What's in a Name - Marvel Super-Heroes vs Classic TV Shows

With the success of the X-Men and Spider-Man
franchises, it seems that every second Marvel Comics superhero has a
film in planning stages. However, Marvel's other superhero teams have a
slight hurdle: they share their names with another popular Hollywood
subject: fondly-remembered TV shows. Let's tell them apart...

THE
AVENGERS
On television: Quirky series from the sixties, in which the terribly
British John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and various offsiders, including
Cathy Gale (Honore Blackman) and Emma Peel (Diana Rigg), battled
various sci-fi goofballs. Best villains: the Cybernauts, a bunch of
homicidal robots.
In the comics: Superhero group, published since the sixties, most often
led by the proudly American Captain America. Every Marvel superhero
save the X-Men seems to have been an Avenger at some time. Best
villain: Ultron, a homicidal robot.
Prospects: The comic book was spun off into a popular animated TV
series, but since the awful 1998 movie (based on the TV show), the name
"Avengers" is probably box-office poison.

THE
DEFENDERS
On television: Riveting 1960s courtroom drama, featuring a father-son
defence team.
In the comics: Riveting 1970s and 1980s superhero comic, featuring a
bunch of guys who would hang out together, fighting mainly supernatural
bad guys.
Prospects: Some of the comic-book Defenders (including the Hulk and,
coming soon, the Sub-Mariner and the Silver Surfer) are already movie
heroes. If they are successful, a team-up is the logical next step.

THE
INVADERS
On television: Maximum paranoia, '60s style. David Vincent (Roy
Thinnes) had to run away from aliens who wanted to take over the world,
disguised as humans, while trying to warn a disbelieving Earth
population.
In the comics: Marvel's greatest heroes of World War II - namely
Captain America, the Sub-Mariner and the original Human Torch. While
they were all popular back in the 1940s, they only worked together in a
nostalgic series, first published in the seventies.
Prospects: How about a crossover? Aliens invade Earth and battle
superheroes during World War II? Hey, it could work!

THE
CHAMPIONS
On television: Silly (but fun) British superhero series of the sixties.
In the comics: Los Angeles-based superhero series of the seventies. One
of the first teams to be led by a woman (the Black Widow, a defected
Russian spy), along with Ghost Rider, Iceman and others.
Prospects: Neither of them lasted long. If a successful TV series (like
The Avengers) or comic book (like Captain America) can bomb at the
movies, who'd want to film one of these also-rans?

ALIAS
On television: The adventures of Sydney Bristow, high-school student cum superspy. First shown in 2001; cancelled 2006.
In the comics: The adventures of Jessica Jones, superhero cum detective. First published in 2000; she retired in 2005.
Prospects: Either would make a good starring role for Jennifer Garner. Time to get started!

Marvel History - 1990

Marvel earned a great deal of money and recognition during the early decade's comic-book boom, launching the highly successful 2099 line of comics set in the future (Spider-Man 2099, etc.) and the creatively daring though commercially unsuccessful Razorline imprint of superhero comics created by novelist and filmmaker Clive Barker. Yet by the middle of the decade, the industry had slumped and Marvel filed for bankruptcy amidst investigations of Perelman's financial activities regarding the company.^{[citation needed]}

In 1990, Marvel began selling Marvel Universe Cards with trading card maker Impel. These were collectible trading cards that featured the characters and events of the Marvel Universe.

Marvel in 1992 acquired Fleer Corporation, known primarily for its trading cards, and shortly thereafter created Marvel Studios, devoted to film and TV projects. Avi Arad became director of that division in 1993, with production accelerating in 1998 following the success of the film Blade.^{[citation needed]}

In 1994, Marvel acquired the comic book distributor Heroes World to
use as its own exclusive distributor. As the industry's other major
publishers made exclusive distribution deals with other companies, the
ripple effect resulted in the survival of only one other major
distributor in North America, Diamond Comic Distributors Inc.^[17] Creatively and commercially, the '90s were dominated by the use of gimmickry to boost sales, such as variant covers, cover enhancements, regular company-wide crossovers that threw the universe's continuity into disarray, and even special swimsuit issues. In 1996, Marvel had almost all its titles participate in the Onslaught Saga, a crossover that allowed Marvel to relaunch some of its flagship characters, such as the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, in the Heroes Reborn universe, in which Marvel defectors Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld
were given permission to revamp the properties from scratch. After an
initial sales bump, sales quickly declined below expected levels, and
Marvel discontinued the experiment after a one-year run; the characters
returned to the Marvel Universe proper. In 1998, the company launched the imprint Marvel Knights, taking place within Marvel continuity; helmed by soon-to-become editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, and featuring tough, gritty stories showcasing such characters as the Inhumans, Black Panther and Daredevil, it achieved substantial success.^{[citation needed]}

Marvel History - 1980

By the 1980s, one-time DC wunderkind Jim Shooter
was Marvel's editor-in-chief. Although a controversial personality,
Shooter cured many of the procedural ills at Marvel (including
repeatedly missed deadlines) and oversaw a creative renaissance at the
company. This renaissance included institutionalizing creator
royalties, starting the Epic imprint for creator-owned material in 1982, and launching a brand-new (albeit ultimately unsuccessful) line named New Universe,
to commemorate Marvel's 25th anniversary, in 1986. However, Shooter was
responsible for the introduction of the company-wide crossover (Contest of Champions, Secret Wars)
and was accused by many creators, especially near the end of his
tenure, of exercising his job in a draconian manner and interfering
with the writers' creative process.^{[citation needed]} . In 1981 Marvel purchased the DePatie-Freleng Enterprises animation studio from famed Looney Tunes director Friz Freleng and his business partner David H. DePatie. The company was renamed Marvel Productions and it produced well-known animated TV series and movies featuring such characters as G.I. Joe, The Transformers, Jim Henson's Muppet Babies, and such TV series as Dungeons & Dragons, as well as cartoons based on Marvel characters, including Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends.

In 1986, Marvel was sold to New World Entertainment, which within three years sold it to MacAndrews and Forbes, owned by Revlon executive Ronald Perelman. Perelman took the company public on the New York Stock Exchange
and oversaw a great increase in the number of titles Marvel published.
As part of the process, Marvel Productions sold its back catalog to Saban Entertainment (acquired in 2001 by Disney), and Marvel management closed the animation studio, opting to outsource.^{[citation needed]}

Marvel History - 1970s

In October 1976, Marvel, which already licensed reprints in different countries, including the UK, created a superhero specifically for the British market. Captain Britain debuted exclusively in the UK, and later appeared in American comics.

In 1971, Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee was approached by the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to do a comic book story about drug abuse. Lee agreed and wrote a three-part Spider-Man story portraying drug use as dangerous and unglamorous. However, the industry's self-censorship board, the Comics Code Authority,
refused to approve the story because of the presence of narcotics,
deeming the context of the story irrelevant. Lee, with Goodman's
approval, published the story regardless in The Amazing Spider-Man
#96-98 (May-July 1971), without the Comics Code seal. The storyline was
well-received and the Code was subsequently revised the same year.^[14]

Goodman retired as publisher in 1972 and was succeeded by Lee, who
stepped aside from running day-to-day operations at Marvel. A series of
new editors-in-chief oversaw the company during another slow time for
the industry. Once again, Marvel attempted to diversify, and with the
updating of the Comics Code achieved moderate success with titles
themed to horror (Tomb of Dracula), martial arts, (Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu), sword-and-sorcery (Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja), satire (Howard the Duck) and science fiction ("Killraven" in Amazing Adventures).
Some of these were published in larger-sized black-and-white magazines,
targeted for mature readers. Marvel was able to capitalize on its
successful superhero comics of the previous decade by acquiring a new
newsstand distributor and greatly expanding its comics line. Marvel
pulled ahead of rival DC Comics
in 1972, during a time when the price and format of the standard
newsstand comic were in flux. Goodman increase the price and size of
Marvel's November 1971 cover-dated comics from 15 cents for 36 pages
total to 25 cents for 52 pages. DC followed suit, but Marvel the
following month dropped its comics to 20 cents for 36 pages, offering a
lower-priced product with a higher distributor discount.^[15]

In 1973, Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation changed its name to Cadence Industries, which in turn renamed Magazine Management Co. as Marvel Comics Group. Goodman, now completely disconnected from Marvel, created a new company called Atlas/Seaboard Comics in 1974, reviving Marvel's old Atlas name, but this project lasted only a year-and-a-half.^[16]

In the mid-1970s, Marvel was affected by a decline of the newsstand distribution network. Cult hits such as Howard the Duck
were the victims of the distribution problems, with some titles
reporting low sales when in fact they were being resold at a later date
in the first specialty comic-book stores.^{[citation needed]} But by the end of the decade, Marvel's fortunes were reviving, thanks to the rise of direct market distribution — selling through those same comics-specialty stores instead of newsstands.

Marvel History - 1960s

n the wake of DC Comics' success reviving superheroes in the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly with The Justice League of America, Marvel followed suit.^[8]

Editor/writer Stan Lee and freelance artist Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four, reminiscent of the non-superpowered adventuring quartet the Challengers of the Unknown
that Kirby had created for DC in 1957. Living in a Cold War culture,
the Marvel creators sought to deconstruct the superhero conventions of
previous eras to better reflect the psychological spirit of their age.^[9]
Eschewing such comic-book tropes as secret identities and even costumes
at first, having a monster as one of the heroes, and having its
characters bicker and complain in what was later called a "superheroes
in the real world" approach, the series represented a change that
proved to be a great success.^[10] Marvel began publishing further superhero titles featuring such heroes and antiheroes as the Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, Ant-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men and Daredevil, and such memorable antagonists as Doctor Doom, Magneto, Galactus, the Green Goblin, and Doctor Octopus. The most successful new series was The Amazing Spider-Man, by Lee and Ditko. Marvel even lampooned itself and other comics companies in a parody comic, Not Brand Echh (a play on Marvel's dubbing of other companies as "Brand Echh", a la the then-common phrase "Brand X").^[11]

Marvel's comics were noted for focusing on characterization to a
greater extent than most superhero comics before them. This was true of
The Amazing Spider-Man, in particular. Its young hero suffered
from self-doubt and mundane problems like any other teenager. Marvel
superheroes are often flawed, freaks, and misfits, unlike the perfect,
handsome, athletic heroes found in previous traditional comic books.
Some Marvel heroes looked like villains and monsters. In time, this
non-traditional approach would revolutionize comic books.

Comics historian Peter Sanderson wrote that in the 1960s,

“

DC was the equivalent of the big Hollywood studios: After the brilliance of DC's reinvention of the superhero ... in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it had run into a creative drought by the decade's end. There was a new audience for comics now, and it wasn't just the little kids that traditionally had read the books. The Marvel of the 1960s was in its own way the counterpart of the French New Wave.... Marvel was pioneering new methods of comics storytelling and characterization, addressing more serious themes, and in the process keeping and attracting readers in their teens and beyond. Moreover, among this new generation of readers were people who wanted to write or draw comics themselves, within the new style that Marvel had pioneered, and push the creative envelope still further.[12]

”

Lee became one of the best-known names in comics, with his charming
personality and relentless salesmanship of the company. His sense of
humor and generally lighthearted manner became the "voice" that
permeated the stories, the letters and news pages, and the hyperbolic
house ads of that era's Marvel Comics, and fostered a clubby
fan-following with Lee's exaggerated depiction of the Bullpen (Lee's
name for the staff) as one big, happy family. This included printed
kudos to the artists, who eventually co-plotted the stories based on
the busy Lee's rough synopses or even simple spoken concepts, in what
became known as the Marvel Method,
and contributed greatly to Marvel's product and success. Kirby in
particular is generally credited for many of the cosmic ideas and
characters of Fantastic Four and The Mighty Thor, such as the Watcher, the Silver Surfer and Ego the Living Planet, while Steve Ditko is recognized as the driving artistic force behind the moody atmosphere and street-level naturalism of Spider-Man and the surreal atmosphere of Dr. Strange.
Lee, however, continues to receive credit for his well-honed skills at
dialogue and story sense, for his keen hand at choosing and motivating
artists and assembling creative teams, and for his uncanny ability to
connect with the readers — not least through the nickname endearments
he bestowed in the credits and the monthly "Bullpen Bulletins" and
letters pages, giving readers humanizing hype about the likes of "Jolly
Jack Kirby", "Rascally Roy Thomas", "Jazzy Johnny Romita" and others, right down to letterers "Swingin' Sammy Rosen" and "Adorable Artie Simek".

Lesser-known staffers during the company's industry-changing growth
in the 1960s (some of whom worked primarily for Marvel publisher Martin Goodman's
umbrella magazine corporation) included circulation manager Johnny
Hayes, subscriptions person Nancy Murphy, bookkeeper Doris Siegler,
merchandising person Chip Goodman (son of publisher Martin) and Arthur
Jeffrey, described in the December 1966 "Bullpen Bulletin" as "keeper
of our MMMS [Merry Marvel Marching Society] files, guardian of our club coupons and defender of the faith".

In the fall of 1968, company founder Goodman sold Marvel Comics and his other publishing businesses to the Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation. It grouped these businesses in a subsidiary called Magazine Management Co. Goodman remained as publisher.^[13]

Marvel History - Atlas

Sales of all comic books declined drastically in the post-war era as the superheroic übermensch archetype popular during the Depression and the war years went out of fashion. Like other comics companies, Timely — generally known as Atlas Comics in the 1950s — followed pop-cultural trends with a variety of genres, including funny animals, Western, horror, war, crime, humor, romance, spy fiction and fantasy, all with varying degrees of success. An attempted superhero revival with the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner and Captain America lasted only from late 1953 to mid-1954.

From 1952 to late 1956, Goodman distributed his comics to newsstands through his self-owned distributor, Atlas. He then switched to American News Company, the nation's largest distributor and a virtual monopoly — which shortly afterward lost a Justice Department lawsuit and discontinued the business. As historian and author Gerard Jones explains, the company in 1956

source : wiki

Marvel History - Timely

Marvel Comics was founded as Timely Publications in 1939, and is now the largest comic company in the world. It was founded by Martin Goodman, a pulp-magazine publisher whose first publication was a Western pulp in 1933. Expanding into the emerging and by then already highly popular new medium of comic books, Goodman began his new line at his existing company at 330 West 42nd Street, New York City, New York. His official titles were editor, managing editor, and business manager, with Abraham Goodman officially listed as publisher.^[1]

Timely's first publication was Marvel Comics #1 (Oct. 1939), containing the first appearance of Carl Burgos' android superhero, the Human Torch, and the first generally available appearance of Bill Everett's anti-hero Namor the Sub-Mariner, among other features. The contents of that sales blockbuster^[2] were supplied by an outside packager, Funnies, Inc., but by the following year Timely had a staff in place. With the second issue the series title changed to Marvel Mystery Comics.

The company's first true editor, writer-artist Joe Simon, teamed with soon-to-be industry legend Jack Kirby to create one of the first patriotically themed superheroes, Captain America, in Captain America Comics #1 (March 1941). It, too, proved a major sales hit, with a circulation of nearly one million.^[2]

While no other Timely character would be as successful as these "big three", some notable heroes — many continuing to appear in modern-day retcon appearances and flashbacks — include the Whizzer, Miss America, the Destroyer, the original Vision, and Paul Gustavson's Angel. Timely also published one of humor cartoonist Basil Wolverton's best-known features, "Powerhouse Pepper",^[3][4] as well as a children's funny animal line whose most popular characters were Super Rabbit and the duo Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal.

Goodman hired a teenaged relative, Stanley Lieber, as a general office assistant in 1939. When editor Simon left the company in late 1941, Goodman made Lieber — by then writing pseudonymously as "Stan Lee" — interim editor of the comics line, a position Lee kept for decades except for three years during World War II military service.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Comics

Marvel Comics

Marvel Comics is an American comic book company owned by Marvel Publishing, Inc., a division of Marvel Entertainment, Inc.

Marvel counts among its characters such well-known properties as Spider-Man, the X-Men and their member Wolverine, the Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, the Punisher, Daredevil, Ghost Rider and many others. Most of Marvel's fictional characters are depicted as inhabitants of a single shared reality; this continuity is known as the Marvel Universe.

The comic book arm of the company was founded in 1939 as Timely Publications^[1] and was generally known as Atlas Comics in the 1950s. Marvel's modern incarnation dates from the early 1960s, with the launching of Fantastic Four and other superhero titles created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others. Marvel has since become one of the largest American comics companies, along with DC Comics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Comics