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Marvel Publishing, Inc., com-monly referred to as Marvel Comics, is an American com-pany that publishes specializing comic books and related media. Marvel Entertainment, Inc., a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, owns Marvel Publish-ing.Marvel counts among its charac-ters such well-known properties as Spider-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men, Wolverine, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, Daredevil, the Punisher, Ghost Rider, Doctor Strange and oth-ers. Most of Marvel’s fictional characters operate in a single reality known as the Marvel Uni-verse, with locales set in real-life cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.The comic-book arm of the com-pany started in 1939 as Timely Publications, and by the 1950s

had generally become known as Atlas Comics. Marvel’s modern incarnation dates from 1961, with the launching of Fantastic Four and other superhero titles created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others. Marvel has since become the largest American comic-book publisher, surpassing its longtime competi-tor DC Comics.Martin Goodman founded the company later known as Marvel Comics under the name Timely Publications in 1939. Good-man, a pulp-magazine publisher who started by selling a Western pulp in 1933, expanded into the emerging — and by then already highly popular — new medium of comic books. Goodman began his new line from his existing company’s offices at 330 West 42nd Street, New York City, New York. He officially held the titles of editor, managing edi-tor, and business manager, with Abraham Goodman officially listed as publisher.Timely’s first publication, Mar-vel Comics #1 (October 1939), included the first appearance of Carl Burgos’ android superhero the Human Torch, and the first generally available appearance of Bill Everett’s anti-hero Namor the Sub-Mariner, among other features. The contents of that sales blockbuster came from an outside packager, Funnies, Inc., but by the following year Timely had its own staff in place. With

the second issue the series title changed to Marvel Mystery Comics.The company’s first true editor, writer-artist Joe Simon, teamed up with soon-to-become indus-try-legend Jack Kirby to cre-ate one of the first patriotically themed superheroes, Captain America, in Captain America Comics #1. (March 1941) It, too, proved a major sales hit, with a circulation of nearly one million.While no other Timely character would achieve the success of these “big three”, some notable heroes — many of which con-tinue to appear in modern-day retcon appearances and flash-backs — include the Whizzer, Miss America, the Destroyer, the original Vision, and the Angel. Timely also published one of humor cartoonist Basil Wol-verton’s best-known features,

THE STORY BEHIND THE MARVEL

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“Powerhouse Pepper,” as well as a line of children’s funny-animal comics featuring popular char-acters like Super Rabbit and the duo Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal.With the new millennium, Marvel Comics escaped from bankruptcy and again began diversifying its offerings. In 2001, Marvel withdrew from the Comics Code Authority and established its own Marvel Rat-ing System for comics. The first title from this era to not have the code was X-Force #119 (October 2001).Marvel also created new im-prints, such as MAX (a line intended for mature readers) and Marvel Age (developed for younger audiences). In addi-tion, the company created an alternate universe im-print, Ultimate Marvel, that allowed the com-pany to reboot their major titles by deconstructing and updating its char-acters to introduce to a new generation. The company has also revamped its graphic-novel di-vision, establish-ing a bigger pres-ence in the bookstore market. As of 2010, Marvel remains a key comics publisher, even as the industry has dwindled to a fraction of its peak size decades earlier. Some of its characters have been turned into success-ful film franchises, the highest-grossing being the X-Men movie series, starting in 2000, and the Spider-Man series, beginning in 2002.In 2002, Stan Lee sued success-fully for a share of income relat-ed to movies and merchandising of Marvel characters, based on a contract between Lee and Mar-vel from the late 1990s; accord-ing to court documents, Marvel had used “Hollywood account-

ing” to claim that those projects’ “earnings” were not profits.In a cross-promotion, the No-vember 1, 2006, episode of the CBS soap opera The Guiding

Light, titled “She’s a Marvel”, featured

the character Harley Davidson Cooper (played by Beth Ehlers)

as a superheroine named the Guiding

Light. The charac-ter’s story continued in an eight-page

backup feature, “A New Light”, that appeared in several Marvel titles published November 1 and 8. Also that year, Marvel created a wiki on its Web site.In late 2007 the company launched an online initiative, announcing Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, a digital archive of over 2,500 back is-sues available for viewing, for a monthly or annual subscrip-tion fee.In 2009 Marvel Comics closed its Open Submissions Policy, in which the com-pany had accepted unsolic-ited samples from aspiring comic-book artists, saying the time-consuming review

process had produced no suitably professional work.On August 31, 2009, The Walt Disney Company announced a deal to acquire Marvel Video-game Entertainment for $4 bil-lion, with Marvel shareholders to receive $30 and 0.745 Disney for each share of Marvel they own. Disney had already owned a

backlog of Marvel-related TV series since 2001, when

it bought Saban Entertainment.

Since 2006, all animated films that have been released or have been announced are produced by Marvel Animation with Lionsgate Home Entertainment and are released direct-to-video.