| Type | Private (subsidiary of Cadence Industries) |
|---|---|
| Industry | publishing |
| Genre | fan, romance, men's, comics, humor |
| Successor | Marvel Entertainment Group |
| Founded | c.1953 |
| Products | comics, magazines |
| Owner(s) | Martin Goodman (1953-1968) |
| Parent | Cadence Industries (1968-) |
| Subsidiaries | numerous |
Magazine Management Co., Inc., latter know as Marvel Comics Group, as the company was listed in its publications' copyright indicia, was an American publishing company that in the 1960s and 1970s was the parent company of Marvel Comics, as well as a publisher of traditional magazines. Founded by Martin Goodman, who had begun his career in the 1930s with pulp magazines published under a variety of shell companies, the firm existed at least as far back as 1953.[1]
Under this company name, Goodman published men's adventure magazines, risque men's magazines, and humor, romance, puzzle, celebrity/film and other types of magazines, later adding comic books and black-and-white comics magazines to the mix.
The company served as an early employer of such staff writers as Rona Barrett, Bruce Jay Friedman, David Markson, Mario Puzo, Martin Cruz Smith, Mickey Spillane, and Ernest Tidyman.
Subsidiaries of Magazine Management included Humorama, which published digest-sized magazines of girlie cartoons, Marvel Comics, and, under the Curtis Magazines imprint, black-and-white comics magazines such as Vampire Tales, Savage Tales, and Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction.
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By the early 1960s, Magazine Management occupied the second floor at 60th Street and Madison Avenue.[2] By the late 1960s, these titles had begun evolving into erotic magazines, with pictorials about dancers and swimsuit models replaced by bikinis and discreet nude shots, with gradually fewer fiction stories.
The company served as an early employer of such staff writers as Rona Barrett, Bruce Jay Friedman, David Markson, Mario Puzo, Martin Cruz Smith, Mickey Spillane, and Ernest Tidyman.[3] It was also the parent of Marvel Comics. As one-time Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas recalled, "I was startled to learn in '65 that Marvel was just part of a parent company called Magazine Management."[3]
In the fall of 1968, Goodman sold all his publishing businesses to the Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation, which made Magazine Management Company a subsidiary and parent of all the acquired Goodman companies. Goodman remained as publisher until 1972. Perfect Film and Chemical renamed itself Cadence Industries and Magazine Management to Marvel Comics Group in 1973, the first of many changes, mergers, and acquisitions that led to what became the 21st century corporation Marvel Entertainment.[4][5]
As writer Dorothy Gallagher reminisced in 1998,
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. ... [Th]e decor was insurance-company blah: grayish white walls and foam-tile ceilings, overhead fluorescent fixtures, gray metal desks. Except for the executive offices, which faced Madison Avenue and had carpets and windows, the space was divided into jerrybuilt bull pens with head-high partitions. Editors got a glassed-in area in each bullpen.[2]
Author Adam Parfrey, in his book about men's adventure magazines, described how,
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.[6]
Magazine Management's publications included 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 one-shot 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 Comics 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.[8] Author Adam Parfrey described the company atmosphere in his 2003 book on men's adventure magazines:
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.[9]