The Brink Marvels at, uh, Marvel

Nazis before America even entered World War Two. So it might seem astounding that Marvel entered bankruptcy in the late nineties, having weathered the fickleness of the comics market multiple times, like a human torch burning bright, bursting bubbles, greedy ventures, and what some might call financial villainy lead owners grasping for a plan seed to world comic domination and selling

their heroes out like mercenaries. But it pays to be good, and after a struggle of illegal battle, some positive new blood, and some daring risks, Marvel is now living up to the Excelsior motto. This is Marvel on the Brink. Hi, Ariel, Hi, I like Marvel. I do too. I like I like comic books and superheroes and comic book movies and comic book TV shows. He guess what, I like all that stuff too. Yeah, So Ariel and I are fans. Some

might call us geeks. I would call us geeks. We have called each other geeks affectionately, and we love Marvel. I mean we love especially the most recent incarnation of Marvel. It's impossible to ignore Marvel at this point. There's a new Marvel film out practically every month. Well not every month, but you like every quarter. Yeah, well enough, like to the point where people joke that if it's if you go to the movie theater, what are you seeing a

Star Wars movie or a Marvel movie? Yeah? And you know, when Marvel movies first started coming out, I was like, I don't know about this, Arcter. But now at this point, I'm just like, here, let me just write you a check. Yeah. Every time that Marvel was coming out with a new film, I was thinking, can they really pull this off? I mean, starting off with iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe stories, I thought, wow, iron Man really, because that's I don't

think of him as a upper tier character. I mean he is if you're a comic fan, right, but mainstream mainstream audiences I don't think knew very much about iron Man. And then then you get to something like Guardians of the Galaxy and you're like, there's no way they're going to make that work, And you know to be fair. Even though I am a self proclaimed geek and I love Marvel. I came to comics late in my geekdom um. I started off with sci fi and fantasy and kind

of worked my way to superheroes. So it's been a learning curve. Yeah. I I collected a little bit when I was a kid. I'll talk about one of the comics I collected in this episode. But I was not the biggest comic book fan. I I always tried to keep semi aware of what was going on because it was interested in it. I just didn't have the allowance to go out and buy every single title that was coming out. Well, and we'll get to it, but there was a while where Marvel was putting out so much

stuff you couldn't keep up. Yeah, so we're gonna talk today about how we got to this point because there it was not a guarantee that Marvel was going to become such a breakout success, not at all. Not a few years ago. You would have laughed if someone had said that a company would buy Marvel for four billion dollars, But that in fact has happened. Before we get into it, though, arial we need to settle something who is your favorite Marvel character? Well, that would be the Hulk. The Hulk.

The Hulk is that the secret You're always angry? That's fair, all right? You know I'm a hulk. I like in D and D. I play a barbarian. I'm just a bruiser, sort of a girl. Got you, all right? That's fair. Who's Taskmaster? I can see that Taskmaster is a villain in Marvel. He has not yet been depicted in films as far as I can tell. Taskmaster's ability is he can watch other people do stuff and then he can

replicate it perfectly. So he can watch, say, an Olympic diver do a perfect dive, and then he can do that perfect dive. He's kind of like a visual rogue. Yeah, he's He's usually known for training mercenaries. Okay, we had to get that out of our system. We had to get all of that geekery out so that we can talk about the business. Yeah, we we need to get down to business because there's a lot to cover, and I know we're gonna want to cover it all. We

are going to be able to cover it. Also, you can do tangents and stuff anyway, So let's let's Let's try to start off by talking about how Marvel got started, because it wasn't always known as Marvel. No, it was started by Martin Goodman in he had made a comic brand called Timely Comics, and Marvel Comics Number one was the actual comic book. Right. This is not unusual, by the way. We think of a lot of like big name comic books like Superman or Batman, which are both

d C comic books. Well, those didn't start off as Batman number one or Superman number one. In fact, the first Batman comic was a Detective Comics issue number twenty seven. The first Superman comic was in a spinoff called Action Comics Number one. Well, and I would call you on talking about d C during a Marvel episode. But it's important to note because DC came out with superheroes before Marvel. Yeah, like two years yeah, but still still it still counts.

So who was in Marvel Comics number one? Tell everybody the superhero who appeared in that. Well, there are a few, but the most notable are Human Torch. But at the time he was like a human android, So he wasn't It wasn't Johnny story, it was it was human Torch version one point oh yes, and the sub Mariner a k A naymore a k A antihero version of Aquaman, although Acuman is sometimes an Yeah, he went through a

dark phase. We all went through that dark phase. It's just a couman did it well after his teenage year. And something to note, right when Timely Comics was starting off, stan Lee joined. So he joined at the age of seventeen with the help of his uncle to become an assistant there. So, I mean he's he's bounced around and he's written stuff for DC as well, but he started right at the beginning. And someone else who was really important in Marvel history and comic book history is Jack Kirby.

And one of his huge contributions happened just a couple of years after the founding of this company, and that was in one with the first Captain America comic book. Yeah, good old cap and Captain America that you might remember. There's like the famous illustration of Captain America punching Hitler and they kind of recreated that in the the Captain

America film Contain America the First a Injured. The interesting fact is we mentioned in the introduction that Marvel had their superheroes fighting Nazis before the United States had even entered into World War Two. Yeah, Timely had some other heroes Wizard, Miss America, Destroyer, and they still occasionally show up, but they never really took off, like Captain America and I guess for that matter, nay More or the Human Torch. Yeah, so not everyone would end up becoming a household name.

Now these days, the years between nineteen thirty eight and nineteen fifty six or so, these are not hard dates, but kind of general dates. We tend to refer to that as the Golden Age of comics. You'll hear people to talk about Golden Age heroes, Silver Age heroes, Bronze Age heroes, and modern age. So fifty six, that's golden age. Let's win. A lot of different iconic characters debuted. With d C. You had Batman and Superman. With Marvel, you

had sub Mariner, Captain, Captain America. But you also saw a lot of comic books that weren't superhero comics. We often think the two are hand in hand, but in truth, there were a lot of different genres that got started or at least that had comic book versions, like horror stories, science fiction westerns, and in fact, a lot of those became more popular than superheroes because when America came out of the Great Depression of World War Two in the

early fifties, people stopped buying comic books. It was still the Golden Era, but it was it was shifting around some. Yeah. Part of the reason why comic books were doing so well even during the Great Depression or or shortly thereafter, was that they were a cheap form of entertainment. You know, it wasn't as expensive as going out and buying a radio or heaven help you, a television set. After World War two, Yeah, these were much less expensive, and so

they were very popular. And we should also point out that the comic books at this time they weren't necessarily just for kids. There were quite a few that we're dealing with some pretty dark subject matter, and they got darker as time went on. So as as comics evolved,

they tried to reach out to a broader audience. Other notable things in Marvel's history and early fifties is Timely comics turned their name to Atlas magazines and Steve Ditko, who is also a very famous comic artist, joined the Marvel team, well, the Atlas team, and at that time Timely Slash Atlas Slash Marvel decided they were going to stop making superhero books for a while and focus more on the other genres sci fi, Western, horror, funny animals to try to recoup they had tried to push Captain

America and Nay More and Human Torch and it just wasn't quite going right. And so this was kind of industry wide. It wasn't just Marvel that was backing off on superheroes. That didn't last too long though. By the mid fifties, d C started to reintroduce some of these characters and create some new ones, including new teams and new uh associations. So that became a trend where we started seeing superheroes come back in. So it was only you know, it was only kind of like four or

five years when superheroes were sort of absent. Yeah, and that was still a part of the olden age. Around that time, Atlas switched its distribution to American News Company. And now we're getting back to the business stuff, which is it's hard because again we just want to talk about all of the fun heroes and things like that. American News Company was the largest distributor in the US, and shortly after Atlas switched their comic distribution to them,

they were found guilty of restraint of trade. They kind of had a monopoly on the distribution market and they liquidated and disappeared. Yeah, so that's the danger of becoming too big. So eventually the government might say, hey, you need to you know, break up into lots of little companies in order for this to be fair. This would also be the mark of the transition from the Golden Age to the Silver Age of comics. And we'll talk

about it. Right after this break superheroes had gone to decline for a few years, but they came back because the United States started to regulate what content could be used in comic books. You've probably heard about the comic book code and this various rating systems. That was largely in response to this, because the United States government was saying, we need to make sure that these youths ain't becoming

delinquents by reading your funny books. They read your funny books and the next thing you know, they all wants to hang out at the drug store and smoke cigarettes. And then there's a music man who comes in and tries to sell instruments. I might be mixing my metaphors. I think you are, I think you are. Let's get

back on all right. Anyway, The point is that they started to bring superheroes back as kind of a way of they were backing off on some of the more controversial topics, right, they were trying to create more family friendly type content. This would also be the era where we started seeing more zany comic books. If you don't remember, it's so much from the Marvel side, but on the d C side you definitely saw. This is when like characters like the Joker or the Penguin started being much

more cartoonish and less violent. During the Silver Age. In nineteen sixty one, you did get somes any because Marvel came out with its what If series, Oh Yes, which I love. What If was where they would ask these hypothetical questions like what if Dr Doom had turned into a good guy. Yeah. It's the same year that they actually went from Atlas magazines specifically to Marvel Comics. So now Marvel comics were all branded as Marvel Comics, and

they added a bunch of characters. Most successfully, they started the Fantastic Four, Stanley and Jack Kirby did, and they started a new sort of comic writing. Now these superheroes were interacting with each other in a more like realistic way and dealing with real world problems, and they also inhabited this shared universe, right, So now it was no longer these individual story arcs where characters just kind of

inhabited their own version of the world. Now they had a shared version, which was beneficial in the sense that you could boost different title sales by having different character show up, almost like a cameo, But it would also add the problem of the more complex this got, the

harder it was to maintain continuity across the entire universe. Yeah, and you know, unsurprisingly, the Silver Age Marvel heroes were Fantastic Four, Hulk, Thor Ant Man, Iron Man, Spider Man, X Men, Avengers, which they did to compete specifically with Justice League, which had come out in nineteen sixty Daredevil, and then the what If comic the original Bullpen, where Stanley and all of them were the Fantastic Four. So this is an era where a lot of the characters

we often associate with comic book superheroes today. This is the era they first arrived. And if you look at Marvel movies nowadays and you go, well, why in the world do they make an ant Man movie? Guse he was part of their silver age, choosing around a long time. Yeah. Uh. Then in nineteen sixty eight we get a change of ownership.

That's when Goodman would sell his company, actually the parent company that owned Marvel Comics, because it was kind of an umbrella company holding company almost to a company called the Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation. Yeah, okay, the PFCC. Yes. So the interesting thing here was not just that it was a acquisition, but that Goodman himself went along with it.

It wasn't like Goodman sold and then walked away. Yeah, and you know, PFCC seemed to be very interested in Marvel's success, unlike some of the companies we talked about where they acquire company and then don't really pay attention to it. I would say, like my Space or something. Sure, they were invested. So they also bought Curtis Circulation in ninety nine to help use them to distribute the Marvel

comics they had bought. This is really interesting to me too, because throughout the history of Marvel you'll see eras where the company would own its own distribution, and then following eras where they would abandon that and go and work with an independent distributor. So that's kind of interesting. Nineteen seventy Marvel would say goodbye to one of its instrumental creators, Yes, Jack Kirby. He goes over to d C. The Trader.

There's a lot of crossover, that's true, and this would be about where we see the transition between Silver Age and the Bronze Age. So in the Bronze Age you started to get a change in tone, and there's no like hard line here. There's not like an event that you could point to. A lot of a lot of

Marvel's history doesn't have hard lines. It's kind of very fluid, right, So in this case, we started seeing sort of a return to what the kind of storylines you saw in the Golden Age, but amped up, like you started seeing comic books deal with some very serious and very dark themes in this era. This is when we start seeing more of the types of stuff that would feed into even the the nineties and early two thousand's. I think of like Frank Miller's run with Daredevil that would come

in the Bronze age. That such a good one. It is a really good run. I'm not a huge Frank Miller fan, but that Daredevil run was really good. When I when I was watching the Netflix Daredevil series, I'm like, oh, I see especially season two there it owes a ton to the Frank Miller run. In the U S Department of Health, Education and Welfare commission Stanley to do a comic story regarding drug abuse which goes falls into this darker era, and Stanley wrote a three parts Spider Man

series about it, kind of warning against it. So it was a darker subject, but a positive message and a positive message for kids who might read it as well or teenagers who relate to Spider Man. But the Comics Code Authority didn't approve it. They said, you can't put this out because it talks about drugs. Period. Yeah, it doesn't matter what the messages. The content itself was objectionable. So what did they do? Well? They published it anyhow, you know, and it was so popular that the c

c Age changed their rules that same year. Huh. So, I guess that's better to ask for forgiveness than permission, I guess. Sometimes In nineteen seventy two, Goodman would finally step down. He retired, and he handed the reins over to someone who had started when he was just seventeen years old as an assistant Excelsior Stanley. Yes. And then immediately the comic books went into a slump. This was

not Sley, by the way, not at all. So Marvel diversified to expand their comic line, and they kind of give us superheroes in the other genres, so like they gave us superheroes in the fantasy genre like Red Sonja and Conan and Barbarian, or in funny animals like Howard the Duck. Now, I mentioned earlier that as a kid, I collected certain comic books. Howard the Duck was one of the comic books I collected. I had the first

twenty issues of Howard the Duck. You know, people are hit a miss on him, but I like him in the comics. He was a very interesting character, and he would often end up teaming up with someone like Spider Man. Spider Man's history is often spider Man teaming up with a even more sarcastic, crazy character. Sometimes it's how Are the Duck, Sometimes it's Deadpool. Sometimes it's stores Frog, sometimes

it's Wolverine who just doesn't put and they switched bodies. Anyhow, They also this year lowered their comic prices and kind of started under cutting d C and taking DC's market share because people could buy Marvel Comics cheaper. Yeah, this is not necessarily a long term sustainable no strategy, by the way, but it's a good way to get fans alright.

So then we get to nineteen seventy three when PFCC was it went under its own identity change became Cadence Industries, and the Magazine Management Company officially was renamed the Marvel Comics Group. So, just just to clarify because we didn't really talk about it earlier, Magazine Management Company was the overhead company of Marvel com So you had Magazine Management Companies a parent company, and then Marvel Comics under it,

and now the entire group is Marvel Comics Group. Now this is also when we started seeing a shift in consumer behavior. So up to this point, the place where you would typically buy a comic book would be a newsstand. You would go to a news stand, you buy yourself, you know, your whichever titles you liked, and you would go off on your married little way. But by the

mid seventies, newsstand sales were in decline. This could have led to a complete collapse of the comic book industry, but the industry as a whole was able to adapt to this by concentrating more on specialty stores comic book stores, because those were not really a thing until the mid seventies. It wasn't until you started seeing people who had grown up with comic books investing to create stores specifically to cater to that audience. That's when you started seeing comic

book stores start. And without that, the industry might not have made it. So this was like almost like a mini brink moment where if the industry had not been able to adapt, it would have gone into extinction or at least gone into hibernation for a really long time. But you know, the comic industry, they're they're like the underdogs. They write about their scrappy They just fighting. We have more to say about Marvel, but first let's take a

quick break. In nineteen Jim Shooter became the editor in chief of Marvel and Jim Shooter. He was kind of a controversial editor in chief. He did some really good things like he introduced creator Royalties and a subsidiary of Marvel Epic Comics, I believe, where the creators of the comics could own the properties they were creating. And then

he also made a company wide crossover Secret Wars. Yes, this was one of those things where when I heard about Secret Wars, I would have to ask my friends who were more avid comic book collectors to explain what happened.

That tends to happen whenever there would be any of these huge multi title arcs or or whatever, like the various Crises and Secret Wars and things, where it usually is an attempt to reset everything so that the continuity makes sense again, because one of the problems with having all these individual titles is that things that developed in one title might not be reflected in other titles because

you have different teams working on them. Yeah. But you know, Jim Shooter, despite all those good things, yeah he So let me talk about this for a second. About in this era, there had been kind of a revolving door for the editor in chief of Marvel, and the reason for that was largely because the artists or writers who would become editor in chief would find that it was unmanageable.

There were so many different titles that were being published at the time, each of which had its own deadline, and they had deadlines for are completing art completing the writing, publishing it, getting it distributed, and it was becoming unmanageable, and there are a lot of teams that were slipping on their deadlines. Yeah, So Shooter becomes the editor in chief and he lays down the law. He starts exercising editorial control. He starts to in the minds of some

writers and artists, interfere with their work. But on the flip side, he starts making sure that those titles are hitting those deadlines. So he starts turning things around and getting the company back on track. But he is his style and his hands on approach was something that really rubbed the creative types of the wrong way. So it was a double edged sword. On the one hand, the business side is getting attended to. On the other hand, the writers and artists are getting more and more irritated

and frustrated and angry about how things are going. So it was it was definitely I think you put it best saying it's a he was a controversial leader. Yeah, and also around this time, we're getting him to a point where Marvel doesn't just go through editors in Chief, but they're going to start changing hands a lot. But before they do, Shooter buys an animation studio, the one that used to make Pink Panther, and they rename it Marvel Productions, and they start making animated cartoons like Spider

Man and his Amazing Friends. And in eighty four they had the opportunity to do something pretty amazing. I kind of wonder what how things would have turned out if they had done this. They had the chance to buy out their old nemesis, d C. Yeah, but why didn't they? Well, they figured that DC characters just weren't as good as Marvel characters. That's why DC was struggling, and that's how Warner Brothers just trying to sell them off to Marvel.

But they were wrong. Yeah. No, I mean it turns out like I think, for your average person, if you asked them to name comic book characters, if Batman or Superman isn't or Wonder Woman, if those are not in like the first more or five names that they say, that's odd. I mean they are the first ones that I think of. Superman was like, first, I'm a I'm a huge Marvel fan, and I think of Superman and

Batman first Marvel. I like the Marvel stories more, but the characters don't stick in your mind the way like Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman do Yeah. Typically I say that now I also acknowledge at the box office they can do no wrong. But we'll get to that. Yeah, Okay, so we've hit the Golden Age, Silver Age, and the Bronze Age. What age is next? The Modern Age? That's the age wherein now?

So that that starts around the mid eighties. Generally, this is where we start getting to more psychologically complex storylines and characters. You get into a lot of storylines that involve anti heroes, so heroes who are not always behaving like super good guys. Wolverine is a great example. Wolverine is kind of an anti hero. He's more on the heroic side of anti hero. But then you have like Elektra, who's maybe more on the shady side of anti Pools

an anti hero. Deadpool is definitely an anti hero. Deadpool is a special case all on his own because he can break the fourth wall. At least, it was just about saying until recently, but we don't need that's a large that's that's yeah. Yeah, So we started seeing that. By the end of nineteen eighty five, the company was hitting revenues of a hundred million dollars a year. And the interesting thing to me is that not all of

that was coming from comic book sales. They were making a significant amount of their revenue through licensing their characters, either to toy companies to produce toys or lunch boxes or you know that sort of thing. So video games that would become a thing, not so much in five but a few years later, so that would become an increasingly important part of their revenue. Yeah. In Marvel Entertainment Group sold to New World Entertainment for forty six million

dollars yep. And they mainly wanted to get the animation studio and the rights to all those characters. And then in we get the release of a film that is a rift between your beloved hosts. Yes, Howard, I'm not going to sing it the Duck because I don't want royalties, but yeah, how are the Duck? Released? It did not go over well, it's it's not a good movie, Ariel, It's not a good movie. But it's a fun movie.

Ariel loves this movie and I do not. When Howard the Duck came out and Guardians of the Galaxy, and okay, I did like that. I was I want to know Howard the Duck movie. Now, I'm just glad that they avoided having to get like the music sting from the Howard the Duck film and played in the background. Yeah, there were other Marvel movies that people wanted to produce, but they cost too much to make, so they just stayed in this production limbo. Yeah, and just never got

out of the development phase. Now, how Are the Duck tanked? But the failure wasn't necessarily an omen However, the following ten years would lead to the event that would almost put Marvel out of business. So we're now about to get into the braink But in a surprise plot twist, we're going to cover that in part two of Marvel on the Brink. Don't you just hate when you're left

with a surprise cliffhanger. Look, if Marvel can have twenty two movies in their first arc, I think we can have it to be continued, all right, We'll tune in next week for another exciting installment of Marvel on the Brink. And if you want to get any of your suggestions to us, well, you can send us a little email that's a feedback at the Brink Podcast dot show. And you can also check out our website at www dot The Brink podcast dot show. And until then, I am

Jonathan Strickland and I'm arial casting. We'll see you next week. Excel See or the Brink is a production of I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Nine