More Comic Book Urban Legends!
Wow, I can't believe I haven't mentioned this before, because it's one of my favorite blog entries/columns to read. But, Brian Cronin has just cooked up another edition of Comic Book Urban Legends.
The idea is, Cronin researches long-standing comic beliefs and either debunks them, or proves them to be true. A fun read for anyone interested in the history of funnybooks. Here's a snippet of the latest entry, but do yourself a favor and go back and read the previous nine. I have:
COMIC URBAN LEGEND: DC dictated the format of Marvel comics for more than a decade.
STATUS: True
In the late 1950s, publisher Martin Goodman was expanding Atlas/Marvel's place in the marketplace. However, they ran into a MAJOR problem in 1957.
They had signed a distribution agreement with American News Company.
However, due to an anti-trust investigation, ANC ceased to exist in Fall 1957!
Suddenly, Marvel was facing a MAJOR problem! They couldn't publish any comics!
This was, suffice to say, a major blow.
Desperate to get the books back on to the market before too much valuable time had passed, Marvel signed a deal with Independent News, with was a subsidiary of DC Comics!!
Yes, that is right, Marvel was being distributed by the enemy!
Part of the onerous deal was that Marvel could not publish more than eight comics a month.
This became a major problem when they decided to get into superheroes in the early 60s, as they had to quit publishing their other titles and convert those titles into superhero titles.
Not an easy feat to achieve, certainly.
In addition, this was why Marvel had so many anthologies. They WANTED to have more titles, but they were not ALLOWED to!
In 1968, finally, Marvel was a big enough sales success (and DC was in a major sales slump) that they were able to negotiate their way out of the deal, allowing themselves to sign with Curtis Distribution.
You may have noticed that 1968 saw the end of Tales of Suspense and Tales of Astonish.
That was because finally, Marvel's title decisions were not restricted by their biggest competitor!!!
posted by Alex Segura @ 12:35 PM
2 Comments:
Thanks, Alex.
For clarification's sake, a pal of mine, Kurt Mitchell, pointed out that if DC was putting a 8 title limits, it was only on monthlies, as they had 8 monthlies and 9 bi-monthlies in the mid-60s.
I'll need to do some double-checking, but I don't believe it was anti-trust that killed American News. There had been an anti-trust case, but as I understood the story, the company that bought American News discovered that they owned so much real estate that they were worth more money if they dropped the company and sold the land.
and American News was HUGE. Imagine Diamond disappearing overnight. Leader News was another distributor that folded in the 50's under odd circumstances -- that was the one that put EC into troubled waters, as that was their distributor, and now they had to go to other distributors that all had links to the rival publishers.
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