It's time for the latest Comics Q and A!  Now on PWIPop AND the Comic Geek Speak website.  You send in your questions about comics and I answer them.  I apologize for the long break between columns.  All I can say is that sometimes, life gets in the way.  However, you have questions and I have answers!  If you've got a question about comic books, I'll do my best to answer them, just like the PWInsider Q and A columns.

The first one is actually from the Comic Geek Speak message board, and I'll paraphrase it a bit:

I saw an editorial in an old Timely comic in the late 1940's by Stan Lee talking about the book “Seduction of the Innocent.”  Stan was defending his comics, stated that they are looked over by a leading child psychiatrist and said that it applied to the entire Marvel Comics Group.  When did Timely/Altas/Marvel start calling itself Marvel?

Seems like a simple question, but when you're dealing with Martin Goodman, who was the publisher back then, what a comic company is called is actually a very confusing question.  Goodman, who was Stan's Uncle, didn't just publish comics.  Through the 30's and 40's, he published pulp magazines as well as comics, and in the 50's and 60's, he moved into paperback books and slick magazines.  One of the things he did for tax purposes was that most of the magazines and comics were published by different shell companies that were all owned by a bigger company.  

Marvel was one of the many different companies under the Timely banner.  At his peak, there were 59 different comic book “companies” under the Timely banner, and the comics would treat them as if they were different companies in that if a character from one company's book would show up in another company's book, there would be a blurb like “We thank the publishers of Marvel Mystery Comics for allowing us the use of The Destroyer” or somesuch.  This went on until the late 40's, but by the 50's, all of the Timely books had an “Atlas” seal on the cover.  Atlas was not the name of the publisher, but was instead the name of Goodman's distribution arm.  He kept up the shell companies, even though everyone who worked for the companies just called it either “Timely” or “Atlas” depending on when they worked there.

So, the letter from Stan about the “Marvel Comics Group” was for those comics published by the Marvel arm (and it may have been printed in others, by the late 40's, Goodman was pretty sloppy about the shell companies).  There was also a few months in 949 – 1950 when all of the Timely books had a “Marvel Comics” logo, but it wasn't permanent, and was dropped without a trace in 1950.

Later in the 50's, Goodman decided to outsource his distribution, and at that point, the Atlas globe left to covers, and there was nothing that let people know on the cover who the publisher was. The final comic to bear the Atlas globe logo was Dippy Duck #1, the company's only release with an October 1957 cover date.

The bad thing about this was that in 1957, the distributor they were using (American News) went out of business.  The comic book division was publishing between 40 – 60 books a month, and all of a sudden, they had no way to get them to newsstands.  Goodman made a deal with Independent Distribution (ID) for between 8 – 12 books a month.  Why so few?  ID was owned by National Periodicals, which which now know as DC Comics.  So, other than the ID on the cover, there was no way to know who published the comics without reading the indicta.

They stayed this way until Amazing Adventures number 3, when there was a “MC” on the cover under the “ID” in 1961.  Soon after that Fantastic Four number 1 was published, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I picked up some old black and white magazines, and they say they were published by Curtis Magazines, but they have Marvel characters and Marvel creative talent. Can you tell me about them?  Are they a company Marvel bought?

Again, this was just how Martin Goodman did business, and it's very confusing to people now.  In the late 60's, Goodman was able to get distribution for his comics, magazines and paperback with Curtis Distribution, so, when Marvel started up their black and white magazine line to compete with Warren's Eerie, Creepy and Vampirella, Goodman did what he had done with Atlas and named the magazine line after the distributor.  No where in the indicta or covers does it say the magazines are published by Marvel, but in the editorials and letters pages, it is stated often that they are a Marvel imprint.  In the Marvel comics of the time, there were subscription ads for the magazines (some of which even say “Marvel Magazines) and in the Bullpen Bulletins pages, they hype the magazines as if they were just regular Marvel comics.

I was reading some recent statements from John Byrne, and he won't even type the word “Marvel”.  Instead, he types it “M*****l”.  Why is he so mad at them, and do you think he'll ever work for Marvel again?  I loved his work on the Fantastic Four and the X-Men.

John Byrne had a falling out with Marvel after his last run with the company when he worked on Spider-Man, an X-Men book set before Giant Size X-Men #1 introduced the “New” X-Men, and the Hulk, among others.  At the time, he was highly upset at his X-Mn book being canceled and felt Marvel's editorial team misled him about the reasons for the cancellation.  Marvel says that they were streamlining the X-Men books and his was the lowest selling, while Byrne maintains that his book wasn't selling anywhere near the level Marvel cancel books at.

In my opinion, both sides are right:  Marvel was looking at the X-Men line and saw a bunch of comics that were “out of continuity” or didn't fit the direction they wanted to go, so the ones that sold the least or couldn't be changed to fit the new direction were dropped.  X-Men: The Hidden Years was selling better than other Marvel books, but sold about 1/3rd of the copies that the main X-Men books sold and was set during stories that were published in the late 60's and early 70's, so the book had limited appeal.

Will Byrne work for Marvel again?  As Sean Connery learned, never say never, but I am confident in saying that as long as the current editorial team is in place, Byrne will not work for them.  According to Tom Brevoort, Byrne has been offered work and told he is more than welcome to pitch ideas, but Byrne chooses not to at this time.  Byrne also posts on his message board his displeasure with the type of stories Marvel is publishing at this time, so I think it'll be a while before he changes his mind.  

Still, Ditko came back to Marvel in the 70's, Kirby came back to DC to finish the New Gods and it looks like Neal Adams is working on a Batman comic, so you never know!

Got questions? Cory!! Strode, The Best Dressed Man In Comics has answers!  Send yours to me, Heck, I am BEGGING ya, or I'll just ramble on how much I want Barry Allen to stay dead, so E-mail them to me at solitaire.rose@gmail.com.

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