The teenager didn’t mind the mindless tasks, even if he spent hours sweeping the floors or erasing stray pencil marks on finished pages to prep them for publication. He watched and learned from two of the industry’s greats.
More importantly, he had achieved his primary goal at the time, simply finding a permanent position. He had a job! His father’s fate would not befall him. Instead, the boy set off on a career.
Many episodes in Lieber’s early life are shrouded in ambiguity: some of his ancestors virtually disappear in the early part of the twentieth century, or official records shine down a road to nowhere. Similarly, how the young man bounded from Clinton high school graduate to Simon and Kirby’s assistant at Timely involves both a bit of mystery and a touch of mythmaking.
There are several versions of the teenager’s Timely Comics origin story. One account begins with his mother Celia, who had urged him to hustle through high school and then helped him search for a job after he graduated early. Clearly Celia put her hopes into her oldest son, particularly since her faith in her husband nearly led the family to ruin.
Celia relayed information to her son about a possible job at a publishing company where her brother Robbie worked. In this version, the young high school grad shows up at McGraw-Hill on West Forty-Second Street with almost no understanding of comic books or even what the company really does. Despite this shortcoming, Simon quickly explains what comic books are and how they come about, and then offers the youngster the position. Basically, he and Kirby are so frantic and overworked from the relentless pace, particularly with their new hit Captain America, that they just need someone (anyone, really) to provide an extra set of hands so that they can focus on creating.
Robbie Solomon is at the center of a different story, but here he is the main figure, essentially a conduit between Simon and publishing house owner Martin Goodman. In addition to being Celia Lieber’s brother, Robbie married the publisher’s sister Sylvia. Goodman liked to surround himself with family members, despite the imperious tone he took with everyone who worked for him. The formal link is never explicitly made, but it seems that having Robbie’s stamp of approval and the familial tie to Goodman made Lieber’s hire a fait accompli. Simon, then, despite what he may or may not have thought of the boy, basically had to take Lieber in. “His entire publishing empire was a family business,” recall two comic book historians.1 Solomon himself played a suspicious role at the publishing house, a kind of spy for Goodman who ratted out employees that were not working hard enough or were playing fast and loose with company rules.
While the family connection tale is credible and plays into the general narrative of Martin Goodman’s extensive nepotism, Lee also offered a different avenue that makes his job at Timely much more coincidental. “I was fresh out of high school,” he said, “I wanted to get into the publishing business, if I could.” Rather than being led to the publishing firm by his uncle Robbie, Lee explained: “There was an ad in the paper that said, ‘Assistant Wanted in a Publishing House.’”2 This alternative version calls into question Lee’s early career move into publishing—and throws up for grabs the date as either 1940, which is usually listed as the year of his hiring, or 1939, as he implies.3
As a young man searching for a career, Lieber may have not known much about comic books, but he did recognize publishing as a viable option for someone with his skills. He knew that he could write, but had no way of really gauging his creative talents, and he had little understanding of what took place at a publishing company. Although Goodman was a cousin by marriage, he did not have much interaction with his younger relative, so it wasn’t as if Goodman purposely brought Lieber into the firm and groomed him for a leadership role. No one will ever really know how much of a wink and nod Solomon gave Simon or if Goodman knew about the hiring, though the kid remembers the publisher being surprised the first time he saw him in the comics division.
The teen, though bright, talented, and hardworking, needed a break. The youngster could not afford to go to college during the doldrums of the Great Depression. His family’s financial instability forced them to rely on handouts from more affluent relatives to make ends meet. His early tenure at Timely Comics served as a kind of extended apprenticeship, as if his work accumulated into an on-the-job type of training at comic book university.
Lieber, for his part, played dutifully with Simon and Kirby, learning the business on the go as the two men scrambled to create content. Since both were known for working fast, the teen witnessed firsthand two of the industry’s greatest talents. The lessons he learned on the job would set the foundation for his own career as a writer and editor, as well as a manager of talented individuals as they plied their trade.
Whether young Lieber’s job at Timely Publishing came about based on his family connections, the pure luck of being in the right place at the proper time, or some combination of the two, the long-term relationship he developed with publisher Martin Goodman would essentially define his career.
Goodman formed Timely in 1933 to sell cheap, tawdry men’s magazines. He had no aspirations to bring great art to the world or innovate in any other way. Goodman was driven by dollar signs. He wanted to make a pile of money in the least taxing manner possible.
The publisher focused on the men’s magazine side of the business. An astute businessman, however, Goodman kept a close eye on broad publishing trends and personally demanded that cover art be sensational, revealing, and provocative, particularly when it came to the semi-nude women who graced the covers of the men’s pulp magazines he favored, with interesting titles like Marvel Science Stories and Mystery Tales. Some of the magazines Goodman and his competitors sold were so salacious that they were basically pornographic and had to be sold behind closed doors. The backdoor mentality brought in various underworld elements, including the mafia and mobsters, who saw pulps as a way to make a quick buck and semi-legitimize themselves or their business interests.
From his expansive office perch in the McGraw-Hill building, Goodman excelled at scrutinizing what other publishers produced, figuring out which magazines sold well, and then throwing the full weight of his company into the new craze. Innovation was not his concern. Instead, he wanted to keep the company in business and afford himself a comfortable living. Like all the men who ran pulp publishing houses in that era, Goodman came of age in the rough-and-tumble industry, filled with stories of horrific bankruptcies and corruption, as well as many get-rich-quick schemes that had paid off.
Many publishers had grown wealthy off the tawdry men’s pulp content in the 1920s when the demand for magazines skyrocketed. They fed an eager public (with more leisure time to devote to things like reading and the excess money to buy magazines) via advanced print technology that enabled higher-quality photos and better distribution systems. Despite the successes Goodman and others in the magazine business enjoyed, they started to face criticism across multiple fronts due to the raunchy story content and lurid cover images.
In response, many publishers set up dummy companies to play fast and loose with the firm’s books. One big company might set up dozens of smaller ones, so that if any single entity went south, it would not topple the whole empire. In this scenario, debts might be loaded onto one operation, which would then go bankrupt and have its assets bought by a secret sister firm at pennies (or less) on the dollar. With little oversight or regulation, the publishers jumped from one fad to the next—from highly sexual adventure stories to true crime dramas with scantily clad damsels in distress to science fiction. Sexual content and pinup covers defined many of these magazines. Titles like Real Confessions and Mystery Tales played to men’s most base desires.
Across the board, the pulps catered to male fantasies, until New York City officials stepped in to clean up the business. They threatened the newsstands first, then the distributors, until they got close enough to the publishing executives with obscenity charges that could land them in jail. In the mid-1930s, while the Depression tore through the national
economy, the pulp publishers attempted to skirt the regulations handed down by aggressive district attorneys such as Thomas Dewey, New York City’s crusading public advocate and future Republican presidential candidate. Summing up the environment, one writer explains that publishers “managed to follow the letter of public decency laws while selling the most obscenely racist and sadistic sexual fantasies.”4 The publishers kept finding ways to circumvent the regulations and stay just inches ahead of fire-breathing consumer advocacy groups and the politicians they attracted to uphold the popular public decency laws.
What Goodman didn’t realize right away was that various forces were aligning against the pulps, ultimately causing another format to grasp the spotlight—comic books. Growing out of the cartoon strips in newspapers, comic books had originally just been reprints bound together and then sold at newsstands. Most of these were aimed at children, like Richard F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid or Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff. Later, pulp magazines featured more heroic characters in stories designed to titillate and entertain the magazine-hungry masses. Tarzan, Doc Savage, and The Shadow had superhero powers, secret origins, and extraordinary abilities. Millions of readers gobbled these characters up, thereby creating a kind of intermediary publication that stood between the lurid side of the pulp industry and the kid-friendly comic books.
In 1929, Dell published The Funnies, the first comic book comprised of original work, not reprints from the newspapers. The publication only lasted a year, but it gave rise to others willing to try out stand-alone comic books. M. C. Gaines, a salesman at Eastern Color, the company that printed the Sunday comics in color for many large northeastern newspapers, experimented with smaller-sized comic books in the early to mid-1930s and gave them a ten-cent cover price. Famous Funnies #1 sold out and other comics were a hit as giveaway promotions for major corporations like Procter & Gamble and retailers like Kinney Shoes. Soon, comic book sales eclipsed the monthly sales mark of one hundred thousand, while the promotional ones reached into the millions. A craze took shape.
The comic book industry in the mid-1930s grew out of the strange convergence of two wild, nearly mythical characters: Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and Harry Donenfeld. Wheeler-Nicholson had a murky past that he filled with swash-buckling tales of serving in World War I and fighting the Bolsheviks in Russia. Venturing to New York City, his fame grew as a magazine writer who could give readers a realistic portrayal of the hardships and adventures of warfare. Donenfeld, a Romanian Jewish immigrant who grew up on the Lower East Side, learned to hustle there and persuade others to share in his entrepreneurial visions. As he rose through the publishing ranks, Donenfeld formed ties with mobsters. (Rumors circulated that he used his publishing network to help the mafia run liquor during Prohibition.) Donenfeld published smutty pulp magazines that bordered on pornography, most frequently called “girlie magazines,” long before Hugh Hefner would create Playboy.
The two men’s paths intersected when Wheeler-Nicholson agreed to a distribution deal for his new Detective Comics line with Donenfeld’s Independent News Company. In 1937 and 1938, Wheeler-Nicholson barely remained solvent. Always strapped for cash and facing a large debt to his distributor, he agreed to form Detective Comics, Inc. with Donenfeld to publish the first issue of the new comic book (soon the company would be known simply as DC). Later, Independent News bought Wheeler-Nicholson’s National Allied Publications at auction and forced him out of the company. According to comic book historian Gerard Jones, the “Tennessee-born major of the cavalry didn’t like Jews,” so getting into business with Donenfeld revolted him, but “he made the only choice he could.” Donenfeld and his cronies “were obviously interested in calling the shots” and as soon as they gobbled up the major’s companies, the move into comic books was nearly complete.5
The comic book revolution required one more spark to set off a storm across America. That catalyst ignited in Cleveland, Ohio, at the hands of two earnest, amateur comic book creators: struggling writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, who struck gold with their first creation, Superman. After a long march toward publication, the superhero appeared on the cover of the first issue of Action Comics hoisting a car over his head and smashing the front end, pieces flying off the vehicle as onlookers fled in terror. Initially, no one realized what a blockbuster Superman would become, but within several months, Donenfeld saw the sales figures, which backed up what newsstand owners told him: he had a big hit right under his nose. Eventually, Action Comics sold more than a million copies a month for Donenfeld’s DC Comics line. The independent Superman comic book launched in early 1939 sold 900,000. Sadly, Siegel and Shuster, like nearly all comic book writers and artists, sold away their rights to the character, working initially for $10 a page, thus earning a combined $130 for the first Superman story.
The Superman craze led to marketing the hero across other media, including a newspaper strip, radio show, and a series of animated cartoons. The radio show propelled further expansion, and according to one writer, “the comic strip sold to nearly three hundred newspapers by 1941.” The publicist hired to promote Superman for Donenfeld claimed “35 million people were following Superman in at least one medium.”6 Beyond the media avenues, there were countless merchandising pieces for sale, including trading cards, buttons, and metal action figures, which ultimately made the publisher rich beyond his dreams.
Donenfeld even got into the act, wearing a Superman T-shirt under his tuxedo. Out carousing with friends and his mistress at tony bars and restaurants around New York City, people would point at him in awe as the man who published Superman. Never one for indiscretion, Donenfeld would wait for some minor accident to happen, leap up, and rip open his white tux shirt to reveal the hero’s logo underneath.7
Not willing to sit idly and watch his competitors make money off a popular genre, Goodman jumped on the comic book bandwagon. Frank Torpey, a Funnies, Inc. sales manager who had worked with the publisher at Eastern Distributing, urged Goodman to launch a comic book division. The two shook hands on a deal for Timely to publish the work of Bill Everett and Carl Burgos, two virtually unknown writers who also did the artwork for their creations. Their superheroes, a term used loosely to describe the angst-ridden Namor the Sub-Mariner and troubled android The Human Torch, served as the centerpieces of Marvel Comics #1, an anthology published by Goodman at the end of August 1939. Always cautious, he took a wait-and-see attitude toward comic books and outsourced the production of the line wholly to the Funnies, Incorporated team.8
The first issue sold 80,000 copies in September alone and ultimately ten times that, actually more than most comics done by Donenfeld’s publishing house, even rivaling the sales of Superman. Marvel Comics soon became Marvel Mystery Comics, focusing on its two successful superheroes.9 Namor and Human Torch became more powerful as the issues piled up, in other words, more Superman-like. They were not the only copycats running rampant across the burgeoning industry. Several dozen publishers rushed into the market. The familiar call rang out across New York City artist and writing communities: “Find me the next Superman!”
Goodman decided to hire his own artists and writers, rather than pay the Funnies, Inc. team. He did not want to become dependent solely on the packager, which would have situated his growing comics business at the whim of outsiders. He offered veteran freelancer Joe Simon a job for $12 a page, much more than the writer/ artist had made with Funnies. The editor brought along a young artist named Jacob Kurtzberg, a tough kid from the Lower East Side who had been a gang member but had become obsessed with writing and drawing comic book heroes. His early experience included working in the famous Fleischer Brothers animation house, helping out with Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons. The young artist could produce pages at an unprecedented rate, which impressed everyone he worked with.
Simon and the artist—using his new pseudonym Jack Kirby—agreed to a partnership. Initially, they worked together on a character Simon created called Blue Bolt for Novelty Press. Many creative tea
ms work well on paper, but Simon and Kirby figured out how to really make it work, particularly since each could do every aspect of the job, from writing and penciling to drawing covers. When people asked about who did what task on a certain project, Simon shrugged and said, “We both did everything.”10 The partnership they forged lasted the next sixteen years until World War II split them apart.
Sensing that Simon and Kirby were supremely talented and that the comic book market was skyrocketing, Goodman bet on their future and offered them a royalty schedule in addition to page rates. In late 1939, he gave Simon a full-time position as Timely’s first editor, though the writer had basically been working in that role already.11 Simon then convinced Goodman to hire on his partner Kirby at a higher page rate than other artists earned, explaining that the artist worked so fast that the steady weekly paycheck would more than pay for itself. Simon and Kirby set up a two-man operation and began developing new concepts for Timely. Goodman purposely kept the comic book division small, not really willing to put funds into the effort until he had a sense it would pay off in a much bigger way.
Content to not micromanage (though he always obsessed over the cover art and whether to add new titles), Goodman basically turned the division over to Simon and Kirby. After a couple of low-selling backfires, including the Red Raven and The Vision, the two hit their stride. Together they came up with Captain America—though both men disputed their roles in the creation to some extent, each giving themselves more of the credit. Steve Rogers got his superpowers from an Army experimental super-serum that made him nearly invincible. Realizing that they had the perfect villain for their patriotic superhero, Simon and Kirby featured Hitler on the cover of the first issue: As evil Nazi soldiers shoot at Cap in vain, he knocks the German leader off balance with a strong right.
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