With The Fantastic Four: First Steps opening this month, based on the comic that launched Marvel as we know it, it’s a good time to tell Marvel’s unknown origin story.
Through its comics, movies, merchandising and more, Marvel is the biggest and most valuable intellectual property in history. And just like its superheroes, it started in an unlikely manner – with a young man named Martin Goodman.
Yet Goodman remains a relatively obscure figure in the annals of comics. Very little has been said, or is known, about him (so much so that researching this article took the better part of a year). But his story is a dramatic and exciting adventure worth telling.
It’s the story of Marvel.
From Humblest Beginnings
Martin Goodman was born Moses Goodman in Brooklyn, New York, on January 18, 1908, the same year as the launch of the first mass-produced car by Ford and the first flight by the Wright Brothers.
He was one of 13 children, born to Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms in Vilna, Lithuania. His father eked out a living as a tailor and his mother as sewing machine operator at a dress factory. “He grew up very poor,” Martin’s grandson, Jason Goodman, told IGN. “He had to rip the heels off of his sister’s shoes as hand-me-downs so that he had shoes.”
According to Sean Howe, author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Martin’s father supplemented his income as a construction worker, but fell from a roof and broke his back. Unable to work, he became a peddler, and Martin had to drop out of school in tenth grade to help out.
With 15 mouths to feed, Martin did odd jobs and sold newspapers and gum by subway entrances. He found escape from his hardscrabble life in books and magazines, reading stories about brave men on fantastic adventures. He dreamed of one day writing them. Then, around 1928, right before the Great Depression hit, he decided to leave home.
“Martin traveled around like a hobo,” Myra Wilkinson (née Goodman), Martin’s niece, told IGN. “It was at least a year, maybe longer.”
Jerry Perles, Goodman’s lifelong friend and Marvel’s in-house counsel from 1939 to 1968, recounted in a 1987 interview how Goodman bummed across America on freight cars, cooking beans over fire.
“I think he just wanted to go see how everybody else was living,” Wilkinson said. “He’d listen to people’s stories. A lot of times he would sit and write them… I know that’s where he got a lot of information for stories he wanted to write.”
When he returned to New York, at around age 20, he found work as a file clerk or sales rep (or both) at Eastern Distributing Corporation, a national distributor of magazines and pulps. Within a year he was promoted to circulation manager, where his supervisor, 29-year-old Louis Silberkleit, became his mentor and friend. (According to Goodman’s New York Times obituary, he also established himself as a cartoonist, creating comic strips for different publishers, though there’s nothing to support this.)
In October 1932, Eastern went bankrupt. By that point, Goodman and Silberkleit’s new companies were already a month old: Newsstand Publications, where Goodman was editor, and Mutual Magazine Distributors, where Goodman was co-owner.
But it was the peak of the Depression, and within two years Mutual went bankrupt too. With no distribution arm, Silberkleit decided to jump ship, selling his share in Newsstand to Goodman. Martin didn’t get to become a writer, but he was now a full-fledged publisher.
Silberkleit went on to found MLJ Magazines in 1939 together with partners Maurice Coyne and John Goldwater, which in 1946 changed its name to that of its most popular publication: Archie Comics.
Goodman eventually managed to turn Newsstand around, and in 1933 founded a new pulp imprint called Timely. In 1935 he followed with another, Red Circle Magazines, which published Marvel Science Stories. The pieces were beginning to fall into place.
In 1934 he also met and married Jean Davis. Likely because he was busy running his fledgling business, they didn’t go on their European honeymoon until 1937. They planned to return in style aboard the posh zeppelin Hindenburg, but couldn’t find seating together so decided to catch a plane instead. On May 6, as the Hindenburg was about to touch down in New Jersey, it burst into flame, becoming one of the most famous aviation disasters in history.
By 1938, Goodman was a successful publisher of at least 27 magazines, ranging from pulp fiction to sports. He bought his parents a house in a nice area of Brooklyn and hired his brothers and even uncle-in-law for various roles in the company. It might seem like nepotism today, but between the Depression and rampant antisemitism, it was customary then, even necessary.
Goodman wasn’t only business savvy, but, according to Blake Bell and Michael Vassallo’s The Secret History of Marvel Comics, was a hands-on publisher with a keener understanding of the importance of cover art and logos than arguably anyone else in the business. “I remember hearing and seeing that,” Wilkinson confirmed. “He knew what he liked.”
Goodman published under a variety of company names, which helped him both appear bigger and mitigate legal and financial risk. It was common practice then, though over the course of his career he purportedly created more than 120 imprints and shell companies.
Bell and Vassallo, as well as some other accounts, present this leapfrogging between ventures as dishonest, a way to stay a step ahead of creditors and the law. And that may well have been the case. But Goodman was also a restless entrepreneur, often buzzing with more ideas than patience, and the anxiety of his impoverished childhood never left him.
Wilkinson remembers discussing it with her father David, Martin’s younger brother. “That’s just normal business,” she said. “He wasn’t doing that to hurt anybody. He wasn’t trying to do something that was illegal. That wasn’t Martin.”
Still, Goodman did engage in some unsavory practices, like republishing material from one magazine in another with a changed title and character names, without notifying or compensating the writers. Without notifying buyers it was also illegal, and by 1942 the Federal Trade Commission sanctioned him. Not that he let it stop him.
The Punch That Launched Marvel
Goodman was also quick to catch on to trends. Superman, the first superhero, debuted in a comic magazine, Action Comics #1, in June 1938, and was a smash hit. Batman followed in May 1939’s Detective Comics #27, to similar success. Within three months Goodman was a comic book publisher, introducing the Human Touch and Namor the Sub-Mariner in Marvel Comics #1.
He didn’t produce the comic himself. He dipped his toe in the water by subcontracting a studio “packager” called Funnies, Inc. to provide a finished product, which he then published under his Timely imprint. (The industry being in its infancy, Funnies’ owner, Lloyd Jacquet, had also been the editor of New Fun Comics #1, DC’s first comic.)
Goodman’s own creative contribution was repurposing two of his pulp heroes, Ka-Zar (a Tarzan knockoff) and the Masked Raider (a Lone Ranger knockoff), technically making them the first Marvel characters.
He printed 80,000 copies, which quickly sold out. A second printing sold 800,000. So he decided to cut out the middleman and produce comics in-house. Timely Comics was born.
“Martin moved forward big. He always thought big. He was not a small-minded man. He was a gambler. He was a crapshooter,” Perles remembered.
He created a comics department in his offices at the McGraw-Hill Building off Times Square, and hired one of Funny’s freelancers, a tall, genteel 26-year-old named Joe Simon, as the editor and writer. On Simon’s recommendation, his second hire was a squat, gruff 22-year-old named Jack Kirby as art director and artist.
Their parents were also Jewish immigrants and tailors, and the three got along. “He was a very sweet man,” Simon described in a 1990 interview. “He was about 35 at that point. His hair was snow white.”
According to Kirby’s biographer and former assistant Mark Evanier, Goodman was willing to pay Simon handsomely, including profit share on books he created, but balked at paying Kirby the salary he wanted. It’s a pattern that repeats itself throughout Goodman’s career, of appreciating writers but treating artists as hired hands, which would later shape the creative conflicts at Marvel.
The rest of Timely was staffed with relatives. His younger brother Artie ran the coloring department. Brothers Dave and Abe were involved in various capacities. His wife Jean was a writer and editor, and even credited as co-owner in 1952. There were more, but it was a haphazard field and records weren’t always kept properly, so it’s unclear who exactly did what and when. What’s clear is that Martin was loyal to his family, and that the Marvel juggernaut of today started out as a small family business.
Goodman also hired Simon and Kirby an office assistant, a 17-year-old named Stanley Lieber. Lieber has usually been referred to as his cousin, but in truth he was Jean’s cousin (their mothers were sisters) and, coincidentally, also a nephew; his and Jean’s uncle Robbie was married to Martin’s sister Sylvia.
A year into Timely’s existence, Simon and Kirby came up with Captain America. Recognizing the character’s potential, Goodman decided to give him his own title instead of an anthology feature—the third superhero to ever get one, after Superman and Batman, and the first to debut in one.
He also agreed to pay them an unorthodox royalty fee. According to Joe Simon, “Goodman offered 25 percent of the profits, 15 percent for me, 10 percent for the artists. We shook hands on the deal. Artists are notoriously poor businessmen.”
Captain America Comics #1 was an instant hit, selling about a million copies. The sensational cover showed Captain America punching Hitler, dated March 1941 but published December 20, 1940, a full year before Pearl Harbor and when almost 95% of Americans opposed getting involved in WWII.
Much has been said about Simon and Kirby’s bravery in lampooning Hitler so brazenly, and rightfully so. The German American Bund mailed and called in death threats, yet they continued.
But as the publisher, it was also Goodman’s decision. It was his name on the Timely shingle, his investment, and he made himself a target just the same. He’d also done it before, in the pulp Dynamic Science Stories #2 (February 1939), and soon after, in Sub-Mariner Comics #1 (April 1941).
There was more trouble. His old partner, Louis Silberkleit, sued him over Cap’s similarity to his own character (and the first patriotic-themed superhero), the Shield. The case was either dropped or dismissed, but Goodman had Simon and Kirby change Cap’s shield to a round disc to help differentiate them.
Lieber mostly ran errands, but was given the occasional writing assignment. His first was a two-page prose story in Captain America Comics #3 (May 1941) in which he had Cap throw his mighty shield for the first time. Like Goodman, he had aspirations of becoming a writer, and he wanted to save his real name for “the great American novel” he would one day write. So he used a pen name: Stan Lee.
Ten issues in, Simon and Kirby found out that Goodman was stiffing them, putting all of Timely’s overhead against the Captain America profits to minimize their royalties. Disgruntled, they started doing work for DC in secret. When Goodman found out in late 1941, indignant, he fired them. (Kirby believed it was Lee who told him, though Simon doubted it. But it didn’t matter. Their style, in popular titles like the Boy Commandos and the Newsboy Legion, was unmistakable.)
With the pair gone, Goodman was left with no staff. But his instincts had always served him well, and he had little choice anyway, so he made Lee, at the age of 19, the temporary editor. He let him stay in the role for 31 years.
Goodman never struck gold again after Captain America, but he did well with Namor and the Human Torch as well as some others, and non-superhero titles like Terry-Toons Comics. Most of it was imitative and not very good, but that was okay. “Fans are not interested in quality,” he told Literary Digest in a rare interview.
Vince Fago, a Fleischer animator whom Lee hired as a freelancer, explained that “a lot of guys thought comics were going to die after the war, so doing things like recycling stories didn’t seem to matter.”
When all is said and done, Goodman was a schlockmeister. He saw comics not as an art or literary form but as a cheap, disposable product. He was selling junk food. And to make a profit, he had to sell large quantities fast, not invest in long-term quality. Even the name he chose—Timely—implied something current, in vogue, a fad.
But he was still a successful businessman, and it was important to him to be taken seriously. The atmosphere around the office was formal, and he made even his brothers call him “Mr. Goodman.”
When the US joined the war, he got himself a cushy assignment as a nighttime air warden patrolling Long Island, where he lived, against air raids, U-boats and saboteurs. During the day he continued growing his publishing empire. Around August of 1942 he moved his operations to the plush Empire State Building, where Fago filled Lee’s shoes as editor-in-chief while Lee was in the service. He remembered the office being small. “I don’t think he expected to expand too much,” Fago said.
But expand Goodman did. Timely was now selling 250,000 to 500,000 copies per issue, putting out five books a week or more. “You’d see the numbers come back and could tell that Goodman was a millionaire,” Fago said.
Yet the specter of his childhood never left him. He spent every afternoon pouring over sales charts. “Goodman knew the hard times, and though things were going great, he banked on things changing later.” Fago said. “And he was right.”
When Atlas Shrugged
After the war the superhero genre fell out of favor, though comic books were selling better than ever. By 1952 Goodman had given up on superheroes, but he’d occasionally test the waters with Cap, Namor or Torch here and there.
Instead, he followed popular trends like Western, jungle adventures, horror, teen romance, science fiction and other comics.
Meanwhile, his other businesses flourished. He became a big player in the down-market publishing industry, producing everything from men’s adventure magazines to celebrity gossip magazines to crossword digests to paperback books, all under different imprints of his Magazine Management Corporation, formed around 1947.
“He was pretty much a genius when it came to newsstand publishing,” Stan Lee later said. “He had a feeling for what the average reader looked for.”
Goodman also had an eye for talent, at least with writers. He gave several their first break, including Bruce Jay Friedman, Mickey Spillane and Patricia Highsmith. In 1959 he hired a young postal worker named Mario Puzo to write for his crime pulps, who a decade later serialized his new novel in Goodman’s Male magazine. It was called The Godfather. (A few years after that, Puzo also wrote the script for Superman: The Movie.)
In 1951, Goodman made another bold move, forming his own newsstand distribution company, again cutting out the middleman. He called it Atlas—after the Greek titan who bears the weight of the world on his shoulders—and added its globe logo (inconsistently) to the covers of his magazines, books and comics. It was never the official name of his comic division, but as time went by readers started referring to it as Atlas Comics, and the name stuck.
Being his own distributor allowed Goodman to foster relationships with wholesalers, get real-time feedback on what was selling, and adjust quickly. He was a trend-chaser, but he knew when to come in: right after something had proven itself and before it became outmoded. He’d commission his own version, often a cheap knockoff, and if it sold well, flooded the market with a bunch more until the fad sputtered out. Then on to the next thing.
For better or worse, he understood the value of monopolizing shelf space before other publishers did. For the average impulse-buying kid at the newsstand, there was a higher chance of picking up one of his comics than anyone else’s.
But by mid-decade, America was in the grip of anti-comics hysteria, and the rise of television threatened the industry’s future. Goodman saw the writing on the wall (or thought he did), and in 1956 sold his distribution company, soon retiring the Atlas logo, and signed with one of the two biggest distributors in the US, American News Company.
This gambit didn’t pay off like the others. The following year ANC shut down suddenly, leaving him stranded. With little choice, he signed with the other big distributor, Independent News.
The problem was that Independent was owned by Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz, who were also magazine publishers and owned DC Comics. Seizing the opportunity, they only agreed to distribute a limited number of his magazines, and only eight comics a month (though the clever Lee rotated 16 bimonthly titles instead).
According to Evanier, Liebowitz regarded Goodman as a loose cannon who was harming the marketplace by flooding it, and sought to rein him in.
By 1959, Goodman went from publishing as many as 80 comics a month to eight. By 1961, he fired his entire comics staff—or rather, he had Lee do it—leaving only Lee as a “human pilot light” to oversee freelance artists from a tiny cubicle. Lee has told this story often, but what’s been left out is that Goodman had to fire many of his own family members.
“I’d hear them talk about it,” Wilkinson said. “I just remember my dad saying, ‘He had to do what he had to do.’”
Things were bad, but Goodman never said die. He’d turned things around before. (Some Marvel histories have claimed that he considered shutting down the comics division, but there’s no real evidence of this.)
And with crisis came opportunity. Goodman had Lee write almost everything himself and work closely with a handful of freelance artists, which was all he could afford. One was a newbie named Steve Ditko. Another was Jack Kirby, who was willing to swallow his pride and come back to work for Goodman because he had a family to support.
These conditions are ironically what allowed a small group of immensely talented creatives to maintain control over their output, which would soon result in a cohesive, dynamic new universe….
The Marvel Age
Atlas Comics, as it was still known, was crammed in Magazine Management’s offices next to the pulps. “Fabulous” Flo Steinberg, Lee’s multi-talented assistant, recounted: “Mario Puzo would look in and would see us all working on his way to the office and he would say, ‘Work faster, little elves. Christmas is coming.’”
But they made the best of it, churning out comics about cowboys and giant monsters. Then, in 1961, everything changed.
DC was experiencing some success with superheroes again. As Lee’s story famously goes, Goodman, who was an avid golfer, met Liebowitz for a game, where Liebowitz bragged about the sales of his new comic, Justice League of America.
When Goodman returned to the office, he charged Lee with creating their own superhero team. And thus, the Fantastic Four were born. The story has been widely recounted in articles and books, but it’s almost certainly apocryphal. Liebowitz later insisted he never played golf with Goodman, nor discussed his sales.
More likely, Goodman, who always had his ear to the ground, got wind and followed suit, as he always did. Whatever the case, it was Goodman’s idea to create a new team of superheroes, which kickstarted the Marvel Revolution.
What he didn’t know was that Lee was a day or two away from quitting. As Lee often said (and often quipped, “I’ve told this so many times that for all I know it might even be true”), he was bored with creating comics that were juvenile and banal, but Goodman thought they should be made for young children.
When he asked Lee to try superheroes again, it was Lee’s wife, Joan, who suggested that, since he had nothing to lose, he might as well write them the way he’d always wanted to. So he reached out to Kirby, whom he considered “the most creative artist of all,” and in November 1961 they introduced the Fantastic Four. In 1962 came the Hulk, Thor and Ant-Man. Then in 1963 Iron Man, the Avengers and the X-Men followed. In 1966, Silver Surfer and Black Panther. And countless other characters and concepts.
Lee also collaborated with Ditko to create Spider-Man in 1962 and Doctor Strange in 1963, as well as Namor creator Bill Everett to create Daredevil in 1964.
There were other creators involved, notably Don Heck and Larry Lieber (Lee’s younger brother and another Goodman cousin-in-law), and together their inspired, manic creativity changed comics forever.
The company was now known as Marvel Comics, and more than just new characters, it created a whole new approach to superheroes. Stories were more realistic, featuring “heroes with feet of clay” who didn’t always manage to stay noble and graceful.
Equally innovative, they all lived in the same world, where they’d meet, fight, team up and even date. When Superman and Batman crossed paths, it was in a special event or team book, not their regular comics. With Marvel, what happened in one character’s series had repercussions in another’s. It mattered.
As the publisher, Goodman was, in today’s parlance, an industry disruptor. As much of a safe-bet copycat as he was, he was also willing to take risks and let Lee try out new ideas, like superheroes that were a dysfunctional family, persecuted minorities, a scary monster and a mopey teen (though he resisted that one at first).
He was also more involved in editorial decisions than given credit for. “He wanted something done a certain way, and if they strayed away from the story plot or something didn’t look quite right, he’d give his input, whether it was nice or not,” Wilkinson said.
“Anything I put into the books and he didn’t like, he’d let me know,” Fago confirmed. But he “never interfered with what Stan was doing. He had faith in Stan.”
Comic creator JL Mast has been working on a graphic novel series about the history of Marvel for the past eight years, the first volume of which is due out next year. “His influence on Marvel Comics is often underestimated or deliberately downplayed,” he told IGN. But “Goodman was a hands-on publisher. Most decisions ran through him. He didn’t usually shape characters or stories directly, but he dictated how many pages each story could be, which characters might be paired in one book to save on costs,” and “he knew all of the Marvel heroes, their specificities, and how to market them.”
Lee, a human exclamation point, became the public face of Marvel, and by most accounts was a resourceful editor and natural leader. But, Jason Goodman adds, “I occasionally wish that he would have given more credit to my grandfather. Somebody had to be there to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and pay the bills. If he had been on the Hindenburg, would there be any of the characters that Stan Lee is credited with?”
The new Marvel was a huge success. In 1963, it reportedly sold 22.5 million comics. In 1965, it was 45.5 million—all while limited by Independent News.
According to Howe, Puzo now changed his tune. “For Stan Lee,” he signed a copy of his book, “whose imagination I cannot hope to equal.”
Still, Marvel constituted at most a third of Magazine Management’s revenue, according to Lieber. The real money was in the men’s magazines and, as Goodman soon learned, licensing.
Grantray-Lawrence Animation, who mostly made subcontracted work for Hanna-Barbera like Top Cat and the Jetsons, paid Goodman a king’s ransom for the rights to produce two cartoon series, The Marvel Super Heroes in 1966 and Spider-Man in 1967.
Just like Goodman did in his early pulp days, the shows, especially the former, reused stories and art straight from the comics, without giving Kirby, Ditko and the others credit or pay.
Legally, Goodman didn’t owe them anything. It was all work-for-hire, which he already paid for and owned. But what he owed them ethically was a different question, and according to Evanier, they were angry. (According to Howe, Goodman did promise Kirby a share of earnings from his creations but kept stalling.)
Ditko and Kirby famously quit soon after. Bell and Vassallo argue that it was primarily over Goodman’s stinginess, though by their own accounts it was as much about not receiving proper credit by Lee. (According to former Spider-Man editor Jim Salicrup, while Spider-Man remained a sore spot, Lee and Ditko eventually buried the hatchet.)
The Secret History of Marvel is unequivocal in its portrayal of Goodman, claiming that he “relished lording over the people who worked for him” and “was proud of the miserly wages he paid them.” And indeed, more than one account has described him as bullish and hot-tempered, prone to outbursts when things didn’t meet his expectations.
But he wasn’t a Dickensian villain, even if some employees may have felt that way. He operated by a logic of his own, which didn’t always make sense to others. He paid low salaries, but gave generous bonuses. He stiffed freelancers out of royalties, but covered medical and mortgage bills. He pinched pennies at the business, but donated liberally to charities.
“I’ve heard all those descriptors, sometimes from the same person,” Mast said. “He could be cold and calculating with one freelancer, then crack a joke and hand out a bonus to another. I think he liked to keep people off-balance.”
Fago also remembered: “He seemed like a kind man to me at times. But then he’d say, ‘After the war, I’ll get those sons of bitches!’” by which he meant “his staff and freelancers.”
“A lot of that is true,” Wilkinson said. She remembers visiting cousin Stan at the Marvel bullpen as a child and hiding from uncle Martin under Ditko’s desk, where he was working on The Amazing Spider-Man #1.
“He was an unusual man. Sometimes he’d be the warmest thing on the planet. Other times….” Wilkinson describes him as someone who kept a collected veneer, but underneath was turbulent. “They all were. My uncles were like that… Stan was pretty much the same way.”
Goodman was a first-generation American who grew up in poverty and scraped his way to success. His approach to business was unsentimental, and more than once criminal. But he was also smart, creative and loyal to family. He was complex, like all good Marvel characters.
Changing Fortunes
In early 1968, Goodman was contacted by Martin Ackerman, owner of Perfect Film & Chemical Corporation (renamed Cadence Industries in 1970), a small conglomerate of photo labs, drugstores, plastic manufacturers and other holdings. Ackerman was expanding into publishing, and had recently bought several national magazines, including the esteemed Saturday Evening Post. Marvel was next in his sights.
He made Goodman a princely offer: a reported $9 million (+$83 million today), which Goodman, as the sole owner, would pocket.
The deal was signed by June. It included all of Goodman’s companies, subsidiaries and imprints, listing 84. It also included the seven lawsuits pending against him, one by Joe Simon for the rights to Captain America.
Kirby, who according to Evanier was irate that he didn’t see a cent from the sale of the house he helped build, said that Goodman sold Marvel for “less than the value of Ant-Man alone.”
“I can’t speak to what it was actually worth,” Jason said, but “it was explained to me by my father that, being from very humble beginnings, grandpa finally had a big chunk of money and could take… pride in that.”
Goodman was still only 60 years old, and as part of the deal stayed on as publisher until 1972. Then, in 1969, Perfect Film bought magazine distributor Curtis Circulation Company, which allowed him to switch from Independent News and publish as many comics as he liked. Which is exactly what he did.
Marvel expanded throughout the 1970s, and by the second half of 1972 had reportedly overtaken DC as industry leader, a position it’s largely retained since. (According to Jim Shooter, Marvel’s editor-in-chief from 1978 to 1987, by 1984 Marvel’s market share was 70% to DC’s 18%, and DC almost licensed its publishing rights to Marvel.)
Goodman, meanwhile, continued taking risks, often trusting Lee’s judgement. He agreed to publish Amazing Spider-Man #96–98 (May–July 1971), for example, despite the Comics Code Authority’s objection and without their seal of approval—a big deal then—to promote an anti-drug message.
He also continued running Marvel in his idiosyncratic style, staffing it with family but keeping his distance. “When I graduated from college they gave me a job,” Wilkinson, who joined in 1972, remembers. “I was in the main bullpen with the magazine people… doing the paste-ups, the layout and all of that stuff.”
She reported mostly to Martin’s son, Charles “Chip” Goodman, but “I don’t ever remember seeing either one of them come through that office the whole time.” What she does remember is the security camera behind her workstation. “I always thought [that] was kind of weird,” she said.
In 1972 Goodman was ready to retire, and planned to leave Chip, whom he’d been preparing to succeed him, as the new publisher. But Lee wasn’t having it.
“Stan felt unappreciated,” Mast said. He was well-paid, but at the end of the day didn’t own his co-creations any more than Kirby did, nor did he get a cut of the company’s sale. After 31 years as the editor, he felt he’d earned the promotion.
According to Shooter, he was ready to quit. “He went to DC and actually negotiated a deal with DC. He was going to revolutionize the whole place… he already started working on it.”
Purportedly, Cadence had promised to make Chip the publisher after Martin, but never put it in writing. And so, afraid of losing Lee, whom they saw as the face of Marvel, they made him the new publisher and president instead. Chip took over the men’s magazines, but Goodman and Lee’s relationship was chilly thereafter, according to Mast. “They got along occasionally. Other times, if they fought in the office, everybody kind of ran and hid behind their desk,” Wilkinson said.
Around November 1972, Marvel moved to bigger, plushier offices at 575 Madison Avenue, a block-long ziggurat on a row of posh ad agencies. Wilkinson believes it was at least in part because of Goodman and Lee’s growing clashes. “It was getting kind of claustrophobic,” she explained.
Then Al Landau entered the drama. Described by Howe as “short, abrupt, and aggressive,” he was the owner of Transworld Features, a news syndicate and photo agency Goodman used for his magazines, and coincidently Chip’s summer home neighbor. He asked to be introduced to Sheldon Feinberg, president of Cadence.
When Lee stepped down as Marvel’s president, a job he hated, in 1973 (but remained publisher, soon of all of Magazine Management), and the Goodmans expected Chip to take his place, Feinberg informed them that he’d given the job to Landau.
They were furious. According to Howe, Landau was unmoved. His response to Chip was, “Do you want to be fired or do you want to quit?”
Vengeance, Inc.
Hurt, betrayed, his family legacy taken from him, Goodman wanted revenge. “He wanted to take Marvel down,” Marvel VP of Publishing & Executive Editor Tom Brevoort said. “He also wanted to show that it was really his business acumen that had been responsible for the success of Marvel.”
In June 1974, he and Chip launched Seaboard Publishing and its imprint, Atlas Comics. They set up shop literally around the corner from Marvel’s offices. Today their company is generally referred to as Atlas/Seaboard, to distinguish it from the 1950s Atlas, but people in the industry then called it by a different name: “Vengeance, Inc.”
They came out swinging, publishing 23 comic book series and a variety of monster, sci-fi, and other magazines. They hired Lieber away from Marvel, who was somewhat disgruntled that his brother wasn’t giving him more work, and made him co-editor with Jeff Rovin, whom they hired from Warren Publishing. (But for reasons unknown, they put Lieber in charge of the black & white comic magazines and Rovin in charge of the color comics, when their experience was almost exclusively the opposite.)
If Marvel was known as “The House of Ideas,” Atlas declared itself “The NEW House of Ideas.” Ironic, seeing as their characters were, true to Goodman form, derivative. There was Tiger-Man (Spider-Man), Destructor (reverse Spider-Man), Brute (Hulk), Devilina (Vampirella), Wulf the Barbarian (Conan) and others, though, in fairness, also originals like Scorpion.
Atlas’s covers were also obvious swipes, possibly not just to ape what was selling but to give Marvel the finger. Lieber called it “a very tacky business.” Landau contemplated suing.
That said, Goodman attracted some top-rate talent, such as Steve Ditko, Wally Wood, Alex Toth, Russ Heath, Archie Goodwin, Gerry Conway, Neal Adams and promising newcomers Howard Chaykin, Rich Buckler and Larry Hama. He even put Ditko on Spidey knockoffs Tiger-Man and Destructor.
He enticed them with higher rates than Marvel or DC (reportedly in some cases by 50%), ownership stake in their creations, and returned original artwork. His new company was, again, a disruptor.
Lee wrote a panicked letter to Marvel’s freelancers, comparing Goodman—careful not to name him—to Hitler, as a dictator who captivated people by making extravagant promises. According to comics historian Alex Grand, Goodman and Lee never spoke again.
Despite all the talent involved, Atlas proved to be less than the sum of its parts. Some of the comics were good, or at least experimental, but mostly they were insipid schlock.
Rovin later explained: “Anger is a lousy reason to start a publishing company; not only are bad calls made in an effort to be vindictive or to recapture lost glories, but the angry party tends to lose interest when the anger fades and the bills continue to mount.”
Without Magazine Management’s muscle, Atlas struggled to make sales and, according to Howe, distribution troubles prevented it from reaching many regions. Evanier also believes that DC and Marvel closed ranks, increasing their number of titles to crowd Atlas off the newsstands.
In late 1975, just over a year in, Atlas closed. It had published a total of 67 issues, with the longest series reaching #4.
The failed venture lost Goodman a fortune, but he did succeed in revolutionizing the industry yet again. It led other publishers to start returning original art, raise rates and offer better deals to creators.
Goodman’s long and tumultuous career ended on a loss. But in the final tally, he scored many more wins.
As for Chip, Jason said that his father “never, ever, ever expressed bitterness… he was a very successful man in his own right… he made peace with it.”
Marvel After Martin
Weeks after shutting down Atlas, Goodman retired to Florida.
“I think he enjoyed his retirement,” Wilkinson said. “He played a lot of golf, and that made him happy.”
Jason remembers visiting him often, and their games of Scrabble. “Grandpa was always very proud of being as good at Scrabble as he was, and of being a publisher, because he didn’t have formal education. So to be a man of letters was significant for him.”
At Marvel, meanwhile, Landau was fired before 1975 was out, when Cadence found out he was artificially inflating sales figures. According to Shooter, he was also caught embezzling.
Landau’s successor, Jim Galton, sold Magazine Management’s Playboy-like publications Stag and Male back to Chip and folded the rest, effectively dissolving Goodman’s original company.
Chip, who also owned the similar Swank, transitioned the magazines from erotica to pornography, eventually selling them in the 1990s. “Chip had gotten into those 976 [phone sex] numbers,” Wilkinson remembered. “Made them a lot of money.” But, she added, “he was always a nice guy.”
Marvel continued to struggle through much of the decade, almost going bankrupt. After 30 years under Goodman, between 1986 and 1997 it changed corporate hands three times. It went public in 1991 and bankrupt in 1996, became solvent in 2004, and evolved into a movie studio in 2005.
Goodman died on June 6, 1992, at the age of 84, at his home in Palm Beach. He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s since around 1980, Jason said. A hard fate for a proud man, whom Lee described as “sharp as a tack.”
All Marvel did to honor him was a single paragraph notice in Marvel Age. “Nobody talks about Martin Goodman,” Irwin Linker, an art director at Magazine Management, is quoted in Howe’s book. “It’s like he never lived, and he’s the guy who started the whole thing. It’s like he never existed.”
“When I tell people that my grandfather founded Marvel Comics,” Jason said, “they say, ‘Stan Lee is your grandfather?’”
Legacy
In August 2009, the Walt Disney Company bought Marvel for $4.2 billion. Marvel is now part of Disney’s stock, but is worth over $50 billion, according to Forbes. It’s something Goodman couldn’t possibly have imagined when he founded the company in 1939 to cash in on the comic book fad.
Stan Lee, though always a hired employee, never a stakeholder, became synonymous with Marvel, and arguably the most famous man in comics. Especially with his MCU cameos, he grew to become a global pop culture icon. He’s been the subject of countless articles, books, and documentaries.
Martin Goodman, meanwhile, remains largely obscure. What few depictions of him exist have tended to be negative, as creators and fans tend to side with artists over business owners.
But whether he was a visionary entrepreneur or a ruthless opportunist, a creative marketeer or a shameless exploiter, passionate or temperamental—or any combination of the above—he was a key figure in American publishing of the 20th century.
And just like without Lee or without Kirby, without Goodman there would be no Marvel today.
Roy Schwartz is a pop culture historian and critic. His work has appeared in CNN, New York Daily News, Comics Beat, The Forward, Literary Hub and Philosophy Now, among others. He is the author of the bestseller Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero and co-producer of the award-winning documentary JewCE: The Jewish Comics Experience. Follow him at royschwartz.com and on Instagram, X and Facebook @RealRoySchwartz.
