By late 1964 and early 1965, Marvel was definitely heading up. Stan used his house ads to promote his hero titles, but he also reminded readers that they published other genres as well, all with the Marvel stamp in the upper left corner.
Of the hero titles, only X-Men and Daredevil were lagging on a bi-monthly schedule, so he chose to give each of them a full-page blurb in the most popular title, Fantastic Four.
There were a lot of good stories this month. FF, Amazing Spider-Man and Thor were starting to approach their high points, Sgt. Fury was one of the best written and drawn of the bunch. and Iron Man was a great soap opera with the introduction of the Black Widow's fish-net costume. Captain America continued his own series but without a purpose, they continued retelling of the first CA Golden Age stories.
Dr. Strange was well into his best story of the Silver Age, on the run from Mordo and Dormmamu, but the Torch and Thing series was on its last legs, even with Bob Powell art. In Tales to Astonish, the Hulk was a page turner with a cliffhanger (and inappropriate Colleta inks over Ditko pencils) and the Giant-Man story by Lee and Powell with inks by Frank Giacoia may have been the high point of his entire series. Powell showed Hank Pym's growing and shrinking powers better than any other artist I can think. of.
Unfortunately Avengers 14 must have been a big deadline problem with three writers and three artists and a terribly out-of-character Giant-Man. What a mess.
Hoy
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It's interesting that they gave an entire page to promoting one comic, but maybe they felt those needed the most help. I used to love those house ads, both to get excited over what was coming and to find out what the cover looked like that I should be keeping an eye out for. Those worked a lot better than the DC ones that described the issue with few graphics, but I liked those too.
There are several I saw so much I remember the to this day: The Batman Annual with Gorilla Boss in the center, the cover for the Case of the Real-Gone Flash and the Flash-Facts one.
-- MSA
Wow. I get all goose-pimply looking at those.
Look at the Big 3 on the Avengers cover standing shoulder-to-shoulder, and Giant-Man looming overhead, fighting ... somebody. Doesn't matter, they would win because they were awesome. Those are "my" Avengers!
Something was lost when Marvel suddenly had too many titles to be able to advertise all of them that way. Did the Millie and Patsy comics have ads for their series? What about the cowboy titles? Did Rawhide Kid have ads like above for Kid Colt Outlaw and Two-Gun Kid?
That's 17 comics on the last page. How were they able to get all of those distributed back then? Wasn't that more than they were allowed, even if several were bimonthlies? What got cancelled to let Captain Savage in?
Just how many monthly titles is too many? 20? 30? I've seen Marvel with more than 50 titles in a month, and have to wonder if they really expected people to buy them all. As a kid I couldn't afford them all even when they were 15 cents each and there weren't that many of them. By the time they were a quarter I was making tough choices like do I get the Hulk or the Daredevil this week, hoping the one I don't get will still be here next week? Then they went up again and I had to cut back further. The new titles? How could they expect me to get Eternals or Devil Dinosaur when I was struggling to get three different Spider-Man titles, plus the FF, the Avengers, the Defenders, Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and whatever else I was getting back then? (Daredevil had lost out by then. I briefly picked him up again while Miller was on the title, but he wasn't the same character I remembered and I soon let him go again.)
The Avengers cover is a bit sad though when you remember in just two more issues everybody except Cap would be gone. The others come back of course, but this was really the highpoint of Giant-Man's career. He returns, but neither Stan nor Roy really seemed to know what to do with him. He comes back as Goliath, not Giant-Man, then Yellowjacket, then bounced back and forth between Ant-Man and Yellowjacket a few times. He never really becomes as important a character, as an Avenger or otherwise, as he was back then.
I've seen Marvel with more than 50 titles in a month, and have to wonder if they really expected people to buy them all.
No, I don't think they did expect that, although I'm sure they would've liked it. I imagine they thought they'd try to hit every possible niche with something. Plus, the more they put out, the better chance that some would become popular. This was a time when sales were dropping on everything, so they had no idea what would work.
They also went through periods where their plan was to push DC off the newsstand as much as possible by flooding the stands with lots of comics and nope theirs got precedence. That led to lots of reprint comics, just to produce Marvel comics to have on the stands.
I don't know how much Marvel relied on that Marvel-zombie approach that allowed fans to buy their entire line of superheroes for about a (sob) buck. But I think once they started expanding in 1968, that spell was broken. How many people stopped buying Strange Tales to buy Iron Man is hard to say, but I have to think some stopped buying Prince Ra-Man to buy Iron Man, or at least that was their plan.
-- MSA
And then Doc announced he was giving up magic and going back to being a doctor. Since he was back casting spells about a year later I don't know why Roy thought that was a good idea.
When I read that story (about two decades after it was first published) I thought it was horrid and Thomas' wrote dialogue for Dr. Strange that was completely out of character for the Master of the Mystic Arts, particularly as previously depicted by Lee & Ditko. A woman had just saved Dr. Strange and was trapped in another dimension, and Dr. Strange just blythely decides he will retire, renounce his magic powers and not give her a second thought. Ugh. What the heck was Roy thinking?
Ron M. said:
It's strange that Roy got him to retire then was the writer that brought him back just a year and a half later. Did he change his mind about getting rid of him? Did he do it while Stan was on vacation and got told to bring him back when Stan returned to the office? Did Roy just need another character to work with Hulk and Namor and Stan said he couldn't use the Surfer (which really ticked me off when I read Marvel Feature#1 because the Surfer wasn't appearing anywhere else, and I thought he fit with Hulk and Namor better than Strange did (Roy had just had the three of them team up to fight Thor, Iron Man, and Goliath II a year before, around the same time he was giving Doc the boot.)
I did like the Ancient One telling him "If I give you your powers back you can't ever get rid of them again!" It was kind of like he was telling him off.
And of course, if he hadn't gone back, who would have stopped Shuma-Gorath from taking over the world by--er--killing the Ancient One? (That's another story with some serious problems. For one thing it changed gears after the first issue, then again three issues later, and then it seemed to lose track of where it was going.)
The quality of Roy's writing was erratic. Particularly in his early years, as on the X-Men, he was pretty terrible, but then the later stories he did with Neal Adams were great and I mostly liked his writing in Conan and even most of his 2nd run on the FF. And as that Hulk/Dr. Strange story shows, even after he'd gotten experience and had taken on the mantle of Stan's heir as chief writer at Marvel and was churning out more consistently good stories, he would still come out with some clunkers. But then even with decades more experience, Stan still put out a few clunkers as well before he quit writing regularly.
I was hoping when he returned to Dr. Strange in the 80s the series would recover from years of mediocrity (or worse.) Surprisingly Roy decided to write it tongue in cheek and suddenly Doc was throwing out quips like he thought he was Spider-Man. Once he left it the series went bad fast, replacing the doctor with some weird character called Strange that might or might not have been Doc. Didn't read it long enough to find out.
Ron M. said:
I did like the Ancient One telling him "If I give you your powers back you can't ever get rid of them again!" It was kind of like he was telling him off.
I never thought of Dr. Strange as having "powers." I always thought that someone with enough discipline who learned the spells could do magic. Did they establish that you had to have a talent or mutation in order to do it?
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