Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and fifty-third installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.
Click here for the first legend in this "Early days of Marvel" installment!
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Martin Goodman canceled his first comic book, Marvel Comics, as soon as it was published
True
As I detailed in the previous installment, Martin Goodman got into comic book publishing in the first place because he was convinced that there was money to be made. The person who was primarily responsible for convincing Goodman of this fact was Frank Torpey, a salesman for Lloyd Jacquet, the man behind Funnies, Inc. Funnies, Inc. was a comic book packaging studio. Packaging studios were companies that would put together comic book stories for publishers for a fee. Essentially, all you had to do was pay them and they would do the rest and all you had to do was then publish the finish the comics and theoretically rake in the money. Torpey convinced Goodman to get into the comics business.
For someone who didn't know anything about comic books, though, Martin Goodman was oddly VERY invested in the putting together of that first issue of Marvel Comics. Goodman personally approved each of the features. He didn't have any creative input, but he had the say so on what would be included and what wouldn't be and he intentionally gave that first issue a nice balance between superhero characters and non-superhero characters (including Ka-Zar, one of Goodman's own pulp magazine characters, adapted into comics for the first issue).
As a result, Marvel Comics #1 is unusually stacked with top notch features. Most anthologies of the period had a good deal of filler material, while Marvel Comics #1 had very few and their leads were so good that, well, we still know Human Torch and Namor to this day, ya know?
However, one area where Goodman's inexperience hurt him was in the actual printing of the comics. He had never done it before and so he didn't know what to look for. He knew to pay for extra color separation to make the cover look great (Goodman knew all about making covers of magazines look good), but he didn't know anything about coloring the insides of a comic book and when we saw the inside of the book, he was aghast.
He felt that the coloring was all over the place in the Human Torch story and that the lettering was hard to read...
He felt that the Namor story was extremely muddy (Namor creator Bill Everett had come up with a unique design for water that made it very hard to reprint years later and apparently difficult to print in the first place)...
The great comic book historian, Will Murray, in his introduction to the Marvel Golden Age Omnibus, explained that when Goodman saw the finished project, he canceled the book on the spot. He felt that there's no way that this book could be a hit with the fans, so he was done with it.
Since he paid for the product, though, he released a small 80,000 copy print run on just the East Coast. This was right in the lead-up to the start of World War II, so Goodman felt that the attention being paid to Europe (with many people trying to get out of Europe before the war began) would further distract from the sales of the comic.
Instead, the book was a massive success and sold out in a week! Goodman sent the book back to print (with the October on the cover changed to November) and printed another 800,000 copies and THOSE copies sold out, too. Goodman, of course, uncanceled the title and renamed it Marvel Mystery Comics...
and Marvel Comics (then Timely Comics) was born!
Thanks to the great Will Murray for the information!
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In the latest TV Legends Revealed - Which Batman Beyond villain was originally created by one of the show's co-creators when he was just 10 years old?_______________________________________________________________________________
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