Martin Goodman (publisher)
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Martin Goodman (born 1910,[1] Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States; died June 6, 1992, Palm Beach, Florida) was an American publisher of pulp magazines, paperback books, men's adventure magazines, and comic books, launching the company that would become Marvel Comics.
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[edit] Pulps and the Golden Age of Comics
In 1931, Goodman, Louis Silberkeit, and Maurice Coyne formed Columbia Publications to publish pulp magazines. In 1932 Goodman left to found his own companies; in 1939 Silberkeit and Coyne joined John L. Goldwater to found what is now Archie Comics.
Goodman's business strategy involved using several corporate names for various publishing ventures, such as Red Circle. Goodman's pulp magazines included All Star Adventure Fiction Complete Western Book, Mystery Tales, Real Sports, Star Detective, the science fiction magazine Marvel Science Stories and the Tarzan-like Ka-Zar.
Timely Comics was the umbrella title for Goodman's comics division, which would in ensuing decades evolve into Marvel Comics. Joe Simon was its first editor.
In 1939 Marvel Comics #1 featured the debut of Carl Burgos's Human Torch and reprinted the first appearance of Bill Everett's Namor the Sub-Mariner.
In 1941 Timely published Simon & Kirby's seminal patriotic superhero Captain America. Simon & Kirby departed after 10 issues, and Goodman appointed Stan Lee as Timely's editor, a position Lee would hold for decades.
With the post-war lessening of interest in superheroes, Goodman published a wider variety of genres including horror, Westerns, teen humor, crime and war comics.
During the 1950s, the company formerly known as Timely was called Atlas Comics.
[edit] Paperback books
Goodman started Lion Books, a paperback line, in 1949, using the name Red Circle Books for the first seven titles plus an additional two later. Most were novels, but there was a smattering of mostly sports-oriented nonfiction. Gooodman eventually developed two lines, the 25¢ Lion and the 35¢ Lion Library.
New American Library bought Lion in 1957, and several Lion titles were reprinted under its Signet label. Authors that Lion published included such notables as Robert Bloch, David Goodis and Jim Thompson.
[edit] Marvel Comics
In 1961, following rival DC Comics' successful revival of superheroes a few years earlier, comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee and freelance artist Jack Kirby debuted The Fantastic Four #1, the first hit of what would become Marvel Comics. The newly naturalistic comics, in which superheroes bickered, worried about money and behaved more like everyday people than noble archetypes, changed the industry. Lee, Kirby and such artists as Steve Ditko and Don Heck eventually ushered in a string of hit characters, including Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk and the X-Men.
In 1968, Goodman sold his publishing businesses to the Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation. It grouped these businesses in a subsidiary called Magazine Management Co. Goodman remained as publisher until 1972. Two years later he founded a new comics company, Seaboard Periodicals, but it folded a year afterward.
[edit] Men's magazines
Goodman's Magazine Management Company also published such men's adventure magazines as For Men Only, Male and Stag, edited during the 1950s by Noah Sarlat. As well, there was such ephemera as a black-and-white "nudie cutie" comic, The Adventures of Pussycat (Oct. 1968) that reprinted some stories of the sexy, tongue-in-cheek secret-agent strip that ran in some of his men's magazines. Marvel/Atlas writers Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Ernie Hart and artists Wally Wood, Al Hartley, Jim Mooney and Bill Everett and "good girl art" cartoonist Bill Ward contributed.
Another division, Humorama, published digest-sized magazines of girlie cartoons by Ward, Bill Wenzel and Archie Comics great Dan De Carlo, as well as black-and-white photos of pin-up models including Bettie Page, Eve Meyer, stripper Lili St. Cyr and actresses Joi Lansing, Tina Louise, Irish McCalla, Julie Newmar and others. Abe Goodman, a relative, headed this division. Titles included Breezy, Gaze, Gee-Whiz, Joker, Stare, and Snappy. They were published from at least the mid-1950s to mid-1960s.
In addition to men's adventure magazines and Humorama, Goodman also published many other magazines covering a plethora of topics including several male oriented glossy 5"x7" digests in the early-to-mid 1950s (e.g. Focus, Photo and Eye) prior to the development of Humorama, as well as many romance, film and television, sports and other general interest magazines spanning several decades.
[edit] Quotes
Dorothy Gallagher, "Adventures in the Mag Trade" (The New York Times on the Web, May 31, 1998) [1]: "At Magazine Management, magazines were produced the way Detroit produced cars. I worked on the fan-magazine line. On the other side of a five-foot partition was the romance-magazine line. And across a corridor were the financial staples of the organization, the men's magazines — Stag, For Men Only, Male — for which, at one time or another, Mario Puzo, Bruce Jay Friedman, David Markson, Mickey Spillane and Martin Cruz Smith wrote, until they became too exalted and rich to do it anymore. I'm almost forgetting the comic-book line, where Stan Lee [co-]created Spider-Man, known to every connoisseur of classic comics."
Adam Parfrey, It's A Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps ISBN 0-922915-81-4 [2]: "Most scribes laboring for Martin Goodman's Magazine Management firm and other repositories of adventure magazines spoke of feeling like well-compensated slaves of a very particular style ['man triumphant'] that was not their own. This was not the style with which editor Bruce Jay Friedman felt most comfortable, and when editing publications for Martin Goodman he unsuccessfully tried to talk him out of running advertisements for trusses, an ad signalling the magazine's target audience: blue-collar yahoos. It would be years before he could raise his head at industry cocktail parties, when his acclaimed examples of 'black-humor fiction' were seen as appropriate material for a hipper, more monied crowd."
Roy Thomas [3]: "I was startled to learn in '65 that Marvel was just part of a parent company called Magazine Management. A lot of people from other departments went on to fame and fortune during Marvel's early days: Bruce Jay Friedman, Mario Puzo, Ernest Tidyman, and Rona Barrett".
[edit] List of Goodman's pulp magazines
- Adventure Trails
- All-American Sports
- All-American Western
- All Baseball Stories
- All Basketball Stories
- All Football Stories
- All Star Detective Stories
- All Star Fiction / All Star Adventure Fiction / All Star Adventure Magazine
- American Sky Devils
- The Angel Detective
- Best Detective
- Best Love Magazine
- Best Sports Magazine
- Best Western
- Best Western Magazine
- Big Baseball Stories
- Big Book Sports
- Big Sports Magazine
- Children's Book Digest
- Complete Adventure Magazine
- Complete Detective
- Complete Sports / Complete Sports Action Stories for Men
- Complete War Novels
- Complete Western Book Magazine
- Cowboy Action Novels
- Detective Mysteries
- Detective Short Stories
- Detective Star Magazine (note: may not exist)
- Dynamic Science Stories
- Famous Stories (note: may not exist)
- Five Western Novels
- Gunsmoke Western
- Justice (digest)
- Ka-Zar / Ka-Zar the Great
- Marvel Science Stories / Marvel Tales / Marvel Stories / Marvel Science Fiction
- Modern Love
- Modern Love Stories
- Mystery Tales
- Quick Trigger Western Novels Magazine
- Ranch Love Stories
- Real Confessions
- Real Love
- Real Mystery Magazine / Real Mystery
- Real Sports
- Romantic Short Stories
- Six-Gun Western
- Sky Devils
- Sports Action
- Sports Leaders Magazine
- Sports Short Stories
- Star Detective Magazine
- Star Sports Magazine
- 3-Book Western (digest)
- Three Western Novels / Three Western Novels Magazine
- Top-Notch Detective
- Top-Notch Western
- True Crime / True Crime Magazine
- Two Daring Love Novels
- Two-Gun Western Novels Magazine / Two-Gun Western / Two-Gun Western Novels / 2-Gun Western
- Uncanny Stories
- Uncanny Tales
- War Stories Magazine
- War Stories Magazine
- Western Digest (note: may not exist)
- Western Fiction Magazine / Western Fiction Monthly / Western Fiction
- Western Magazine
- Western Novelettes
- Western Short Stories
- Wild West Stories & Complete Novel Magazine
- Wild Western Novels Magazine
[edit] List of Goodman's humor magazines
- Breezy
- Cupid
- Gaze
- Gee-Whiz
- Joker
- Stare
- Snappy
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Daniels, Les, Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics (Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (1991), p. 17, gives 1910, Brooklyn, for birth. The Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections Division: Reading Room Index to the Comic Art Collection, "Goo" to "Goodman" gives life-dates as 1910-1992.
