Thoughts on the new book: The Secret History of Marvel Comics...

[bminor]

Received this book this holiday season for Christmas.

This is a book about Martin Goodman and his publishing empire of magazines, pulps and incidentally comics. So it is not really about Marvel Comics.  Comic books were incidental in this empire, a tiny, tiny fraction of the empire.

After reading  this book I came away not liking the man who was a large part of the comics that we all enjoy.

The volume is lavishly illustrated. If you deleted all the illustrations, the remainder would fill a book a quarter of its size.
There is a quote spoken by Mr. Martin Goodman in the book that sums up his attitude towards the people who read his publications "Fans are not interested in quality"

The talent that he published, artists and writers, were given little to no respect.

The authors dug back into publication industry magazines of the era and unearthed a treasure trove of data. They explained why there are so many different publications associated with Mr. Goodman, Timely, Atlas, Marvel, etc.

There is a interesting graphic in the book, a chart showing all the different publishing arms that he had over the years, represented as a large office building. Some publications represented as several floors. Timely comics is represented as a little window.
The book has brief bios of the artists, and samples of their pulp artwork. The bios are very, very brief, and there is a lot of reproduced work of each artist. I would have liked to see more exposition on each of the artists.
The authors do go into the burning question of why Ditko and Kirby left Marvel.
The book is has fantastic production quality, a beautifully printed, very nice paper, a wonderful layout and it a visual delight to look at.
I was not happy after reading this book though. It upset me that this man treated the talent in such a callus manor.
I would recommend reading it though.
B.

[bchat]

Received this book this holiday season for Christmas.

This is a book about Martin Goodman and his publishing empire of magazines, pulps and incidentally comics. So it is not really about Marvel Comics.  Comic books were incidental in this empire, a tiny, tiny fraction of the empire.

After reading  this book I came away not liking the man who was a large part of the comics that we all enjoy.

The volume is lavishly illustrated. If you deleted all the illustrations, the remainder would fill a book a quarter of its size.
There is a quote spoken by Mr. Martin Goodman in the book that sums up his attitude towards the people who read his publications "Fans are not interested in quality"

The talent that he published, artists and writers, were given little to no respect.

The authors dug back into publication industry magazines of the era and unearthed a treasure trove of data. They explained why there are so many different publications associated with Mr. Goodman, Timely, Atlas, Marvel, etc.

There is a interesting graphic in the book, a chart showing all the different publishing arms that he had over the years, represented as a large office building. Some publications represented as several floors. Timely comics is represented as a little window.
The book has brief bios of the artists, and samples of their pulp artwork. The bios are very, very brief, and there is a lot of reproduced work of each artist. I would have liked to see more exposition on each of the artists.
The authors do go into the burning question of why Ditko and Kirby left Marvel.
The book is has fantastic production quality, a beautifully printed, very nice paper, a wonderful layout and it a visual delight to look at.
I was not happy after reading this book though. It upset me that this man treated the talent in such a callus manor.
I would recommend reading it though.
B.

I'd be surprised to hear that he treated the talent any other way.  My impression of Goodman, along with the majority of publishers back then, was that he was a businessman first & foremost, not caring about what he published as long as it made money.  As for the quote about the fans, it almost makes sense if you don't take what he said so literally.  I imagine that his real feelings about the readers & his publications was that his only goal was to reach the widest possible audience with each book he produced, in which case publishing "quality books" would be of little concern to him.

[Yoc]

There is a blog devoted to this book that covers things they had to leave out as well as reviews, etc that you might enjoy -
http://secrethistoryofmarvelcomics.blogspot.ca/

The authors of this book both run informative blogs you might like:
DocV's - http://timely-atlas-comics.blogspot.ca/
Blake Bell's - http://blakebellnews.blogspot.ca/

-Yoc

[Geo (RIP)]

I too have that book B. As to the read, it was mostly what I've already knew of the business model at the time from reading Alter-Ego and others, make piles of money with the least payout and being a slime ball at the same time. A sad show of the times with some of the talent available at the time and the respect that they got from it. They did get that respect outside of the field of comics though. It just a surprise that so many stayed with the comic field with the way they were treated.

Geo

[bminor]

I suppose it is a surprise that all the talent of the day did stay in the field to be used in such a manner.
But, then as now, a job is a job. When you have bills to pay, mouths to feed. What are you gonna do?
Take time off to find a better job or go with what you do know how to do?
It takes a lot of time to track down a new field to make a living.
At least Kirby in the end of his career was able to work in film, knocking out layouts for cartoons.

B.

[Drusilla lives!]

Was there a "spicy" side to Goodman's magazine-pulp empire?  I've read in various accounts that he did have a line of mags geared toward men's interests... cheesecake stuff, not anything one would get worked up about by today's standards.   

Do they touch on this subject in the book at all?

[Yoc]

It sure does D.
DocV touches on it in his blog as well here - http://timely-atlas-comics.blogspot.ca/2011/12/best-western.html

[Drusilla lives!]

I guess when regarding Goodman Yoc, the question should be how many windows were the men's mags represented as... not if there were any. 

...There is a interesting graphic in the book, a chart showing all the different publishing arms that he had over the years, represented as a large office building. Some publications represented as several floors. Timely comics is represented as a little window.

[darwination]

As a collector of pulps as well as magazines and comics, I really enjoyed the book, as the authors manage to piece together a lot of the disparate wings of Goodman's outfit which really did manage to put out a ton of different magazines over the years - pulps, pin-up mags during the war, true crime mags, film and tv and photo magazines in the 50s, the sweat mags (one case where Goodman was probably a pioneer), and maybe a little bit about the humorama type mags which were indeed spicy at least as far as nudity goes, later on at least (it is true his men's adventure magazines aren't tooo salacious).  The book definitely helps me connect some of the dots on a lot of the magazines in my collection (and has added some mags to my want list), but there are plenty of Goodman mags that didn't even get a mention, too (probably because they didn't use the Timely Atlas artists too often).  Plenty of work to be done on the subject.  Whatever you think of Goodman, you have to give the guy props for lasting so long and putting out so many magazines over the years.

I, too, enjoy the graphic of all the different shell names Goodman used.  It must have been a ton of work to put it together.

As for whether the authors are too hard on Goodman, I don't know.  Both of them have done books in celebration of artists that got the usual treatment from Goodman, but there is acknowledgement that it was very much a way of doing business for many of the publishers of the day.  I was a little irked by their labeling of the shudder pulps as "torture porn" but they were probably going for pointing out some of the salacious aspects as counterpoints to his comic output. 

I wish the book had an index and was as detailed with some of the other mags as they are with the pulps (particularly the SF pulps), but overall it earns a nice spot on my reference shelf, and I'd recommend it to Timely/Atlas fans as well as well as to those interested the general mid-century magazine landscape..

[bminor]

Here is a scan of the graphic we have been talking of.
B.

[Yoc]

Thanks for the graphic B.
If they had a second graphic that showed by 'type', ie magazines, books, comics, etc that might have been interesting

[Bob Hughes]

A lot of those "companies" that Goodman owned switched "type" fairly often.  In fact one of the points the book makes is that Goodman would continue the numbering from a comics title into a Swanky magazine and then into a pulp digest and back into a comic book without so much as an eye blink.  I can't imagine the post office fell for it, but maybe they just couldn't keep up.

[Yoc]

Thanks Bob.
Now that you mentioned it I had heard of this to suggest some of the odd numbering that can be seen in some titles.

[JVJ (RIP)]

Thanks Bob.
Now that you mentioned it I had heard of this to suggest some of the odd numbering that can be seen in some titles.

Um.... did you READ the book, Yoc? Michael discusses this in great depth therein. You don't have to "hear" about "suggestions". You can read the facts... Just sayin'

(|:{>

[Yoc]

Hi Jim,
Nope, not got a copy yet.  Followed along on the Yahoo group for many years though.