by Sean Howe
The American comic book, meanwhile, was beginning to take form. In 1933, the Eastern Color Printing Company used its idle presses at nighttime to publish Funnies on Parade, a book of reprints of Sunday newspaper strips. 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 as promotional items. The following year, Eastern Color slapped a ten-cent price on the cover of Famous Funnies #1, and sold more than 200,000 copies through newsstands; soon that title was seeing a profit of $30,000 a month. Other publishers gave it a shot. The biggest sellers were repackaged Sunday newspaper comic strips like Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and Popeye, but New Fun, a black-and-white, ten-by-fifteen-inch anthology of unpublished strips, became the first comic book of all-new material. By 1937, a few enterprising men set up packaging services in which comic books were produced by efficient assembly lines, in the tradition of garment factories. A writer would hand his script off to an efficient assembly line of out-of-work veteran illustrators and young art school graduates armed with fourteen-by-twenty-one-inch Bristol board. In turn, they would break the action down into a series of simply rendered panels, flesh out the drawings in pencil, add backgrounds, embellish the artwork with ink, letter the dialogue, and provide color guides for the printer. It wasn’t a 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-year-olds from Cleveland, sold a thirteen-page story called “Superman” to National Allied Publications for $130. The character was a mix of everything kids liked—pulp heroes, science-fiction stories, classical myths—rolled up into one glorious, primary-colored package. The “champion of the oppressed, the physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need” fought corporate greed and crooked politicians, and preached for social reform at every turn, a perfect fantasy for the New Deal era. But Superman was more than just a symbol; his secret identity as the mewling Clark Kent offered even the loneliest readers a fellow outsider with whom to identify. Premiering in the cover feature of Action Comics #1, Superman became a surprise runaway success, and by its seventh issue, Action was selling half a million copies per issue. National’s sister company Detective Comics (they’d soon merge and come to be known as DC Comics) introduced Batman, another caped avenger, and gave Superman his own title—just as competitors rolled out a wave of colorfully costumed knockoffs. (Legend claimed that the publisher of Wonder Man, one of the earliest and most blatant imitations, had been an accountant for the head of National until he saw the numbers on Action and quickly set up his own company.)
Lloyd Jacquet, a soft-spoken, pipe-smoking ex-colonel, decamped from his position as art director of Centaur Comics and, following the leads of others, went into business as a comic-book packager, churning out stories for trend-hopping publishers. Chief among the artists Jacquet grabbed from Centaur and assigned to develop new superheroes for his new concern—Funnies, Inc.—were Carl Burgos and Bill Everett. Both were twenty-one years old and restless. Burgos had quit the National Academy of Design, impatient with the speed at which he was being taught; Everett, a three-pack-a-day smoker and already a decade into serious drinking, had bounced between Boston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Now they sat down at a Manhattan bar called the Webster and hammered out their plans for superheroes. They kept it simple: fire and water.
Burgos came up with the idea of a brilliant but avaricious scientist, Professor Phineas T. Horton, who creates a synthetic man within a giant test tube, only to see him burst into flames upon contact with oxygen. The “Human Torch” needs no costume: his featureless face and vague anatomy, both reddened and obscured by wisps of fire, are surrounded by stray, tear-shaped bursts that fly off him like nervous crimson sweat, and the flares at the top of his head suggest demonic intent. He is, in other words, a creature flickering with fear and anger. Upon his inevitable escape, he sets about shooting fireballs from his hands and scaring the bejeezus out of cops and criminals alike; Burgos’s low-budget primitivist style only increased the sense that the flimsy buildings, cars, and people the Torch encountered were hastily constructed only to be destroyed in short measure. By the end of his first adventure, the Human Torch learns to control his powers, but he’s a man on the run.
Everett’s contribution, which borrowed from Jack London’s maritime adventure tales, Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and Giambologna’s Mercury, was Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner. After an arctic expedition unknowingly causes destruction to the underwater settlement of an aquatic race, the amphibious emperor sends his daughter to spy on the humans. The princess marries the expedition’s commander, gathers intelligence for her homeland, and, before returning to the ocean, conceives a son. Nineteen years later, the pointy-eared, pointy-eyebrowed, widow-peaked Namor, clad only in swimming trunks (and graced with winged feet), is “an ultra-man of the deep . . . flies in the air . . . has the strength of a thousand men”—and he seeks revenge on America. Putting his powers to scary use, he murders two deep-sea divers (one via vicious stabbings, the other via head-crushing) and then shoves their ship into a reef. The faint horizontal lines, lonely bubbles, and levitating objects that Everett administered in ink-wash to convey the subaquatic world gave the proceedings an eerie, theremin-ready ambience, although such subtleties of mood were necessarily temporary.* Pages later, the creepy languor of the saltwater battles gives way to pure action, as Namor hurls a pilot from a biplane and “dives into the ocean again—on his way to further adventures in his crusade against the white men!” Unredeemingly violent and willfully unassimilated, the sneering Sub-Mariner was the reverse negative of the alien-as-immigrant-hero Superman.
The Sub-Mariner strip was marked for inclusion in Motion Pictures Funnies Weekly, a giveaway comic that movie theaters would distribute to moviegoing kids, in hopes that they’d be hooked enough to show up for the following week. But Motion Pictures Funnies stalled out, never going to press except for a handful of sample copies that were handed out to theater owners.
Luckily, the Funnies, Inc. sales agent, a compact and balding Irishman named Frank Torpey, had connections, and one of them was Martin Goodman, with whom he’d worked at Eastern Distributing. Torpey grabbed copies of Superman and Amazing Man (a title that Everett had recently done for Centaur), walked three blocks north from the shabby building that housed the Funnies, Inc. loft, and entered the pristine blue-green Art Deco skyscraper headquarters of Timely, where he made the pitch to his old friend Goodman. Comics, Torpey said, were easy money. They made a deal for Goodman to publish the Human Torch and Sub-Mariner strips in a new comic book anthology. Goodman already had a perfect idea for a title.
Marvel Comics #1, produced entirely by Jacquet’s team, covered all the popular bases in its sixty-four pages: Paul Gustavson’s mustachioed, Saint-like Angel, Ben Thompson’s jungle adventurer Ka-Zar (a Tarzan knockoff, resurrected from one of Goodman’s pulps), Al Anders’s cowboy the Masked Raider, and gag cartoons to fill it out. Goodman commissioned a cover from veteran pulp illustrator Frank R. Paul, and Timely’s first comic book was published on August 31, 1939. Hours later, halfway around the world, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. World War II was in motion.
Marvel Comics #1 sold 80,000 copies in September 1939, and so Goodman went back to press. Eventually it sold 800,000—better than the average DC Comics title. In the years to come, Timely staffers would talk about seeing Frank Torpey darting in and out of Goodman’s office, moving so fast they thought he was a messenger. The truth was that he was just collecting twenty-five dollars, a weekly thank-you from Martin Goodman for pulling him into the comic-book industry.
Goodman never missed an opportunity to change a name, and Marvel Comics became Marvel Mystery Comics with the second issue. The Human Torch started to act like every other costumed crime-fighter; whether the threat he defended against was a Martian or a trigger-happy racketeer, it could just as easily be a job for Superman—indeed, following i
n Superman’s footsteps, the Torch took on an alias (Jim Hamond) along with an upright-citizen day job (policeman). Namor, on the other hand, stayed true to his anger: He kidnapped a high-society woman and killed a cop.
Namor did find one human he liked. Betty Dean was, of course, a pretty girl; less predictably, she was also a policewoman, friendly with the Human Torch’s alter ego Jim Hamond and thus in the unique position to act as a go-between for Timely’s two most popular characters. And so it was that in Marvel Mystery Comics #7, a seemingly throwaway moment—in which Betty warns Namor that the Torch is now on the police force and looking for him—carried the seeds of something revolutionary: the fictional universes of two characters, conceived by two different imaginations, were in fact one and the same.
Or was this a fictional universe at all? Wasn’t that the Manhattan skyline behind the Torch? Wasn’t that the Hudson River that the Sub-Mariner was diving into? Superman and Batman had smiled together on a few carefree covers, but every kid knew that they were fully tethered to their respective Metropolis and Gotham City, and that never the twain would meet. Who cared if the Acme Skyscraper fell, or the First National Bank had to give up its cash? Timely’s New York City, on the other hand, was rife with Real Stuff to Destroy. In Marvel Mystery Comics #8 and #9, which hit newsstands in the spring of 1940, Namor wreaks havoc on the Holland Tunnel, the Empire State Building, the Bronx Zoo, and the George Washington Bridge (“Hah! Another man-made monument!” he shouts, breathlessly aroused at the potential carnage) before the Human Torch finally confronts him, and the battle rages to the Statue of Liberty and Radio City Music Hall. Was it possible that they’d turn a corner and meet the Angel? Or, better yet, show up at the reader’s home?
Maybe they’d bump into the slew of other characters that Funnies, Inc. was now cranking out for Goodman’s two new titles: the Blue Blaze and Flexo the Rubber Man, or the Phantom Reporter and Marvex the Super Robot. Alas, Daring Mystery Comics and Mystic Comics didn’t sell anything like Marvel Mystery Comics. Flexo the Rubber Man would never get within stretching distance of the Human Torch.
Goodman didn’t want to count on Lloyd Jacquet’s studio alone, especially if they weren’t going to come up with new hits. He quickly realized that it was possible to reduce the role of the profit-eating middleman. When Goodman had requested another hero in the vein of the Human Torch, one of Jacquet’s freelancers, Joe Simon, had risen to the occasion, creating the flame-shooting Fiery Mask. Now Goodman asked him to create new characters directly for Timely. Simon, a former newspaper cartoonist from Rochester, New York, was earning seven dollars per page from Funnies, Inc.; Goodman would pay him twelve per page, and still spend less than he paid to Jacquet. Simon, always an astute businessman, took the money. Soon he was, incredibly, balancing the work for Goodman with a job as the editor in chief at Victor Fox’s Fox Publications, where he made corrections, assigned stories, cranked out covers, and supervised a staff of low-paid, mostly inexperienced artists.
At Fox, Simon met a twenty-one-year-old artist named Jacob Kurtzberg, a product of the Lower East Side slums. “My mother once wanted to give me a vacation,” Kurtzberg said, describing his childhood, “so she put me on a fire escape for two weeks and I was out in the open air sleeping for two weeks on a fire escape and having a grand time.” A member of the Suffolk Street Gang, as a youth he was no stranger to the rougher elements of his neighborhood (“I would wait behind a brick wall for three guys to pass and I’d beat the crap out of them and run like hell”), but Kurtzberg found his escape in fantasy: in Shakespeare, in movie matinees. The life-changing moment was the rainy day he saw a pulp magazine with an illustration of a foreign-looking, futuristic object on the cover, floating down the gutter. He picked up the copy of Wonder Stories and stood transfixed, staring at this thing called a rocket ship.
Kurtzberg threw himself into drawing his own stories, carefully studying the comic-strip artistry of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, Hal Foster’s Tarzan, and Billy DeBeck’s Barney Google. A short stint at the Pratt Institute ended after a week, when his father lost his factory job, but Kurtzberg found an alternate path to his career dreams. After joining the Boys Brotherhood Republic, a local civic club designed to rescue youths from the streets, Kurtzberg began producing a mimeographed cartoon series for the organization’s newsletters. Then he enrolled in industrial school, filling out auto mechanic classes with an afternoon art course. At the end of his teens, he was hired to draw for the Fleischer brothers’ animation studio, but the assembly-line production of Popeye and Betty Boop reminded him too much of his father’s factory job. Stints at various comic-strip syndicates followed, and by the time he met Joe Simon at Fox, Kurtzberg was ready to create something of his own.
Kurtzberg was skilled, fast, and, because he was the one putting money on the table for his parents and younger brother, eager to earn as much as he could. Impressed with Kurtzberg’s talent and work ethic, Simon soon conscripted him as a partner in his freelance endeavors, and in early 1940 they worked together on a new title for Timely called Red Raven. Kurtzberg went uncredited for his work on an eight-page story called “Mercury in the 20th Century,” in which the fleet-footed god is sent “from High Olympus, Celestial retreat of the ancient gods” to save mankind from itself—and from Mercury’s cousin Pluto, who has taken the disguise of “Rudolph Hendler,” dictatorial leader of “Prussland.” But for another feature, the Flash Gordon–derivative “Comet Pierce,” Kurtzberg signed a pseudonymous name that he would soon adopt permanently, and legally: Jack Kirby.
Unfortunately, Simon’s title feature in Red Raven was inane: an orphaned plane-crash survivor raised by bird-men on a “gravity-free island” is given wings, and later fights a bald, gold-pillaging demon named Zeelmo. The comic sold poorly, and a month later, Goodman replaced Red Raven with a new title that starred a proven commodity: The Human Torch.
Despite the failure, Goodman kept Simon around as an art director on one of his crime magazines. He liked the idea of generating comics without Funnies, Inc. and encouraged more submissions from Simon and Kirby. Their track record improved immediately. After they introduced Marvel Boy and the Vision, Simon sketched out a variation on MLJ Comics’ star-spangled hero the Shield.
“I stayed up all night sketching,” Simon remembered. “Mailed armor jersey, bulging arm and chest muscles, skin-hugging tights, gloves, and boots flapping and folded beneath the knee. I drew a star on his chest, stripes from the belt to a line below the star, and colored the costume red, white and blue. I added a shield.” At the bottom of the page, he wrote “Super American.” Then he reconsidered, and changed the name to “Captain America.”*
While Superman, Batman, and other heroes continued battling aliens, costumed villains, and bank robbers, the grittier, louder, angrier Timely stars had already rolled up their sleeves to combat the real-life villains of World War II. In the last weeks of 1939 the Sub-Mariner had taken on a German U-boat off the New York coast; soon Marvel Boy was fighting a dictator named Hiller (Goodman, it was said, was afraid that Adolf might sue), and the Sub-Mariner was joining a French island in resistance to Nazi invaders. These were sporadic battles. But now the war in Europe was ratcheting up: France had fallen, and the threat of Nazi rule spreading across the world finally began to sink in for Americans. Captain America would be focused on his mission: taking down the Third Reich.
Sensing Captain America’s great potential, Simon negotiated a special deal with Timely through Maurice Coyne, the company’s chief accountant.* “We can’t keep putting out this crap for long,” Goodman had told Simon on their first meeting, but he too must have recognized something special. Not only did he agree to the 25 percent royalty rate (which Simon would split with the artist), but he also asked Simon to come on board full-time, as an editor. Goodman would still need to pay Funnies, Inc. for his two biggest characters, the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, but he could get Simon to pad out the line at a huge savings. (Eventually, Goodman would buy those chara
cters outright.)
Simon soon asked Jack Kirby to come work for Goodman full-time. While Simon handed out assignments, brainstormed titles with Goodman, designed logos, and art-directed the pulp magazines, Jack sat and drew, all day. When Simon prepared to assign the penciling of Captain America to a team of freelancers, Kirby told him not to bother. He could get it done on time by himself.
But Goodman was already nervous about the idea that Hitler might be killed before Captain America reached newsstands. Kirby penciled the issue, but Simon had an old cartoonist pal from Syracuse, New York, ink the pages. Also brought in to help was Syd Shores, a quiet art school graduate who’d spent seven years working in a whiskey plant, and would become Timely Comics’ third employee. On Shores’s first day at work, Simon sat him down at a desk in the room he already shared with Kirby, handed him the cover that Kirby had just drawn, and asked him to ink it. It showed Captain America punching out Adolf Hitler.
While Captain America #1 was at the printers, a tall, teenaged cousin of Jean Goodman traveled down from the Bronx to the foot of the McGraw-Hill Building—which, he’d later recall with wonder, “seemed to be made entirely of glass”—and rode the elevator up to the Timely offices for the first time. He opened the door to a tiny waiting room and gave his name, Stanley Lieber, to the secretary at the window.
Circulation manager Robbie Solomon—Jean Goodman’s “Uncle Robbie”—was expecting the visit. Stanley’s mother, Celia, was Robbie’s sister. Celia had explained to Robbie that Stanley wanted to be a writer, but he was floundering—he’d recently been fired from a menial job in trouser manufacturing. Solomon opened a door to the left of the secretary’s window and invited Stanley to follow him back. They took a quick left into the eighteen-by-ten room that Simon, Kirby, and Shores shared. “This is my nephew,” Solomon said. “Can you find something for him to do?” Simon interviewed the teenager, who didn’t seem to know much about comic books but was very eager. And, of course, he was a relative of the boss. Simon hired him.