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

Exposed: Myths of Marvel's Silver Age - Part 2

OVER THE LAST FEW DECADES, a great deal has been written about the history of Marvel Comics, not all of it as well-researched as it could have been. And because of this, certain historians have chosen to lift anecdotes from earlier histories without bothering to check the sources of the material they're quoting.

Last time, I took a look at some of the legends that have appeared in successive histories of Marvel Comics and questioned whether they had been verified by the authors or simply repeated based on faith. As with many histories, it seems that opinion often triumphs over fact ... and fans of a particular artist or writer will insist that their hero tells the objective truth while all others lie and dissemble. But as my old friend and collaborator Phil Edwards always said, "There's three sides to every argument - his side, her side ... and the truth."

Back when I was a teenager, the first glimmer we comic fans had that there was an actually history to comics was these two books, both published in 1971. In retrospect, neither were very good. We wouldn't really get a decent history till Steranko's History of Comics (1970), a project sadly aborted before it could get to the Silver Age and the stuff I was really interested in.

I've already looked at the oft-repeated story that Marvel Comics was limited to just eight titles a month during the 1960s (not true), that Stan Lee only got his job at Marvel Comics in 1941 because he was related to publisher Martin Goodman (not true) and that Stan Lee was the cause of Simon and Kirby leaving Captain America in 1942 because Stan snitched about their moonlighting for DC to his cousin-by-marriage Martin Goodman (no evidence to support that).

This time, I'm going to look at a few more cases where it seems to me as if the historians have gone with "Print the legend."

STAN LEE'S FIRST STAB AT GROWN-UP COMICS

To be fair to the comics historians, I should say that this myth has largely come from Stan Lee himself. As far back as Origins of Marvel Comics (Simon and Schuster, 1974), Stan had alluded to the claim that he had a revelatory moment when he realised he was fed up with hacking out copycat strips for Goodman and wanted to do something that would raise both his game and set a higher benchmark for the comic book medium. 

Stan expanded on the story in his autobiography Excelsior; The Amazing Life of Stan Lee (Fireside Books, 2002). "For once I wanted to write stories that wouldn't insult the intelligence of an older reader, stories with interesting characterisation, more realistic dialogue and plots that hadn't been recycled a thousand times before. Above all, stories that wouldn't hew to all the comicbook cliches of years past."

So, The Fantastic Four was born ... right? Well, not exactly, no.

All that stuff about wanting to quit the business and Joan Lee telling Stan to just write comics the way he wanted to, because he had nothing to lose, didn't result in Fantastic Four. It resulted in Amazing Adult Fantasy. At the very least, Stan was working on both simultaneously ... but tellingly, only one had the word "Adult" in its title. Also, only one promised to be "The Magazine That Respects Your Intelligence", right there on the cover. And though both sported a logo that strikingly resembled that of the hit, liberal-leaning Twilight Zone tv show, only one was an anthology of fantasy tales.

In this house ad from Strange Tales 95 (Apr 1962), which came out between FF 3 and FF 4 and the same month as AAF 11, Stan puts Amazing Adult Fantasy and Fantastic Four together, emphasising their common logo style - though tellingly, he places AAF above FF, indicating that he thought the fantasy anthology book best placed to further his agenda.

It's for these reasons that I think I can make a case for Amazing Adult Fantasy being the title Stan thought would bring the older reader to the table.

The Twilight Zone had premiered two years earlier, in October 1959, to outstanding reviews. "Twilight Zone is about the only show on the air that I actually look forward to seeing. It's the one series that I will let interfere with other plans", said Terry Turner for the Chicago Daily News. The New York Herald Tribune said it was "certainly the best and most original anthology series of the year" and Variety called it "the best that has ever been accomplished in half-hour filmed television". 

From the outset, Serling's moral fables, with their liberal worldview and chilling observations about human frailty, won a strong audience following and, later, Emmy and Golden Globe awards. And when you compare the stories that Stan Lee was offering in his anthology titles, especially those drawn by Steve Ditko, you can see just how much of an influence on Lee Serling's series was.

It's not a coincidence that Amazing Adult Fantasy and Fantastic Four shared a similarly styled cover logo. And I think it's fairly safe to say that Stan thought looking to the title design for Rod Serling's intelligent sci-fi tv show The Twilight Zone for inspiration might be the fastest way to reach the readers he was looking for.

So when Stan Lee felt he should do something more worthwhile than the kiddy-fodder he'd been filling the Atlas/Marvel comics with, it seemed natural to beef up the presence of the Serling-influenced Ditko fantasy tales by giving them their own title. So Amazing Adventures' Kirby kaiju stories gave way to the humanist fables of Lee/Ditko. I also think it's significant that Stan Lee almost always signed his stories with Ditko, but didn't much bother with the Kirby monster strips. 

The only reason I can think of that Stan would later downplay the role of Amazing Adult Fantasy in his quest to bring a degree of sophistication to the four-colour comic book is that ultimately the title fell prey to poor sales and was cancelled by Marty Goodman before the new approach could establish itself. Far better to hitch your revolutionary game-changing approach to a success rather than to a failure.

I also can't help but observe that the first few issues of Fantastic Four followed the formula of the Kirby Giant Monster comics, almost as though Stan felt you just couldn't do grown-up superhero tales. Certainly issues 1, with the Mole Man's Godzilla-like subterranean creatures, and 3 and 4, with The Miracle Man's giant marquee monster and The Sub-Mariner's Giganto creature, didn't stray far from kaiju territory.

When you have a successful formula, you'd be nuts to abandon it. So Stan stuck with giant monsters for the first few issues of Fantastic Four, reasoning that if monsters drove sales on Astonish, Suspense and the others, then it would for FF, too.

It wasn't really until Fantastic Four 8 (Nov 1962) that the tone of the comic shifted a bit and Stan made an effort to change the direction of the title. He makes The Thing less angry, the FF start calling him "Ben" instead of "Thing" and Reed begins his quest to revert Ben to his human form. Stan also gets rid of the (rather odd) Reed-Sue-Ben triangle and introduces a new love interest for Ben, Alicia, who initially resembles Sue - though that idea is also jettisoned quite quickly. For me, this is where Stan made a concerted effort to make superhero comics a bit more sophisticated than the standard superhero mags DC were putting out under the editorship of Mort Weisinger - pretty brave, considering how well the Superman family titles were selling in 1961.

And as history would show, turns out Stan was right. Once Marvel got into its stride, sales began to climb and the previously unassailable DC began their decline.

STAN LEE INVENTED THE "MARVEL METHOD"

There is a prevailing school of thought out there, especially among Kirby Kultists, that Stan Lee invented the Marvel Method (of comics writing) specifically to gyp artists out of their plotting payments. The story gets repeated over and over, but without any real evidence to back it up.

I think the first hint I came across - beyond Stan's own explanations in the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins - of how comics were created during the early days was in Steranko's History of Comics, which I would have picked up around the age of 18. In volume 1, Steranko recounts how the classic 44-page battle between The Human Torch and The Sub-Mariner (Marvel Mystery Comics 8 & 9, Jun & Jul 1940) was written and drawn over a weekend.

What's remarkable about this 44-page battle between The Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner isn't that it was the first such character cross-over, pre-dating the first appearance of the Justice Society by several months, but that it was conceived and completed over a weekend! Both books sold out.

"Carl (Burgos) and Bill (Everett) sat down at the drawing boards and composed the first two pages without having the slightest notion about the storyline. John Compton came in and began to plot out a script ... Breakdowns were pencilled as soon as page-by-page synopses were completed. Finished dialogue was written directly onto the pages, then lettered."

That process, with the art produced from a synopsis and the dialogue and captions written and lettered on the finished art sounds a lot like the Marvel Method to me.

More recently, I picked up a copy of The Best of Alter Ego, a compilation of the best articles from the pioneering fanzine of the early 1960s. In it, there was a short essay by Golden and Silver Age artist Paul Reinman, which first appeared in Alter Ego 4 (Oct 1962). Something Reinman wrote reminded me of that account from Steranko's History of Comics. 

"I remember when the artists were just a page, or a few boxes, ahead of the writer. We would come in in the morning and the editor, who mostly doubled as the writer, would say 'Sit down. I'll write an outline of the plot in a few minutes.' While the artist was working on the first page, the editor broke down the rest of the story and typed it for the artist. The dialogue was not written before the artist had finished his inkings. When the artist looked at the breakdown of his story and if the box showed a lot of action he would let his drawing take up most of the space of this box: if it was a close-up or very little action, he would leave more space for dialogue. Well, that's the way it was in the beginning of comics."

MLJ - which later became Archie Comics - had a spat with Martin Goodman over a Captain America villain called The Hangman. It was MLJ partner Maurice Coyne (also working as Goodman's accountant at Timely) who told Joe Simon that Goodman was cheating on the Captain America royalties.

Though Reinman doesn't give any dates, a quick check of his credits on GCD, shows that he spent the first two years of his career working for MLJ on strips like Hangman, The Wizard and Zambini, which appeared in their top titles, Pep Comics, Shield-Wizard and Zip. Though he moved on to DC in mid-1943, I think it's pretty safe to say that Reinman was talking about how they worked at MLJ.

Atlas was at its peak in the mid-1950s, publishing the most titles of any publisher. Sinnott was one of Stan Lee's mainstay comic strip artists, though only the real stars - like Joe Maneely and Bill Everett - got to draw the covers.

Different publishers worked in different ways, but during the 1950s, when Marvel was known as Atlas and Stan Lee was Editor and head writer, the artists worked from full scripts. Joe Sinnott was a prolific artist at Atlas and described the work routine in The Jack Kirby Collector 9 (1995). "I'd go down to the city on Friday, and Stan would give me a script to take home. I'd start on Monday morning by lettering the balloons in pencil. Then I'd pencil the story from the script and ink it and leave the balloons penciled. I'd pencil a page in the morning, and ink it in the afternoon ... I'd bring the story back on Friday and he'd give me another script. I never knew what kind of script I'd be getting. Stan had a big pile on his desk, and he used to write most of the stories himself in those days. You'd walk in, and he'd be banging away at his typewriter. He would finish a script and put it on the pile. Sometimes on his pile would be a western, then below it would be a science fiction, and a war story, and a romance. You never knew what you were getting, because he always took it off the top. And you were expected to do any type of story."

The later, in the post-Atlas years, when Marvel Comics was only known by the tiny letters "MC" on its covers, Stan was still supplying full scripts to his artists. The seeds of the Marvel Method were sown when Stan began to ramp up output at the beginning of the 1960s and found he was struggling to do all the editing and scripting himself. So he began writing with his brother Larry Leiber, who was primarily an artist.

In an interview for Alter Ego Vol 3, No 2 (1999), Lieber explained how those early Marvel stories were done. "Stan made up the plot, and then he'd give it to me, and I'd write the script ... I was unsure of myself just sitting down to write a script. Since I knew how to draw, I'd think, 'Oh, this shot will have a guy coming this way... this shot we'll have a guy looking down on him,' and later I'd sit at the typewriter and type it up. After a while, I'd just go to the typewriter. I would follow from Stan's plots ... Jack I always had to send a full script to." [My emphasis.]

A few months later, dissatisfied with Lieber's scripts, Stan Lee hired some veteran scripters -  Robert Bernstein, Ernie Hart and even Jerry Siegel - to cope with the load, but in the end he realised that to get the kind of stories he wanted for the fledgling Marvel Comics, he'd have to write them himself.

However, there is an important clue here to how Stan arrived at the Marvel Method. He was giving plots to brother Larry to break down into panel-by-panel scripts with dialogue and captions. I've not come across any indication that Larry had any input into the plots. It is possible that, when Stan was working with Bernstein and Hart, he did allow some plotting collaboration but, again, I've not found any statements from the participants to support that.

The above Marvels were the last scripted by Hart, Siegel and Bernstein before Stan took over all the writing chores himself. It's not a huge leap to go from providing brief plots to hired scripters, to providing plots to pencillers, to co-plotting with pencillers.

The next step in the evolution came when Lee rightly realised that it was the characterisation in the script - and the emotions felt by his characters - that made Marvel tales more appealing to his young audience than the old-fashioned, plot-driven DC-style stories. Stan understood that the details of the plot were the least important component. So rather than sit down with some less talented scripters and feed them plots, why not sit down with the artists, thrash out a plot, then have the artist draw it up before the dialogue was written? Pretty much a reversion to how it was done in the early 1940s.

As 1963 rolled over into 1964, it seems likely that Stan found some pencillers were better at fleshing out a brief story synopsis into a 20-page story than others. Steve Ditko appears to have been best at it, and had likely worked that way with Stan during the pre-hero years. Jack Kirby  - even though he'd been used to full scripts from the Marvel Bullpen was able to adapt and add detail to the briefest of outlines. Others, like Gene Colan and Don Heck, needed more hand-holding.

What is interesting is that those who had the biggest issues with how Stan worked - I'm thinking Wally Wood, Joe Orlando and Gil Kane - were all from a background where they would be given some form of full script to work from.

Kane had worked for DC Comics most of his career, and the editors there would hold regular story conferences with the writers to create a plot, then have the scripters - John Broome, Gardner Fox - go home and type up a full script for the penciller. I'm pretty sure the writers didn't get paid for the plotting session.

At EC Comics, where Wood and Orlando cut their teeth, the discipline was even stricter. Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein would plot and script the stories, then give the boards to a letterer to ink in the captions and dialogue. Only then would the boards go to the artist, who would have to fill the pre-ruled and lettered panels with drawings.

Here's a Wally Wood page and a Joe Orlando page - both from Weird Fantasy 13 (May 1952). The artboard was pre-lettered with the captions and balloons and the artists would have to fit their drawings in as best they could. Some artists would find this restrictive and impossible to work with, and others found it worked best for them. Wordy, aren't they?

So from Wally Wood's point of view, it may well have looked like Stan was getting him to "write" the story while taking the credit ... but that's only because Wood had never worked Stan's way before.

Interviewed by Mark Evanier, Wood said, "I enjoyed working with Stan on Daredevil but for one thing. I had to make up the whole story. He was being paid for writing, and I was being paid for drawing, but he didn't have any ideas. I'd go in for a plotting session, and we'd just stare at each other until I came up with a storyline. I felt like I was writing the book but not being paid for writing."

That doesn't really ring true to me. I just can't imagine Stan - the most talkative human being on the planet - just sitting and staring at Wally Wood. I rather think that Wood, like some others, is vastly overestimating the importance of the plot to a comic story. When Wood did actually write an issue of Daredevil by himself, Lee's criticism wasn't of the plot but of the lack of characterisation in the dialogue.

"I persuaded him to let me write one by myself since I was doing 99% of the writing already," said Wood in the same interview. "I wrote it, handed it in, and he said it was hopeless. He said he'd have to rewrite it all and write the next issue himself."

At that stage of the process, there was very little Lee could have done about the plot ... but he sure could fix up the dialogue. 

Joe Orlando, who preceded Wally Wood as Daredevil penciller, also had difficulties with Stan's way of working. After three issue - Daredevil 2 - 4 (Jun - Oct 1964) - he quit because he couldn't deal with Stan asking him to redraw the pages he was turning in.

The point is that every writer or artist has a different history and background. And each has different working habits. What works for some doesn't work for others. What drew Neal Adams to Marvel in 1969 is he'd heard that the artists worked from the slightest of plots and were free to draw the comic their own way.

So it turns out that Stan didn't invent the plot-art-script process of creating comic strips. It's a method that has been in use since the 1940s, which some artists prefer and some don't. I can see how Stan found his heavy workload - as Marvel Comics grew during the early 1960s - meant he had to find ways to get the comic stories completed faster. He tried several different processes before he hit on the one that gave him the best control over how the characters were portrayed. Because Stan was all about the characters and their emotions, just as DC were all about the plots and their resolutions, and thought characterisation was irrelevant ... And we know how that eventually turned out.

I was going to try to squeeze in an account of the 1971 "price war" between Marvel and DC and give some perspective on the sales numbers that have been quoted in a few accounts, but it's the end of the month and I just don't have the time to do it justice this month, so I'll leave it for now and try to publish the last part of this look at Marvel Myths and Legends in a week or two.

Next: The DC / Marvel Price War of 1971