Sidelining Martin Goodman

Continuing essay to counter the constant erroneous corporate propaganda regarding the early days of Marvel Comics.

Another thing that the Lee droolies like to do is to claim that Stan Lee was a marketing genius guiding the corporate ship known as Marvel Comics. This never happened. Martin Goodman, the publisher and owner, held Lee in such low esteem that his junior cousin-by-marriage had to clear everything through the owner (Goodman) for all but the most minor decisions. Contrary to the lies made popular by later faux-historians, you can see that Martin Goodman was a hands-on publisher who paid very close attention to all of his publishing ventures, especially to Marvel Comics. Once Kirby and Ditko had revitalized the comics publishing portion of his publishing outfit he did not want the Comics Code Authority, or muckraking journalists, to come down on him with complaints against the material he was printing.  He was enjoying his resurgent economic success, while also searching for a buyer to make him a rich man. He didn't need complications and kept a very close eye on Marvel.

I mention all of this because I was recently referred to an article which repeats the fallacy that Lee was some kind of marketing genius, giving him credit where none is due.

Lee never marketed anything. Just as he never created, plotted, or wrote anything.

Lee was a rudderless shill. He depended upon upper management for all direction. All of it. Martin Goodman was the man who built a publishing empire from essentially nothing. Goodman hired the talent, paid them, saw to the day to day running of the show and made sure the bills were paid. And he certainly knew how and where to advertise and to make the decisions concerning customer outreach.

This article claimed that it was Lee who saw a way to expand sales by noticing new customers who hadn't been targeted. However, Lee didn't see any untapped market. He never directed any kind of promotional campaign or fan outreach. Hell, he couldn't buy paperclips for the office without permission so how was he supposed to find and toss advertising money at this great invisible prospective customer base?

Reporters like the fellow who wrote that article make a common error. They had seen that lying blowhard on TV, radio, or in too many print interviews for them to formulate any honest conclusions remotely based on the truth.

Lee was never executive material who could be trusted with a responsibility as important as marketing. If no corporate powerhouse had ever wanted his one dimensional car salesman schtick, his own cousin wasn't going to trust him with something as serious as advertising Marvel Comics. Lee was a subnormal jackass, and he was far too stupid to create any complicated or nuanced business models. He couldn't even plot the comic strips so often credited to him!

However, Lee was a shill who had value to various Marvel owners (and Marvel owners ONLY!) due to his (and the corporations) unfounded claims over the intellectual property stolen from creators like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

Giving that creep credit for the hard work of Martin Goodman is akin to saying that the actor who portrayed The Marlboro Man was the Chief Financial Officer of a multi-national tobacco corporation. Would you say that some nameless actor was the business mastermind of the vast Marlboro Cigarette Company? Only a snookered moron would make that claim. Like the Marlboro Man, Lee portrayed a garish, posed, false character trotted out to blinker the hoi polloi. They train people to do that. They direct them how to say it, and when to repeat their scripted lines. But the costumed actors don't run the company. Neither did a shill working for Martin Goodman, Cadence Industries, etc.

To paraphrase Steve Ditko: A shill is a shill.

A fiction.

Martin Goodman, the man who actually built and guided a publishing company.

The Weird World of Publishing.

Publishing somewhere along the way became a really weird and abusive undertaking. There was a time when a publisher would think enough of a book to buy it. That is, to give the author an advance for the right to publish the work. That expense undertaken, the publisher would then advertise the book and begin to promote the work--better to earn back that advance and ensure that the author could share in the profits made and to have the leisure to produce more art.

But somewhere along the way things changed. In the later 1980s some of my friends who were then known as "mid-list" authors began to complain to me that two things were happening. First, that their advances were getting smaller (few of them could continue to full-time as writers and had to begin taking day-jobs), and the publishers not only weren't promoting their novels, they were expecting the authors to advertise and promote their books out of their own pockets! That is, it was becoming understood that the advances they were getting were not for the author's housing and food and upkeep, but for buying ads and investing in book tours.

This was the world I encountered when I began to sell novels. I was supposed to spend my advance money on advertising the publisher's book for them, and to provide my own transportation and pay my own expenses in any book tour I wished to undertake. Fuck that.

Why did this happen? I'm not sure. All I know is that it did happen.

Many authors were forced to flee first to the small presses and then to self-publishing. But all this did was make the situation worse. The folk who faded to the small presses found themselves in at least as bad a situation as before, or a worse one. And only the self-publishers who are good at being shills and liars do well--that is, they're good used car salesmen, but lousy writers (which is why I don't read many self-published books).

Alas, I made my own way into the world of publishing as the house began to creak and break apart. I was paid decent advances on a few occasions but never saw my works advertised by any of the publishers with whom I worked (except for, ironically, Marvel Comics). I had the misfortune of getting my foot in the door of an industry that was fading away. When that door was finally opened to admit me, I looked inside and saw that the place was in the midst of a four-alarm fire.

A couple of my writer pals have given up. They've carefully put the notebooks away in the back of a drawer in their desk and folded up their laptops for the last time. I talk to these folk every once in a while. They speak about the good days and don't even think about the industry as it now exists. They claim not to write anymore. I don't challenge them on this, but hope it's not true.

THE FLOCK, from Tor-Forge. Written by me. Promoted exclusively by me. Optioned from time to time by people who want to make it into a feature film.