Martin Goodman Timeline

Martin Goodman started a company that was named Timely Publications in 1939. Martin Goodman had started with a Western pulp in 1933 and was expanding then by making highly popular, new comic books. Launching his new line from his existing company's offices at 330 West 42nd Street, New York City, he was the editor, managing editor, and business manager, with Abraham Goodman officially listed as publisher.

Timely's first publication, Marvel Comics #1 , starred the first superhero, the Human Torch, and the first villain, Namor the Sub-Mariner. The issue had great success so, they made a printed a second issue, selling nearly 900,000 combined with the other comic. Timely had its own staff made the following year. Joe Simon, the company's first

When editor Simon left the company in late 1941. Goodman made Lieber, by then writing as "Stan Lee”, editor of the comics line, a position Lee kept for decades except for three years during his military service in World War II. Lee wrote extensively for Timely, contributing to a number of different titles.

Goodman's business strategy involved having his various magazines and comic books published by a number of corporations all operating out of the same office and with the same staff. One of these companies through which Timely Comics was published was named Marvel Mystery Comics #55 in May 1944. As well, some comics' covers, such as All Surprise Comics #12 in Winter 1946, were labeled "A Marvel Magazine" many years before Goodman would formally adopt the name in 1961.

The post-war American comic market saw superheroes falling out of fashion. Goodman's comic book line dropped them for the most part and expanded into a wider variety of genres than even Timely had published, featuring horror, Westerns, humor, funny animal, men's adventure-drama, giant monster, crime, and war comics, and later adding jungle books, romance titles, espionage, and even medieval adventure, Bible stories and

Superman rarely crossed national borders or involved himself in political disputes. From 1962 to 1965, there were more communists [in Marvel Comics] than on the subscription list of Pravda. Communist agents attack Ant-Man in his laboratory, red henchmen jump the Fantastic Four on the moon, and Viet Cong guerrillas take potshots at Iron Man.

All of these elements struck a chord with the older readers, such as college-aged adults, and they successfully gained lots of profit. In 1965, Spider-Man and the Hulk were both featured in Esquire magazine's list of 28 college campus heroes, alongside John F. Kennedy and Bob Dylan. In 2009 writer Geoff Boucher reflected that, "Superman and DC Comics instantly seemed like boring old Pat Boone. Marvel felt like The Beatles and the British Invasion. It was Kirby's artwork with its tension and psychedelia that made it perfect for the times.

In addition to Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, Marvel began publishing further superhero titles featuring such heroes and antiheroes as the Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man,Iron Man, the X-Men, Daredevil, the Inhumans, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel and the Silver Surfer, and such memorable villains as Doctor Doom, Magneto, Galactus, Loki, the Green Goblin, and Doctor Octopus, all existing in a shared reality known as the Marvel Universe, with locations that mirror real-life cities such as New York, Los Angeles and