Marvel's First Universe
by Anthony Bernardo

    For fans who came of age during or after the Silver Age, it’s surprising to find that Marvel wasn’t always the powerhouse of the comic book field. In fact, at one time it had a precarious position as one of the large companies.

    Timely’s first publisher Martin Goodman held onto that position until the early 1970s before passing the job on to his cousin-in-law Stan Lee. In the 1930s Goodman had a pulp line, whose main title was Marvel Stories. Deciding to expand into comics, Goodman named his flagship title, appropriately, Marvel Comics. The first issue of Marvel Comics is one of the most sought-after Golden Age magazines. Its cover, showing what looks like a fire-elemental burning his way through a metal tank, touted the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, and the Angel, who would be among the most enduring heroes of the Timely line. And Marvel Mystery Comics, as the title would be called, would become the biggest seller and most stable venue for Timely.

    As a kid reading Marvel, I was surprised to find that Marvel had at one time created dozens of heroes but only chose to revive or reprint Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, and the Human Torch. What about all those other heroes? Who were these guys, and why did we never see them except as middle-aged homicidal maniacs, guest stars in The Invaders, and figments of Rick Jones’s imagination in Avengers # 97? The answer lies in the fact that Timely had a Big Three, Captain America, the Human Torch, and the Sub-Mariner, and then almost nothing else. Unlike DC or Quality, Timely never developed an appealing second tier of heroes.

    With Marvel Mystery Comics a hit, Goodman then launched Daring Mystery Comics (later Comedy Comics) and Mystic Comics, both of which failed to develop lasting strips. Their contents changed almost completely from issue to issue. Goodman had much better luck with a new comic done by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby called Captain America. Another title, USA Comics, floundered around until Captain America became its lead feature.

    Timely would frequently launch strips that appeared only once or twice and then vanished. These characters were not worse than what was dished out by other companies, but Martin Goodman directed Timely in throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks marketing. Thus Red Raven # 1 had a whole new set of characters, including a titular hero who might have competed with Hawkman, but most were never seen again, since Red Raven became Human Torch after the first issue.

    Instead of developing second-tier characters, Timely featured its Big Three in various titles and used the other strips as fillers. Of Timely’s 80-odd superhero strips, most appeared less than ten times. Were they really so much worse than DC’s Little Boy Blue or Quality’s Red Bee? Yes, some were lousy, and a few were too weird for their own good. But it’s difficult to see the Red Raven or the Thin Man as laughable flops.

    But one thing that characterized Timely’s characters was that they were weird. Jim Steranko has written:

    The horror element permeated every Timely book…Timely summed up their policies on their covers and created an anarchic madhouse of screaming women with torn blouses, hideous fiends with razor-sharp fangs, swastika’d skeletons administering lethal gas…dank dungeons overcrowded with iron maidens, racks, chains, and branding irons, patriotic kids with bazookas and tommy guns, and heroes of a stature that enabled them to clean up such a mess.

    Many companies carved out their own little niches in character types. Quality had a thing for suit-and-mask heroes (Midnight, the Spirit, the Clock, etc.), the All-American line of National Comics favored myth-inspired or heroes (the Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Hawkman), while its DC line liked colorful gimmick-based non-super types (Batman, Sandman, the Guardian, etc.). Timely’s writers took their cue from the weird fiction pulps. For Timely, the attraction was non-human heroes, lost races and androids No other company was so fond of heroes coming from lost races (the Sub-Mariner, Rockman, Jack Frost, the Vision) or discovering lost races (the Thin Man, the Blazing Skull, Red Raven). No company featured so many android heroes (the Human Torch, Flexo the Rubber Man, Marvex, Dynaman, the Eternal Brain) and even gods (Mercury and Hurricane) and a genie (Super-Slave).

    Timely involved itself in the war like no other company. A postwar advertisement set in 1940 shows a pensive Martin Goodman trying to awaken American youth to the fascist menace. His solution: make them the villains in his strips. And so he did, long before Pearl Harbor. His heroes went into the war fiercely shouting their battle cry “OK, Axis, here we come.”

    But during the war Timely launched a successful line of funny animal strips with the best selling one being Super Rabbit. This success spelled the end of the Timely superhero line in the postwar era, as Goodman would look for other avenues of revenue, especially in the horror and teen humor fields.

    Timely did little to promote their heroes’ stories, relying on action to keep things going. There were no major villains other than the Red Skull (but then Timely’s heroes were often scary and ruthless enough), no long-running superhero team, and weak supporting casts. Timely’s All Winners Squad can’t lay claim to the significance of DC’s JSA. The Young Allies, which featured Bucky, Toro, and a collection of kid-gang types was more successful. However, Timely’s contributed to the team-up genre with the titanic battles between the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. They paved the way for Marvel’s trademark slugfests between heroes.

    As the Golden Age ended, Timely tried to attract female readers by producing female superheroes, in what Trina Robbins has called this the most concerted effort by any Golden Age publisher to attract female readers. The Blonde Phantom, Venus, Namora, and Miss America all got their own comics. Meanwhile Captain America and the Human Torch replaced Bucky and Toro with (respectively) Golden Girl and Sun Girl, who also got her own comic. Unfortunately, this latest trend didn’t pay off. By the end of 1949, all of Timely’s superhero strips had been cancelled.

    In the Fifties, Goodman devoted his energies to other genres, becoming one of the largest publishers of horror comics as well as successful westerns and teen humor comics. But the heroes had one last stand in 1954-55, when Goodman brought Captain America, the Human Torch, and the Sub-mariner back for a brief time. Unfortunately, the strips didn’t take off. It wasn’t until 1961 that the company once known as Timely began doing superhero comics. They kept the old emphasis on action and offbeat heroes, but took them in a whole new direction. The rest is history.

Selected Sources:

    For this special Timely issue of Good Guys and Gals of the Golden Age, the following books and websites were helpful:

    The standard early works on the company and its superhero comics are Don Thompson’s chapter on Timely Comics, “Okay, Axis, Here We Come” in All in Color for a Dime and the chapters on Timely in The Steranko History of Comics Volume One. Les Daniels’ Marvel: Five Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics is a more in-depth work Trina Robbins’ The Great Women Superheroes is valuable for information on Timely’s many female heroes.

    Marvel’s recent spate of reprints, especially The Golden Age of Marvel Comics, is a welcome and overdue look at Marvel’s early heroes. Let’s hope it continues (hint! hint!).

    On the Web, Jess Nevins’ Guide to Marvel’s Golden Age Characters and The Timely Comics Story as well as his essays on some of Timely’s minor characters are invaluable.

The Creators

Carl Burgos (1917-1984)

    Carl Burgos is best remembered for creating the android Human Torch. Indeed, androids were his specialty, just as his co-worker Bill Everett did water-heroes. He created the first android hero in comics, the Iron Skull, for Centaur Comics, as well as the White Streak. After studying at Manhattan’s National Academy of Design, he worked for Harry “A” Chesler’s shop and then for Lloyd Jacquet’s Famous Funnies shop. There he and his friend Bill Everett came up with leads for Martin Goodman’s new Marvel Comics. They decided to do a fire hero (Burgos) and a water hero (Everett).

    Few regard Burgos as one of comics’ best draftsman, but he delivered the action and energy that was mostly what Golden Age comics demanded. Unlike other artists, he didn’t swipe from the more accomplished comic strip artists, boasting instead: “if they wanted Raymond or Caniff, they could look at Raymond or Caniff. The miserable drawing was all mine, but I was having fun.” Apparently he wasn’t the only one. His incendiary hero took off with the readers, becoming his major work.

    After the Golden Age, Burgos drew a few issues of the Silver Age Human Torch strip in Strange Tales (he even made a cameo appearance in one story). Later he worked on the infamous Silver Age Captain Marvel from MF Enterprises. The Torch’s creator eventually retired from drawing comics and worked in other parts of the magazine business.

Bill Everett (1917-1973)

    William Blake Everett was one of the finest talents to work for the original Timely comics or for any other company. Before getting into comics, He dropped out of high school and among other things worked on cattle ranches and in the Merchant Marine (possibly where he got his familiarity with the sea). His earliest work was for Centaur, where he drew Skyrocket Steele and the bizarre Amazing Man (who bore a certain resemblance to the Sub-Mariner). He then joined the crew of Lloyd Jacquet’s Funnies, Inc., becoming its art director.

    While at Funnies, Inc. Everett created his most famous strip, the Sub-Mariner, the first of his water heroes. He also created the Fin for Timely and Hydro-Man for Eastern Printing, as well as working on Sub-Zero, the Patriot, the Chameleon, and the Conqueror. His style combined the influences of cartooning and illustration to produce more elegant work than anything else at Timely. He also inked and lettered his own strips, making them still more distinctive than those of other artists.

    Like so many other comic book men he was drafted in World War II. After the war, he went back to the Sub-Mariner and created Namor’s cousin, Namora. He also drew Marvel Boy II, one of Timely’s last superheroes. He also did a lot of horror work in the 1950s and then quit comics entirely in favor of work for greeting card companies. In 1964, he went back to his old company, now Marvel Comics, to become the first artist on Daredevil and he took over Dr. Strange after Steve Ditko left. And, of course, he worked on his old strip, the Sub-Mariner, where he introduced Namorita, a reprise of Namora.

Jack Kirby (1917-1994)

    Ron Goulart said it best: “Next to Superman, Kirby is probably the most important figure in the history of comic books.” Kirby’s work with his partner Joe Simon revolutionized comics in the 1940s. They brought the medium into its own by developing the potential of the comics page rather than the comic strip, expanding the medium’s ability to portray action.

    Jacob Kurtzburg was born in New York’s lower East Side; he called it “Edward G. Robinson territory.” His first art was on the walls of his tenement building; His “art school” was Milton Caniff. He loved H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the science fiction pulps, and, above all else, the movies. One of his earliest jobs was as an in-betweener for Popeye cartoons.

    Kurtzburg began his comics career in the Esiner-Iger studios with humor, Western, and science fiction for Fiction House’s Jumbo Comics. In 1940, he combined two of his pen names and became Jack Kirby. His earliest super-hero work was with Joe Simon on Blue Bolt. Shortly thereafter, they moved to Timely and set about redefining comic books with Captain America. They also worked on (though how much is debated) the Young Allies, their first kid-gang strip. Kirby’s fight scenes were the most amazing yet done in comics and dozens of artists imitated his work. But more importantly his layouts and composition let people know that comic books were written on pages, not strips or film sequences. Captain America was Timely’s biggest success, and the Young Allies a solid feature among Timely’s here-today-gone-tomorrow strips. His work on the two almost identical strips Hurricane and Mercury show the penchant for mythology that would mark Kirby’s later work.

    While at DC, Simon and Kirby earned bigger rates and produced some of their best Golden Age work. They created the Boy Commandos (which was popular enough to get its own 36-issue comic), the Guardian and the Newsboy Legion (the lead strip in Star Spangled Comics), and Manhunter, as well as handling the revamped Sandman for Adventure Comics. They almost took over the DC line, except for Superman and Batman. These strips didn’t have the impact of Captain America but they made up for it in narrative and polish.

    Following the Golden Age, Jack stuck with his partner Joe Simon until the late 1950s. They did Boys Ranch, regarded by many as the greatest Western comic ever and created romance comics, as well as the light-hearted spoof, Fighting American. He also created the Fly for MLJ comics (its most successful hero after the Shield) and the Challengers of the Unknown, DC’s first new title in the superhero revival). At Marvel, after doing innumerable monster strips, Kirby and Stan Lee launched Marvel's superhero line, which once again changed comics. In 1970, Kirby quit Marvel and went to work for DC, where he created the Fourth World (New Gods, Mister Miracle, The Forever People) line of comics, the most ambitious superhero line yet done. His later work included the Demon, Kamandi, the Eternals, Machine Man, Captain Victory, and Destroyer Duck. His battles with Marvel in the 1980s were legendary. And though they didn’t show him as the gentleman he usually was, they added to his prestige. He was and is the King.

Alex Schomburg (1905-1998)

    Even more than Bill Everett or Simon and Kirby, Alex Schomburg was Timely’s definitive artist. His covers were among the company’s most frequently used. Their cluttered, chaotic, sometimes gruesome features defined the no-holds-barred look of Timely the way that Lou Fine’s clean, beautifully drawn figures on Quality’s covers did for it. Ron Goulart has called him “the undisputed champ” of cover artists and “the Hieronymous Bosch of comics.”

    Schomburg left his native Puerto Rico for New York as a child and started a commercial art shop with his brothers in the early 1920s, producing art for Hugo Gernsback’s science fiction magazines. He then graduated to cover work for the science fiction pulps and then to comics in the early 1940s, working primarily for Timely and the Standard/Better/Nedor outfit. He operated out of a small studio of his own rather than the offices of any publisher.

    Schomburg’s action-packed, anarchic covers for Timely proclaimed: this was the company that went wild. They emphasized the company’s whole-hearted devotion to the war effort. And they had the Timely heroes teaming up before the first All Winners Squad comics as they sent fists, shields, and fireballs (and sometimes machinegun bullets) against the Nazis. But in all of this fury, Schomburg worked with a precision and attention to detail that Timely'’ interior art rarely had. His postwar material, done largely for Better/Nedor Publications, was cleaner and less cluttered.

    As the comics field moved into its 1950s downturn, Schomburg left comics and returned to science fiction, working through the 1970s. More recently, he did some paintings recreating his World War II cover art.

Joe Simon (born 1915)

    Joe Simon’s partnership with Jack Kirby is one of the great comic book team-ups, but he is a talent in his own right. Simon was born in Syracuse, NY, and began drawing sports cartoons in 1937. In 1940 he entered comics, working on characters like Novelty’s Blue Bolt, where he began working with Jack Kirby. For MLJ, Simon created did the Shield, the first patriotic hero and MLJ’s biggest seller until a certain red-haired teenager from Riverdale came along. With Kirby doing the pencilling and Simon the inking and lettering, the team created Captain America, the Boy Commandos, the Guardian and the Newsboy Legion, and Manhunter. They were the reigning kings of comics until they entered the service.

    While in the Coast Guard, Simon noticed how many service men were reading comics and speculated on comics for older readers. After the war, he and Kirby renewed their partnership with strips like Stuntman and the Boy Explorers. But fun as these strips were, they weren’t what comics readers in the late 1940s wanted. So S & K put Simon’s wartime notions to work and turned to crime comics and romance comics (a genre they created) By the mid-1950s, with comics in a serious slump, Simon and Kirby broke up. Simon later worked on strips like DC’s Brother Power and Prez, comics the so-bad-it’s-good category.

    Simon has left comics as a profession, but still is active in the field as a historian and memoirist.

The Angel - Black Marvel - The Black Widow - Blazing Skull - Blue Diamond - Captain America - Captain Wonder & Tim Mulrooney - The Challenger - Citizen V - The Defender & Rusty - Destroyer - The Falcon - The Fin - Human Torch - Invisible Man - Ka-Zar - Marvel Boy - Mercury - Miss America - Namora - The Patriot - The Purple Mask - Red Raven - Rockman U.S.A. - Silver Scorpion - Super-Slave - Thin Man - The Thunderer - The Vision - The Witness I & II

Villain - The Red Skull