With Great Failure Comes Great Possibility

Stan Lee at proto-Marvel Comics in the 1950s

Lee was even, sometimes, the Black Rider

In 1957, Stan Lee was an editor in a literally despised industry. A gun salesman he met while vacationing in the Catskills had called him “absolutely criminal” for writing comic books.

His publisher Martin Goodman, having made a disastrous decision about distribution, left Stan to fire virtually everybody on staff except Stan’s best friend, an artist who in 1958 fell between the cars of a commuter train. Lee called the mass firing “the most horrible thing I ever had to do,” and it moved him from a thriving Manhattan office to a cubicle.

Yet within a decade, Stan and artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko had built the smartest and most popular brand in comics, transforming the industry, and Lee had moved from his 1950s cubicle to lunching with Fellini and lecturing at college campuses around the country.

The point? That the last thing you should surrender is the last thing that flew out of Pandora’s box.
In other words, I finally picked up Sean Howe’s “Marvel Comics: The Untold Story,” which begins just before World War II, when hardscrabble Jewish immigrants’ sons scrambled to sell new, lurid four-color fantasies with sunshine smiles and sharp practices on shoestring budgets. It ends with today’s billion-dollar empire. In between, in the 1970s, the first wave of fans-turned-pro plunged in, including my friends David Anthony Kraft, Jim Salicrup and Roger Slifer. Perhaps the best book of its type I have read. It’s going to a permanently handy place on the prestigious biography shelf.

Source: "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" by Sean Howe