CHAPTER 1

Long before there was Marvel Comics, there was Martin Goodman.Born in Brooklyn in 1908 to Russian immigrants, the ninth of thirteenchildren, Goodman was such an avid reader as a youth that he would cutup pieces of old magazines and paste them into new creations. But a lifeof leisurely imagination was not an option: his father's construction jobsended with a backbreaking rooftop fall and Isaac Goodman became apeddler. The fifteen members of the Goodman family constantly movedaround Brooklyn, trying to stay one step ahead of their landlords. Martinwas forced to drop out of school in the fifth grade and worked a series ofjobs that failed to excite him. Finally, as he reached the end of his teenyears, he resolved to make a bid for freedom: he set out to travel the countryby train. By the time the Great Depression hit America, he'd alreadyracked up journals detailing his coast to coast experiences on railroadsand in hobo camps.

It was his childhood love of magazines that eventually called himhome. Returning to New York, he found work singing the praises of pulpsas a publisher's representative for Eastern Distributing. Eastern soon fellapart, but Goodman's fortune only rose: he and his coworker LouisSilberkleit joined forces to form Newsstand Publications. From a dingyoffice in lower Manhattan, they turned out westerns, detective stories,and romance tales at fifteen cents an issue.

Lone Ranger rip-offs may not have been high art, but, somewhatimprobably, Martin Goodman had ascended from poor immigrant torail hopper to magazine editor. Slight, quiet, his arched eyebrowsoverwhelming his wire- frame eyeglasses and a bow tie punctuatingone of his many crisp pink shirts, Goodman even had prematurelywhitened hair that neatly completed his transformation from street kidto businessman.

He was twenty-five.

In 1934, Newsstand Publications' distributor went under, costing Goodmanand Silberkleit several thousand dollars in lost payments. Newstandwas unable to meet payments to its printer; its assets were seized.

Silberkleit abandoned the company, but an eager Goodman convincedthe printer that it stood to make back its money if it allowed him to continuepublishing some of the titles. Goodman's cunning instincts quickly carriedthe company back into profitability; within a couple years, he'd moved intothe considerably more elegant RKO Building uptown. He'd devised a simpleformula for success: "If you get a title that catches on, then add a few more,"he told Literary Digest, "you're in for a nice profit."

It was all about staying on top of trends, not providing anything more thandisposable literature. "Fans," he decreed, "are not interested in quality."When the market crashed again, Goodman stayed afloat: he simply filledout his magazines with unlabeled reprints of other publishers' stories.Now he was in a financial position to set his parents up in a little housein the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. He could also afford to relax.On a cruise ship to Bermuda, he approached two young women playingPing Pong and asked to play the winner. Jean Davis - also a New Yorker,but from a more cultured and sophisticated New York - soon becamethe apple of Goodman's eye. Back in America, Jean was on-again, off-againabout having a serious relationship, but Goodman threw everythinghe could into the courtship. Once, scraping into his bank account, heflew her to Philadelphia for a dinner and a concert performance. Eventually,he won her over, and she became his bride. They honeymooned inEurope, with plans to return on the fashionable Hindenburg - but therewere no two seats together, so they changed their plans at the last momentand caught a plane. Martin Goodman's luck just kept improving.Goodman was publishing more than two dozen magazines by 1939,with names like Two Gun Western, Sex Health, and Marvel Science Stories.(The latter didn't sell especially well, but there was something Goodmanliked about that word, Marvel. He'd remember that one.) He movedhis business into the fashionable McGraw-Hill Building on Forty SecondStreet, where he set about providing steady work for his brothers. Goodman'soperation was, in the words of one editor, a "little beehive of nepotism":

one brother did bookkeeping; one worked in production; one keptan office where he photographed aspiring starlets for the pulps. EvenJean's uncle Robbie got in on the action. Furthermore, the flood of companynames that Goodman shuffled around - advantageous for tax purposesand for quick maneuvering in the event of legal trouble - wereoften derived from family members: there was the Margood PublishingCorp., the Marjean Magazine Corp., and soon, when Jean gave birth tosons Chip and Iden, there would be Chipiden.

The company name that stuck, though, was "Timely," taken fromGoodman's Timely magazine. It was no longer racking up debt, but neitherwas it setting the world on fire. Pulp sales, crowded by the increasedpopularity of radio serials, were starting to go flat. Martin Goodmanneeded a hit.

The American comic book, meanwhile, was beginning to take form. In1933, the Eastern Color Printing Company used its idle presses at nighttime to publish Funnies on Parade, a book of reprints of Sunday newspaperstrips. The strips were printed side by side on a single tabloid page,folded in half and stapled, and sold to Procter & Gamble to give away aspromotional items. The following year, Eastern Color slapped a ten centprice on the cover of Famous Funnies #1, and sold more than 200,000copies through newsstands; soon that title was seeing a profit of $30,000a month. Other publishers gave it a shot. The biggest sellers were repackagedSunday newspaper comic strips like Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and Popeye,but New Fun, a black and white, ten by fifteen inch anthology ofunpublished strips, became the first comic book of all new material. By1937, a few enterprising men set up packaging services in which comicbooks were produced by efficient assembly lines, in the tradition of garmentfactories. A writer would hand his script off to an efficient assemblyline of out of work veteran illustrators and young art school graduatesarmed with fourteen by twenty-one inch Bristol board. In turn, theywould break the action down into a series of simply rendered panels, fleshout the drawings in pencil, add backgrounds, embellish the artwork withink, letter the dialogue, and provide color guides for the printer. It wasn'ta way to get rich, but in the throes of the Depression, it was steady work.And then, in 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two twenty-three yearolds from Cleveland, sold a thirteen page story called "Superman" toNational Allied Publications for $130. The character was a mix of everythingkids liked - pulp heroes, science fiction stories, classical myths - rolledup into one glorious, primary colored package. The "champion of theoppressed, the physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence tohelping those in need" fought corporate greed and crooked politicians,and preached for social reform at every turn, a perfect fantasy for theNew Deal era. But Superman was more than just a symbol; his secretidentity as the mewling Clark Kent offered even the loneliest readers afellow outsider with whom to identify. Premiering in the cover feature ofAction Comics #1, Superman became a surprise runaway success, and byits seventh issue, Action was selling half a million copies per issue.

National's sister company Detective Comics (they'd soon merge and cometo be known as DC...