A work · 1961 ·
A team built to answer a competitor
A publisher asked his editor to make a superhero team after noticing that a rival's superhero team was outselling everything else, and the characters were designed to fit that reading of the audience.
It is the clearest documented case on this site of figures manufactured from a measurement of what people already felt, and it happened in four months from a conversation on a golf course. The team was not invented and then found an audience; the audience was observed first and the team was specified against the observation. That is the same relationship this site is about, running in the direction that usually gets left out - the industry doing deliberately what a viewer does by accident, building a far side that will hold still and say the right thing because somebody measured what would make it work. Lee's own account is worth having verbatim in the entry, because it is the participants describing the mechanism rather than a critic inferring it.
Where it sits
1950 1950-1999 · 1961 1999
Provenance · 3 source record(s)
- retrievableLee, writing in 1974: 'Martin mentioned that he had noticed one of the titles published by National Comics seemed to be selling better than most. It was a book called The Justice League of America and it was composed of a team of superheroes.' The Marvel era began in August 1961 with the launch of The Fantastic Four.Wikipedia (2024). Marvel Comics. ↗
- retrievableIn 1961 Marvel publisher Martin Goodman asked his cousin-in-law, Marvel editor Lee, to create a knockoff of DC's best-selling Justice League of America; Lee and Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four.Los Angeles Times (2002). Spinner of Tales and Weaver of Webs. 28 April 2002. ↗
- needs-sourceAttributed account of Goodman's remark on hearing about DC's Justice League of America sales; quoted at length in the Marvel Comics and Fantastic Four articles and not read in the original here.Lee, S. (1974). Interview in The Man of Action
Connected · 2 out, 0 in
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