The Math Ain't Mathing...

 

Examples of the first version Marvel's iconic Silver Age "Corner Box" trade dress

Admittedly, my comic book collecting tastes have always been a bit...eccentric.  They've always been dictated by my own...quirky...sense of personal aesthetic, simply put: I just dig what I dig because it amuses me on some level or I find it creatively stimulating.  Sometimes I just like something because of how weird or odd I find it, fully aware that I'm probably the only person in existence that sees the absurdity.  Case in point:  That little corner of the early Marvel Age where a unique Silver Age blend of humor, romance, and teen soap opera comics inhabited:  PATSY WALKER, it's spin off PATSY & HEDY, MILLIE THE MODEL, and it's sister publication MODELING WITH MILLIE.  Oh, and let's not forget the (short-lived) forgotten KATHY THE TEENAGE TORNADO.

Patsy Walker #106 (Marvel, April 1963)

Kathy #23 (Marvel, June 1963)

I've always had a soft spot for these Marvel Oddities, books that had been in publication since (in some cases) the end of the 1940s and the Golden Age of Comics, that just happened to be in the room when the Marvel Age of Comics was just dawning after the 1961 publication of FANTASTIC FOUR #1.  I particularly enjoy Stan and the gang's efforts in the next coming years attempting to "reformat" these titles so that they would emulate the superhero books in hopes of achieving the same profitable success in other genres.  This reformatting consisted of basically taking storytelling and visual elements from the superhero books and applying them: slightly more..."realistic" art styles, serialized soap opera melodrama, and hyperbole filled prose.

A couple examples of the reformatting that I was speaking of

And, here's a couple more

In 1957 Marvel (Atlas) lost its distributor, so they cut a deal with distributor Independent News, which owned and distributed DC (National Periodical Publications). That deal supposedly significantly limited the number of titles Marvel could publish. In 1968, Marvel changed distributors to Cadence Distribution and started publishing many more titles.  I've heard a couple different stories concerning the details of this deal:  All the sources I've found say that limit was 8 titles a month, though occasionally they note that it was 16 bi-monthly titles.  But....the math doesn't add up if you do a headcount...

Marvel 1963 in-house ad announcing their "Corner Box" branding

Let's count, shall we?  Well, there's the superhero titles, which serve as the foundation for the House of Ideas:

Fantastic Four, The Amazing Spider-Man,...hell, let's even include The Incredible Hulk Volume One, even though it only lasted six issues before cancellation and the Hulk moving to Tales to Astonish....and speaking of that book, there's the four reformatted horror/sci fi anthology books: Tales to Astonish (Ant-Man and the Hulk), Strange Tales (Dr. Strange and Agent of SHIELD), Tales of Suspense (Iron Man and Captain America), and Journey Into Mystery (starring the Mighty Thor).  And, to round things up, there was X-MEN, The AVENGERS and DAREDEVIL.  Total books: 10

Let's not forget the war comic, SGT. FURY and HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS and the three ongoing Western titles that survived into the Marvel Age:  KID COLT: OUTLAW, THE TWO GUN KID, and the RAWHIDE KID.  We'll even throw in GUNSMOKE WESTERN, a title that only lasted about a year into the Marvel Age, cancelled after 77 issues in July of 1963...  Total books: 15

...then there's the three ongoing titles of reprinted material:  MARVEL TALES, FANTASY MASTERPIECES, and MARVEL COLLECTORS ITEM CLASSICS.  Total books: 18

Finally, there's the above mentioned books: KATHY, MILLIE THE MODEL, PATSY WALKER, MODELING WITH MILLIE, PATSY & HEDY,...and we'll acknowledge the parody/satire book NOT BRAND ECCH!, simply due to the fact it launched in 1967, a year prior to Marvel's 1968 change in distribution.  Total books published by Marvel on a regular basis between the years of 1957 and 1968: 24

No matter how hard I try, I can't get the math to work.  The number of actual titles won't allow for either the limited "8 monthly titles" or "16 bi-monthly titles in constant rotation" part of the equation to be possible.  The only way for this to be possible is if a portion of the titles were on a monthly schedule, another portion were on a bi-monthly schedule, and YET ANOTHER portion of the titles to be on that weird "nine times a year" (roughly every six weeks) "semi-monthly" schedule that Archie Comics seemed to be in love with for decades.  And then it would have to happen SEEMLESSLY with no margin for error or delay.  And, just by looking at the cover dates on a range of Marvel books across the decade of the 1960s...this can't be the case.  Everything appears to have been like this:  the majority of the titles appear to have been monthly for the majority of the timeframe, with a about a half dozen that were bi-monthlies.  If the "everything was on a different rotating schedule" notion I mapped out above were true, then editorial deadlines and printing schedules would have been a logistics nightmare.  Especially if Stan Lee is "Marvel Methoding" all of this in collaboration with his artists.  No wonder Stan was depicted as being something akin to a hyper-dramatic cokehead most of the time in the comics, because that's what it would have taken to even come up with as much of clusterfuck of a working schedule as this would have been.

I've always felt that this was a pretty accurate depiction of how Stan Lee's Marvel Method worked

I have a couple weird conspiracy theories brewing.....

Let's say that Marvel was bound by this deal.  It makes sense on one hand and illogical in the other.  DC seeking to basically control their competitor's market share by controlling the amount of product they can sell kinda makes sense, even if it tempts some sorta anti-trust regulations.  It insures that the guys across the street ain't ever gonna outsell you...and you make money in the deal, too.  They have to pay you to get their product to market.  But,...limiting the amount of product limits the amount of money you can charge them, cutting your own throat profit-wise.  So, it's my opinion that if the deal was in place, either Marvel wasn't abiding by the terms and/or DC wasn't enforcing them.  Everyone was still making money in the end.

Or,....this may be a gentle bit of ribbing/ propaganda towards the "Distinct Competitors", aka DC Comics.  Stan Lee made the whole thing up.  "Well, True Believers, we'd love to give you more of the Marvel Comics you all love, but the Man keeps tryin' to keep us down.  Excelsior!"

If so, it just makes Stan Lee look that much more clever.  An absolutely brilliant master at the art of self-promotion, always building a cult of personality around himself....and I mean that in the best way possible, because I absolutely adore Stan (the reasons why I'll probably get into in a future post).