Aug. 28.
Marvel Comics is home to such legendary super-heroes as Spider-Man,
Hulk, Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man, all of whom have spun box
office gold in the 21st century. But Marvel Comics has a secret history
hidden in the shadows of these well-known franchises.
The Secret History of Marvel Comics
digs back to the 1930s when Marvel Comics wasn't just a comic-book
producing company. Marvel Comics owner Martin Goodman had tentacles into
a publishing world that might have made that era’s conservative
American parents lynch him on his front porch. Marvel was but a small
part of Goodman’s publishing empire, which had begun years before he
published his first comic book. Goodman mostly published lurid and
sensationalistic story books (known as “pulps”) and magazines, featuring
sexually-charged detective and romance short fiction, and celebrity
gossip scandal sheets. And artists like Jack Kirby, who was producing
Captain America for eight-year-olds, were simultaneously dipping their
toes in both ponds.
The Secret History of Marvel Comics
tells this parallel story of 1930s/40s Marvel Comics sharing offices
with those Goodman publications not quite fit for children. The book
also features a comprehensive display of the artwork produced for
Goodman’s other enterprises by Marvel Comics artists such as Jack Kirby
and Joe Simon, Alex Schomburg, Bill Everett, Al Jaffee, and Dan DeCarlo,
plus the very best pulp artists in the field, including Norman
Saunders, John Walter Scott, Hans Wesso, L.F. Bjorklund, and Marvel Comics
#1 cover artist Frank R. Paul. Goodman’s magazines also featured cover
stories on celebrities such as Jackie Gleason, Elizabeth Taylor,
Liberace, and Sophia Loren, as well as contributions from famous
literary and social figures such as Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, and
L. Ron Hubbard.
These rare pieces of comic art, pulp and magazine history will open the door to Marvel Comics’ unseen history.
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