I did a post yesterday or the day before mentioning the book Marvel Comics: the untold story and thought I'd share a few more Marvel facts/stories that I've found to be interesting so far such as:
- How many teenagers were actively being hired to write or edit comics in the early/mid 70's. Among them Jim Shooter who started writing for dc at 14 and Gerry Conway who started writing for Marvel at 16. Marvel also had several editors in the 19-21 age range after most of the older crowd had departed in the late 60's.
- People who complain about the influence of the MCU on the comics should know that its something that's actually been going on to some degree since the late 60's when Lee first started pursuing a lot of tv, movie and toy deals. So he started telling all the writers to keep characters pretty much the same so it would stay consistent with any portrayals they had in tv or whatever else. This was a common theme after Lee moved on to become publisher and president in the 70's/80's and started spending a lot of time with movie people and celebrities.
- Marvel actually was having a sister company of DC distribute their comics for them from 1961 up until 1968 due to their first distributor going out of business and having no one else to turn to. This resulted in a deal where Marvel was only allowed 8 titles per month in order to leave plenty of space for DC titles on newsstands and comic racks until that deal expired in 1968. That is when characters such as Dr. Strange and a few others were finally able to get their own titles after being relegated to other titles such as Tales of Suspense which would include a variety of characters.
- Marvel actually came dangerously close to going under in the mid 70's. The guy running them then pretty much ran them into the ground financially along with comics in general becoming less and less popular and the new president was given one year to make them profitable or else Marvel, which was always a small branch of a much larger magazine publishing company was going to be shut down for good.
- One of the things the new president asked for was a title which included members from around the world to get more sales outside of America. Roy Thomas then took that order to recreate the X-Men which he had wanted to do and is why nearly every member of the new team was from outside the us. This is also why Wolverine had been created as a Canadian prior to that, to help sales of Marvel in Canada.
- This has to do with DC actually but apparently the guy who ran DC back in the 60's and 70's(Mort Weisinger) was a complete jackass to work for who treated his employees horribly and ran off a lot of them to Marvel. DC was also known for being a suit and tie sort of company that was very uptight about everything back then compared to Marvel which was very much the opposite especially after Roy Thomas took over as editor in chief and started to give his writers lots of creative control.
I'll stop there and maybe add some more facts in a few days.
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