Goodman, trend-surfing publisher of some lurid pulps, was one of the first to ride the superhero wave, immediately making a giant splash with his first issue of Marvel Comics in October 1939. (The first printing of 80,000 copies was followed by a reprint of 800,000 more.) The content was provided by Funnies, Inc, a comic book packager that could produce complete comics from concept to finished art for nascent publishers who wanted to keep their overheads low. These “shops” had something in common with the garment district sweatshops that many of the artists’ family members worked in. Usually done as piecework while punching a time clock with many hands (script-writers, pencillers, inkers and letterers) all attacking the original pages almost simultaneously, this was more a small industry than an art form.
It recruited green youngsters, washed up old hacks and even – when the second world war came along and drafted many of the young men who filled the growing demand for comics – women, people of colour and other interlopers. (Those interlopers, by the way, still had to provide the racist and sexist stereotypes that have long been a touchstone of the whole medium.)
At this point, it might be worth pointing out (not out of ethnic pride, but because it might shed some light on the rawness and the specific themes of the early comics) that the pioneers behind this embryonic medium based in New York were predominantly Jewish and from ethnic minority backgrounds. It wasn’t just Siegel and Shuster, but a whole generation of recent immigrants and their children – those most vulnerable to the ravages of the great depression – who were especially attuned to the rise of virulent antisemitism in Germany. They created the American Übermenschen who fought for a nation that would at least nominally welcome “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free … ”
To namecheck just a few of these secular Jews who had adopted Clark Kent-like secret identities: Gaines was born Max Ginzberg; Goodman’s parents immigrated from Vilnius, Lithuania; Jack Kirby (né Jacob Kurtzberg), the powerhouse who co-created Captain America with his landsman Joe Simon, was born in the slums of New York’s Lower East Side; and Stan Lee, who became the face of Marvel Comics, was Goodman’s wife’s cousin, nepotistically hired as a 17‑year-old office boy named Stanley Lieber. Though not welcome in the higher precincts of advertising and publishing, they were all able to find their niche at the bottom of the barrel.