 The logo utilized by Magazine Management under the Marvel Comics Group name | |
| Company type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | Publishing |
| Genre | Men's magazines,humor,romance, comics |
| Founded | c.1947; 79 years ago (1947) |
| Founder | Martin Goodman |
| Defunct | 1973; 53 years ago (1973) |
| Fate | Rebranded asMarvel Comics Group, assets merged withMarvel Comics |
| Successor | Marvel Comics Group |
| Headquarters | , United States |
| Products | Comics, magazines |
| Parent | Cadence Industries (1968–1973) |
| Subsidiaries | Humorama Marvel Comics |
Magazine Management Co., Inc. was an Americanpublishing company lasting from at least c. 1947 to the early 1970s, known formen's-adventure magazines, risquémen's magazines,humor,romance,puzzle, celebrity/film and other types of magazines, and later addingcomic books and black-and-white comics magazines to the mix. It was the parent company ofAtlas Comics, and its rebranded incarnation,Marvel Comics.
Founded byMartin Goodman, who had begun his career in the 1930s withpulp magazines published under a variety ofshell companies, Magazine Management served as an early employer of such staff writers asRona Barrett,Bruce Jay Friedman,David Markson,Mario Puzo,Martin Cruz Smith,Mickey Spillane, andErnest Tidyman.
Subsidiaries of Magazine Management includedHumorama, which publisheddigest-sized magazines of girlie cartoons; and Marvel Comics. The company also publishedblack-and-white comics magazines such asVampire Tales,Savage Tales, andUnknown Worlds of Science Fiction that utilized primarily Marvel writers and artists.
Founded byMartin Goodman, who had begun his career in the 1930s withpulp magazines published under a variety ofshell companies, Magazine Management existed as of at least 1947.[1] By the early 1960s, the company occupied the second floor at 60th Street andMadison Avenue.[2] It publishedmen's-adventure magazines with such writers asBruce Jay Friedman,David Markson,Mario Puzo,Martin Cruz Smith,Mickey Spillane, andErnest Tidyman; film magazines with writers includingRona Barrett; and humor publications, among other types.[3] By the late 1960s, its men's-adventure magazines such asStag andMale had begun evolving intomen's magazines, with pictorials about dancers and swimsuit models replaced bybikinis and discreet nude shots, with gradually fewer fiction stories, and eventually intopornographic magazines.
One division of the company was theMarvel Comics Group. As one-time Marvel editor-in-chiefRoy Thomas recalled, "I was startled to learn in '65 that Marvel was just part of a parent company called Magazine Management."[3]
In late 1968, Goodman sold all his publishing businesses to thePerfect Film and Chemical Corporation, which made the subsidiary Magazine Management Company the parent company of all the acquired Goodman concerns. Goodman remained as publisher until 1972. Perfect Film and Chemical renamed itselfCadence Industries and renamed Magazine Management as Marvel Comics Group in 1973, the first of many changes, mergers, and acquisitions that led to what became the 21st century corporationMarvel Entertainment.[4][5]
As writer Dorothy Gallagher reminisced in 1998,
At Magazine Management, magazines were produced the way Detroit produced cars. I worked on the fan-magazine line. On the other side of a five-foot partition was the romance-magazine line. And across a corridor were the financial staples of the organization, the men's magazines —Stag,For Men Only,Male — for which, at one time or another,Mario Puzo,Bruce Jay Friedman,David Markson,Mickey Spillane andMartin Cruz Smith wrote, until they became too exalted and rich to do it anymore. I'm almost forgetting the comic-book line, whereStan Lee [co-]createdSpider-Man, known to every connoisseur of classic comics. ... [Th]e decor was insurance-company blah: grayish white walls and foam-tile ceilings, overhead fluorescent fixtures, gray metal desks. Except for the executive offices, which faced Madison Avenue and had carpets and windows, the space was divided into jerrybuilt bull pens with head-high partitions. Editors got a glassed-in area in each bullpen.[2]
AuthorAdam Parfrey, in his book about men's adventure magazines, described how,
Most scribes laboring for Martin Goodman's Magazine Management firm and other repositories of adventure magazines spoke of feeling like well-compensated slaves of a very particular style ('man triumphant') that was not their own. This was not the style with which editor Bruce Jay Friedman felt most comfortable, and when editing publications for Martin Goodman he unsuccessfully tried to talk him out of running advertisements for trusses, an ad signalling the magazine's target audience:blue-collar yahoos. It would be years before he could raise his head at industry cocktail parties, when his acclaimed examples of 'black-humor fiction' were seen as appropriate material for a hipper, more monied crowd.[6]
Magazine Management's publications included suchmen's adventure magazines asFor Men Only,Male andStag, edited during the 1950s by Noah Sarlat.[citation needed] As well, there were suchephemera as aone-shot black-and-white "nudie cutie" comic,The Adventures of Pussycat (Oct. 1968), that reprinted some stories of the sexy, tongue-in-cheek secret-agent strip that ran in some of his men's magazines.Marvel Comics writersStan Lee,Larry Lieber andErnie Hart, and artistsWally Wood,Al Hartley,Jim Mooney, andBill Everett and "good girl art"cartoonistBill Ward contributed.[8]
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