced for the preceding ten years, a melange of lost superpowers, secret identity threats and even jokey (if slightly offensive) body-shock situations.

By contrast, Marvel's whole approach could not have been more different. Certainly, Jack Kirby was responsible for much of the "sense of wonder" that permeated the Fantastic Four and Mighty Thor titles. But even Stan Lee and his Spider-Man collaborator John Romita were presenting far more interesting and mature situations for their hero than anything DC was doing.

By contrast, the Lee-Romita Spider-Man title presented genuine threats and life-changing events for their most popular character. Readers were given a real sense that Spider-Man was in danger of physical harm.

It was DC's failure to update their out-moded story styles for a new, more savvy generation of comics readers that lost them their sales lead. By mid 1967, DC's total monthly sales were trailing Marvel's by almost a million, around 13% behind their rivals. It was only going to get worse for DC from here. The Go-Go Checks hadn't helped one bit. And while DC were consciously not imitating Marvel Comics, there were others who were.

THE C LIST

In the mid-1960s, especially in the UK, us kids really only bothered with two types of comics - Marvels and DCs. Of course there were quite a few other companies, but DC had the big names and Marvel had Lee & Kirby. Archie was huge in the States, but never made much of an impact on us in Britain. It was just too, well, American for us. We liked the tall buildings, the cool cars and cops with guns, but the high school antics of Archie never appealed to me or to the kids I went to school with.

Archie Comics had tried - almost half-heartedly - to develop a line of superheroes as early as 1959, when they engaged Joe Simon and Jack Kirby to produce The Double Life of Private Strong and, shortly after, The Fly, forming the backbone of the "Archie Adventure Series".

Although on the surface, The Shield appeared to resemble Captain America, the Golden Age character actually pre-dated Simon & Kirby's patriotic hero. This revamp, ironically by S&K, was more like Superman than Cap.

The Double Life of Private Strong featured the Archie-owned Golden Age character The Shield, revamped with an new civilian identity and backstory. In this version The Shield was Lancelot Strong, who'd been given superhuman abilities by his scientist father. When communist agents killed his dad, Strong was adopted by a rural couple, discovered his powers in his teens and adopted a bumbling, timid persona to conceal his abilities. Superman publishers DC Comics didn't like the sound of that very much and, under threat of legal action, Archie cancelled the title after two issues. But also in Double Life of Private Strong 1 was a two-page strip featuring The Fly, also by Simon & Kirby.

The artwork for The Fly seems quite a bit more old-fashioned than Kirby's concurrent work over at Atlas/Marvel. Perhaps this was due to Simon's influence. Weirdly, the cover to issue 3 looks more like it was drawn by Mike Golden in the early 1980s than by Simon & Kirby in the late 1950s.

Two months after the debut of Private Strong, Archie publisher/editor John Goldwater launched The Adventures of the Fly, with Simon & Kirby again providing the finished package. The Fly was in reality teenager Tommy Troy who finds a fly-shaped ring in his home's attic. Rubbing the ring, he transforms into an adult superhero.

The character started as a pitch to Harvey Comics back in 1953. In his book, The Comic Book Makers, Joe Simon described the genesis of the character: "In 1953, a year before the devastating Senate investigation into comics, I was visited by C.C. Beck, the artist behind the success of Captain Marvel. Beck told me that he owned the Ukulele Bar & Grill in Miami, Florida, and while tending the bar, often thought about doing another superhero. He offered to 'take a crack' at the business again, if I would come up with an idea for a new character and a script.

"Jack Oleck, my brother-in-law, who had been the number one scriptwriter for Simon and Kirby since the early days of Young Romance, had time on his hands. Oleck always had time, even if he turned out a script seven days a week. As always, he was anxious to join in a new venture."

The first page of a Silver Spider script by Jack Oleck, discovered amongst papers in Joe Simon's apartment.

Simon's idea was for a character called "Spiderman", and he asked Oleck to come up with an origin. In Oleck's pitch, orphan Tommy Troy is adopted by a strange elderly couple and finds a strange ring in their attic. When he rubs the ring, a genie appears to offer one wish. Tommy wishes he were a superhero. Joe Simon changed the name to The Silver Spider and took Beck's sample pages to Harvey. Editor Sid Jacobson thought the pitch was "old-hat" and "a take-off on The Green Hornet", so the series didn't sell. Simon later revived the idea for Archie's Goldwater as The Fly.

The origin of the Silver Spider, created by Joe Simon and C.C. Beck, scripted by Jack Oleck and drawn by Beck. The concept failed to sell to Alfred Harvey in 1953 and was shelved immediately afterwards. Jack Kirby had no involvement.

In later years, particularly in a lengthy interview in The Comics Journal 134 (Feb 1990), Kirby would claim he and Joe Simon came up with the idea for Spider-Man, originally called The Silver Spider. It's possible that Kirby was misremembering his work with Joe Simon on The Fly as some kind of early pitch to Stan Lee for what became Spider-Man. And if that's not the case, then Kirby's claim to have had a hand in the creation of Spider-Man would have amounted to him pitching other people's work to Stan.

In any case, Simon & Kirby stopped working on the title after The Fly 4, and Kirby gave his full attention to freelancing for Marvel. The writing on The Fly was taken over by Robert Bernstein and the art fell to John Giunta and later John Rossenberger, seasoned professionals all. Bernstein had been a staple at DC, scripting many first and second tier characters, like Superman, Jimmy Olsen, Congorilla and Aquaman. Stan also gave him a shot at Marvel where he wrote stories for Thor (Journey into Mystery 92-96), Iron Man (Tales of Suspense 40-46) and Human Torch (Strange Tales 108-109), though I thought those issues were the dullest of the early runs. Lee must have agreed, because he took back the scripting on those titles and Bernstein was gone. Giunta was known primarily for inking Superboy, Jimmy Olsen and Wonder Woman stories for DC. Rosenberger had drawn romance stories for DC and mystery stories for ACG. The remainder of the run on Adventures of the Fly was unremarkable and the series was cancelled in 1964.

The other title in the Archie Adventure Series was The Adventures of the Jaguar. The character's origin was remarkably similar to The Fly's. Zoologist Ralph hardy finds a "nucleon energy" (that's magic) belt in a hidden temple in Peru and on putting it on, is tranformed into ... The Jaguar. As the Jaguar he has all the abilities of the animal kingdom, multiplied by a factor of a thousand. With stories again created by Bernstein and Rosenberger, the comics didn't set the world alight, but still managed to stay on the stands from September 1961 until the 15th issue in November 1963.

The Jaguar had an origin story that was suspiciously similar to that of The Fly's. Way too much reliance on magic artifacts and abilities that mimicked those of animals.

But in 1965, Archie publisher Goldwater thought he saw an opportunity. He had been watching the rise and rise of Stan Lee's Marvel Comics and figured, "How hard can it be?" He hired Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel to revamp all of his superhero properties into one line of comics, The Mighty Comics Group.

Starting with The Fly, Siegel morphed him into Fly Man and pitched the writing style as a bad pastiche of Stan Lee, mixed with the hokiness of the Batman TV show, albeit nearly a year before the Caped Crusader hit the airwaves. To further beef up the appeal, Siegel included additional superheroes teamed up to help Fly Man battle The Spider, including Golden Age MLJ characters The Comet and The Black Hood, as well as a revamped version of The Shield ... and of course Fly-Girl - not to be confused with the later dance troupe that shot Jennifer Lopez to fame. At the end of the story, the heroes wonder if they should form a super-team called The Mighty Crusaders and continue to fight crime.

Siegel's run on Fly Man was a pretty cynical attempt to ape the success of the superheroes in Stan Lee's Marvel Comics. Toward the end of the run, Archie Comics took to featuring the heroes in a corner box that was a bit too similar to the established Marvel trademark cover box.

Of course ... they did. So much so that as well as starring in Fly Man's comic, The Mighty Crusaders got their own title. As with the Fly Man stories, art was by Paul Reinman. Reinman's notable achievements were a long run as artist on the Golden Age Green Lantern character, then contributing art for the fantasy, war and western tales in Marvel pre-hero titles for years, at the same time as freelancing for ACG. Later, Reinman would ink Kirby's pencils on Fantastic Four 18, 19 & 21, Avengers 3 & 5 and X-Men 1-5.

The covers of the Archie Mighty Comics line went out of their way to look like they were published by Marvel. The story titles in particular tried to capture Stan's sense of melodrama.

To further ram home how hard Archie were trying to fool readers into thinking their comics were as good as Marvel's, they took the branding one step further and re-titled Fly Man "Mighty Comics Presents", making the books resemble Marvel's anthology titles Tales of Suspense, Tales to Astonish and Strange Tales, rotating the characters on the covers and even using a split cover on issue 42.

At the end of its run, the format of the final issue Mighty Crusaders changed to feature just the one character, foreshadowing the run of Mighty Comics Presents that followed right on its heels.

The trouble with the Mighty Comics Group was just ... their comics weren't very good. I remember reading a couple when they came out and even my 11 year old mind could figure out that this stuff was just a bad copy of Marvel Comics. And they've not stood the test of time very well, either.

To give you a taste, here's a bit from Mighty Comics Presents 40 (Nov 1966), with The Web battling Iron Fist. Who actually has iron fists. Made of iron. The Web is enjoying a good fight with his enemy Iron Fist for reasons that are never explained. Then, Iron Fist's costume goes out of control and he asks The Web to help him. Like they're suddenly best friends.

Pages 3, 4 and 6 from the first issue of Mighty Comics Presents.
Read the extract and make up your own mind.

Later, when the Web gets home, his wife Rosie gives him a hard time for dressing up in a superhero costume and fighting bad guys. We know she's called Rosie because the Web mentions her name in every speech balloon. The Web's civilian name, on the other hand, remains a mystery until page 7 (not ideal as this is the first issue), when Rosie finally calls him by name. When The Web (John Raymond, by the way) doesn't give up being a superhero, she leaves him. To get her to come back, he has to promise not to fight as The Web again.

Finally, Iron Fist attacks John and Rosie and The Web honours his promise to his wife. Iron Fist is so upset that The Web won't fight that he gives up being a super-villain and leaves.

All of this portrayed with horrendous dialogue by the legendary Jerry Siegel.

It's hard to imagine what Siegel was trying for. Funny? It really wasn't funny. Satire? Satire should be cleverer. Other than Paul Reinman's workmanlike art, there just doesn't seem to be any talent going into these stories. In fact, it's a bit sad to see the great Jerry Siegel - the guy who wrote Superman, for goodness' sake - reduced to this. It's a bit like watching Bela Lugosi in an Ed Wood movie.

Mercifully, John Goldwater cancelled the Mighty Comics series with issue 50, cover dated October 1967.

SOME KIND OF TOWERING ACHIEVEMENT

Wally Wood had contributed the pencil art for Marvel's Daredevil, issues 5-8, (and by definition the plotting/pacing) but had been unhappy about either Stan Lee criticising his storytelling or Stan having Wood plot the stories while Lee took the payment and the credit. I kind of lean more towards Wood's lack of ability to work from anything other than a full script (as he did at EC), as his storytelling on Daredevil was quite weak. I'd also add that I don't think that Wood, brilliant as he was at EC science fiction, was very good at superhero action. For issues 9-11 of Daredevil, Wood inked over Bob Powell pencils.

So, after exiting Marvel, for whatever reason, Wood immediately teamed up with Len Brown and established the Tower line of comics featuring newly-created superheroes in an attempt to do what Stan was doing back at Marvel.

Len Brown had been a creative editor at Topps Chewing Gum from about 1959. In 1962 inspired, legend has it, by Wally Wood's cover art for Weird Science 16, Brown pitched an idea for a set of cards that would depict the Martian invasion of Earth.

I liked the cover for Weird Science 16 so much that I asked artist John Ridgway to do a pastiche of it for the cover of Marvel UK's Transformers 2, when I was supervising editor on that title back in 1984.

Brown hired Wood to produce a series of concept sketches, Bob Powell to pencil the art for the cards and Norman Saunders to render the art in a fully painted style. The result was Mars Attacks, one of the most notorious of all trading cards sets. It's interesting to note that when Wood struggled to produce pages for Daredevil that matched Lee's expectations, Bob Powell was the artist drafted in to help out. It's not known whether this was Wood's doing rather than Lee's, but it was probably a match made in heaven given the artists' prior history on the Topps project.

The design influence of Wood's Weird Science cover can be seen on the design of the gum card Martians. The card set scandalised suburban America and Britain during the 1960s, due in no small part to Wood's subversive sense of anarchy.

Even before Wood left Daredevil, he was talking to Brown about a possible new series of comics. They'd first discussed the concept of a group of superheroes working together for a government organisation in 1964. A year later, with Wood already dissatisfied with the way things were going at Marvel, he asked Brown to write a 12-page outline for the series. "I submitted a Captain Thunderbolt story in which he fought a villain called Dynamo," recalled Brown. "I had always loved the old Phantom Empire serial with Gene Autry in the 1930s. I remembered that the Thunder Riders were agents of the evil queen in the serial. I loved the name, the Thunder Riders, so I recommended 'Thunder Agents' to Wally."

Wood had been casting around for a property he could offer to Tower Publications' managing editor Harry Shorten. Shorten had been an editor for Archie/MLJ during the 1940s and in the 1950s had started his own publishing company, producing television magazines. Shorten wanted Wood to be the editor for his new line of comics, but stressed that Wood would be strictly creative, and wouldn't have to do the boring officework part of the editor's role. When it became obvious that Wood couldn't handle the art by himself, Shorten brought in long-time Archie artist Samm Schwartz as a production editor to handle trafficking. Gil Kane, Steve Ditko, Reed Crandal, Chic Stone, Sal Trapani and others produced art and the series was off and running.

The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents title managed a respectable three year run, from Nov 1965 to Nov 1968, doing better than the Archie line of superheroes.

What set the Tower Comics apart from the beginning was that they were all 68-page, 25c books, which made them an attractive, if pricey, read. The core title was  T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, an anthology comic which featured Dynamo, NoMan, Menthor as well as the heroes fighting together as T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. Two spin-off titles, Dynamo and NoMan, followed, but were short-lived. Tower also published some war, teen and funny animal titles, but I have no recollection of those at all.

With the cover of Dynamo 4, it's hard to tell whether Wood was being ironic or had just given up trying to think of new ideas. NoMan lasted just two issues and the other titles made little or no impact. The Tippy Teen title was very much an Archie knock-off, featuring art by Archie contributors Samm Schwartz and Dan DeCarlo.

I remember seeing the Tower comics at the time in 1965 and thinking that the art was nice but the stories were a bit boring. The scripts were written by Len Brown, Larry Ivie, Steve Skeates, Lou Silverstone, Bill Pearson and others. And none of these guys seemed to grasp what it was that made Lee's Marvel books different from the Competition, Distinguished or otherwise. The writing just has no pizzazz, no enthusiasm. It's hard to imagine anyone reading these stories and being entertained. I wasn't.

And I couldn't have been alone because after 1968. Tower Comics pretty much closed its doors and left the field to Marvel, DC and Charlton.

THE D LIST

In 1965, American Comics Group (ACG) decided that they too would have a crack at superheroes. The company had long published a handful of war, romance and mystery titles, but were best known for Adventures into the Unknown (1-174, Fall 1948 - Aug 1967, Forbidden Worlds (1-145, Jul/Aug 1951 - Aug 1967) and Unknown Worlds (1-57, Aug 1960 - Aug 1967).

Their first hero was Magicman, who appeared in Forbidden Worlds 125 (Jan/Feb 1965). As Tom Cargill, Magicman is the immortal son of the 18th Century magician Cagliostro and, joining the army to fight in Viet Nam, uses his magical abilities to combat evil ... well, communists. The series was written by ACG editor Richard Hughes and had gorgeous, clean-line artwork by Pete Costanza, who had drawn many Captain Marvel stories during the preceding two decades.

The ACG heroes appeared at the beginning of 1965. Though not strictly a super-hero, Herbie's alter-ego The Fat Fury appeared around the same time as Magicman and Nemesis, so is not likely to have been just a coincidence.

ACG immediately followed Magicman with another occult hero, Nemesis. Debuting in Adventures into the Unknown 154 (Feb 1965), Nemesis was the spirit of detective Steve Flint who is murdered by the mob. Awaiting processing in the afterlife, Flint strikes a bargain with the Grim Reaper that allows him to return to Earth and avenge his own murder. A bit similar to DC's Spectre, really. The Magicman stories were also written by Richard Hughes and drawn in the main by Chic Stone.

For most of its existence, ACG comics had concentrated on horror and mystery stories. During the comics purge of the 1950s, ACG had survived by severely toning down the horror elements. They didn't dip a toe into superhero tales until 1965, which suggests Hughes, or more likely publisher Ben Sangor, had noted the success of Marvel's heroes and thought ACG should have some costumed heroes of its own. Hughes had created The Black Terror for Standard during the 1940s, along with Fighting Yank and Pyroman, so he had a track record. However, some ACG fans weren't happy with the move. In response to a reader complaining about the inclusion of a recurring character in Adventures into the Unknown 161, Hughes replied that it was "simply a matter of business. The popularity of costume heroes was such that we just had to go in for them to some extent ... our readers were demanding them."

DC had been publishing superheroes continuously since Action Comics 1, so it's unlikely Hughes is referring to the popularity of Superman and Batman, which at this point was in decline. Yet if it was Marvel who'd inspired him to create Nemesis and Magicman, why do the ACG scripts read more like DC material than like Lee's hip, informal yarns? Tellingly, after the cancellation of its titles and the closure of ACG in 1967, Hughes went on to script Jimmy Olsen and Hawkman for DC.

I think if Hughes had been savvier, he could have used Magicman to take some kind of stance on the Viet Nam conflict, which formed a background for the character's stories. Using the setting as a kind of Hogan's Heroes comedy scenario is a missed opportunity at best, and faintly offensive at worst.

DELL'S KEY WASN'T SO GOLDEN, EITHER

The other player that tried to muscle in on Marvel's (and to an extent DC's) turf was comics giant Dell. Founder George Delacorte had been there for the birth of the American comic book. When he collected a bunch of newspaper comic strips and put them into the first recognisable comic book, The Funnies, in 1933, he created an entire industry. In later years, Dell concentrated on licensed material, publishing huge amounts of Disney and Warner Bros material from their animated cartoons, along with iconic fictional characters from pulps and radio, like Tarzan, Lone Ranger and Zorro. Their tv tie-ins were legendary and many cult tv shows had a Dell comic - Man from U.N.C.L.E, Star Trek and Twilight Zone to name just three.

And their own originated characters enjoyed massive sales. Turok Son of Stone (a native American adventure book) outsold most DC titles during the early 1960s.

But when it came to superheroes, Dell didn't enjoy such a sparkling success. Their first forays into super-powered shennanigans were bland enough ... Nukla made his first appearance in late-1965 and Superheroes almost a year and a half later in early-1967.

Nukla was really CIA spy and pilot Matthew Gibbs. While flying a mission over Communist China (surely a breach of some kind of international protocol), his plane is fired upon by the Chinese military and is instantly vaporised by the resulting nuclear explosion. We might argue that it serves him right, but he does gain the ability to reassemble his body through sheer force of will and can now perform amazing nuclear-powered deeds, provided he can first de-materialise his body into an intangible nuclear cloud. To be fair, Nukla wasn't terrible. But it wasn't great either. A bit like Captain Atom, without the great Steve Ditko artwork.

The Superheroes featured a team called The Fab Four (familiar, much?), teens who find themselves able to transfer their minds into four super-powered androids - El (laser, infra-red and x-ray powers), Polymer Polly (speed and heat resistance), Hy (hypersonics) and Crispy (cryogenics). Like Nukla, Superheroes was written by Joe Gill and drawn by Sal Trapani. But where Trapani's art on Nukla is neat and ordered, similar to the DC comics by Gil Kane and Infantino, the art on Superheroes is chaotic and messy. It looks to me like Trapani was trying to emulate the dynamic layouts of the Marvel comics but not quite pulling it off ...

Trapani was the brother-in-law of longtime Charlton inker and editor Dick Giordano, drawing science fiction strips for Charlton during the 1950s. In the 1960s, he provided art for ACG and Warren, and moved to DC, along with Giordano in the 1970s, finally fetching up as an inker at Marvel during the 1980s.

Nukla isn't an especially bad comic ... it just isn't very good, either. The Superheroes, on the other hand, defies description of just how awful it is. And that's being kind.

Joe Gill had enjoyed a long stint at Charlton Comics, where he'd co-created Captain Atom, Peacemaker and Judomaster. Credited by Mark Evanier as probably the most prolific scripter in comics, Joe Gill began by scripting Captain America after the departure of Simon & Kirby from Timely in 1942 and continued writing western and teen stories until around 1948, when the industry went into a post-war downturn. Gill landed at Charlton and worked there almost exclusively right through till the 1970s. He also did much colouring work for Charlton.

As bad as these Dell superhero titles were, they looked like literary gold compared to the next adventure offerings from the company. Dracula, Werewolf and Frankenstein were an attempt by Dell to turn the Universal Monsters into superheroes. It didn't work.

With scripts by Don Segall and art by Bill Fraccio and Tony Tallirico, these superhero adventure stories were cringingly bad, both in concept and execution.

Just when you think it can't get any worse ... Dell tries to turn the Universal movie monsters into superheroes.

Dracula was a modern-day descendent of the original Count Dracula, researching into a cure for brain damage using bat blood. Exposure to his experimental serum gives him bat-like abilities and he moves to America where he adopts the secret identity of Al U. Card. See what they did, there? Incredibly, even though Dracula lasted just three issues, Dell thought it was a good idea to reprint the entire series in 1972. I don't think it would have sold any better than it had in 1967. It's pretty inept stuff, even if Dell were aiming it at non-discerning eight year olds.

Frankenstein was created in 1866 by a scientist known only as The Doctor, The Monster has superior intellect and the strength of 50 men. He lies dormant for 100 years below a castle outside Metropole City, until awoken by a convenient lightning bolt. To disguise his monstrous appearance Frankenstein puts on a rubber facemask and takes the name Frank Stone (sigh!)

Werewolf has Major Wiley Wolf (honest, I'm not making this up) crashing his aircraft in the Arctic Circle, developing amnesia and becoming like a wild animal, as he lives with a pack of wolves for six months in the Canadian wilderness. After being rescued, he resigns from the Air Force and joins the CIA, who train him to the peak of physical perfection and ... It's no use. I can't go on.

Don Segall had written for DC and Tower Comics was probably best known as the co-creator, with Steve Ditko, of The Creeper. By the 1970s, he'd moved into television, where he enjoyed a similar level of success as a writer and producer, contributing single scripts to shows like Diff'rent Strokes and Love Boat. Fraccio and Tallirico were a long-time double act who frequently worked under the collective name of Tony Williamson or Williamsune and enjoyed a long stint at Charlton Comics and later at Warren, contributing art for Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella. Their art was never great and they never aspired to be anything other than jobbing artists who would deliver competent work - when circumstances allowed - on time for a reasonable rate.

After the failure of these books, Dell pretty much stuck to its core strength of movie, cartoon and tv tie-ins until closing its doors in 1973.

WHAT IS SO HARD?

It's a good deal easier to figure it out with the benefit of hindsight, but it's still pretty incredible that so many smart, experienced publishing people were unable to see the obvious. The secret of Marvel's success in the 1960s wasn't really a secret at all. Stan Lee put it all out there on show, so with a little bit of thought, anyone could figure it out.

It wasn't just putting an eye-catching branding idea on the cover. Yes, Marvel had the trademark corner box on the cover ... but so did Mighty Comics, and look what happened to them. DC Comics tried their own version with the Go-Go Checks. But if that's the only change you're going to make, then that's not going to alter the direction of your sales figures. 

It wasn't just publishing stories where the character had a glib line in dialogue. True, DC characters all talked like your humourless and slightly boring uncle, but Archie tried jokey dialogue with their Fly Man and Mighty Crusaders comics (admittedly bad jokey dialogue) and that didn't work either. 

And it wasn't Jack Kirby alone. DC had had Jack Kirby both before and after Marvel - his runs on Green Arrow and Challengers hadn't been tours de force of sales and read just like any other DC comics of the time. And don't get me started on the "Fourth World" stuff. I wasn't a fan at the time, and re-reading those books more recently confirmed my worst fears. No matter what Jack claimed ... he couldn't write. I love him to bits as an artist and an ideas man, but a writer he was not. And in case you think it was the DC editors holding him back, just look at those early Archie Adventure Comics with his legendary partner Joe Simon.

No, what made Marvel Comics special was the Voice that Stan Lee brought to them. It was the way his characters talked, each with his own personality. Even if you couldn't see the pictures, you'd be able to tell if it was The Thing or Spider-Man speaking. It was also the way his characters reacted to the extraordinary circumstances they found themselves in - mostly with shock and surprise, just like we would if it were us. Even the innocent bystanders in Marvel comics often refuse to believe what was right in front of their eyes, claiming that an invasion of New York by Galactus must be some kind of advertising stunt, which is exactly how people in the real world would react.

And, as I've covered in detail in other entries in this blog, Stan sought to extend that real world informality to his letters pages and his Bullpen Bulletins.

It was all those factors, working together, that separated Marvel from DC, ACG, Archie and Dell. And it was the fact that Stan had talent as a writer, and had his characters drive the plots, that made his stories speak to the readers in a way they could relate to. Every other superhero series I've looked at in this entry did exactly the opposite. Contemporary comic characters like The Web, Superman and Dracula all sounded pretty much the same - no personality, no unique voice, no characterisation - and existed only because of the demands of the plot.

Today comic readers take characterisation for granted. Customers expect a much higher standard of writing than the companies were prepared (or able to) to offer during the formative years of the 1960s. So today, it's not uncommon to see writers of the caliber of Joss Whedon, Michael J Straczynski and Kevin Smith writing scripts for comics. But back then, there was only Stan, trying to raise the standards, all by himself. It just took the industry a decade to catch up with him, as first Roy Thomas, then other decent writers like Len Wein, Marv Wolfman and Tony Isabella filtered into the business, all heavily influenced by the work of Stan Lee.

Next: Superheroes on the 1960s screen