Flush of Two Worlds

We have always been told that the owner of Marvel Comics, Martin Goodman, went out golfing with an executive from DC Comics, who mentioned the big success they were having with their new Justice League comic book.  So when Martin went back to the office, he told Stan Lee to do a rip-off of the Justice League, and that's how we got the Fantastic Four and from that, the whole Marvel Universe.

That's always been a neat anecdote, but there are several issues which I don't think have ever been covered.  My theory is that DC was deliberately controlling Marvel and it was influenced by the 'multiverse' concept.  I can't be the first one to notice that Flash #123, the infamous "Flash of Two Worlds" story which started the 'multiverse,' is cover-dated the same month as Fantastic Four #1.

Marvel was not owned by DC, but at the time, they were under a lot of control from DC.  In the 1950s, Goodman had attempted to form his own distributor for the company, which failed, and the only back-up he could find to keep the company going was using DC's distributor.  DC was fine with making profit off of other companies but didn't want them to get too big or powerful, so they limited Marvel to publishing 8 titles a month.  Marvel's titles were mostly bimonthly, so they published an average of 16 titles total at any given time.

Goodman had always cranked out as many copycat titles as possible so this was a limitation for him.  It also showed how DC saw itself as the leader of the comic book industry.  They were very litigious.  Most notably, in the 1940s, they called Captain Marvel a rip-off of Superman and continued suing.  They didn't win in court, but the lawsuits were so time-consuming and expensive that Fawcett went broke and got out of the business, selling all their intellectual properties to DC.

DC had always been based on multiple companies, having been founded as two separate but closely-related companies, National Allied Publications and All-American Comics.  Even before the two companies merged, they had put their superheroes together as a team, the Justice Society.  The title was effectively a group of separate adventures of each character by their respective creative teams, with the beginning and end of the story showing the team together and whatever mission they were engaged in for that issue.

The title sold well during the 1940s but was eventually cancelled.  In the 1950s, DC attempted to restart its superheroes.  They kept the same name but were different characters with new origins and powers, starting with the Flash.  When these titles sold, they were united for a new team, the Justice League, an updated version of the old formula.  This was what, officially, Martin Goodman told Stan Lee to copy after the golf game.

The result was the Fantastic Four, a group of characters that had little resemblance to DC's titles.  Part of this was deliberate, there was no point ripping off DC too much, when they'd just sue or cut off distribution in retaliation.  If anything, the FF were a much more obvious copy of the Challengers of the Unknown, a team of four adventurers/explorers, getting in wacky challenges.  They had a girl as a secretary and no superpowers.  They also had the same creator or co-creator - looking it up, it's very vague which - Jack Kirby.

Kirby was already one of the biggest legends in the still-new industry and the Challengers had been his most recent work for DC.  He had attempt to get out of the industry by starting a comic strip where the real bucks were, but it hadn't succeeded and a DC editor Jack Schiff had claimed co-creative rights.  He won a lawsuit and as a result, Kirby couldn't get work anywhere but Marvel, cranking out monster books.  When there was a chance to do a rip-off of the Challengers, he went at it.  Put the girl on the team and give them superpowers, there you go.

So why didn't Marvel just rip-off Justice League like they were supposed to do?  Eventually they would with the Avengers, but there was something about needing a new batch of characters.  Marvel did have cheesy superheroes in the 40s, but only Captain America stood out, and he wouldn't be brought back until the Avengers was a regular series.  There was also the Human Torch, who was remade as a member of the Fantastic Four, and the Submariner, who would become a villain.  The other characters would stay buried for years, generally because they were never that interesting.

Because of the limits set by DC, Marvel moved slowly into this new line.  Fantastic Four was the only superhero title they had for almost a year, until it was obviously a success and they could slowly add more.  The Fantastic Four fought aliens and monsters, didn't wear costumes or have secret identities.  The next new character was the Hulk, which was just a monster comic starring the same monster every month.  The Hulk was not a successful comic and was cancelled after six issues, but the character would show up in other titles, keeping the IP active and spreading the developing sense of an interactive 'Marvel Universe.'

Then Thor appeared.  Kirby had always been interested in mythology although this was different from the Thor of Norse mythology.  He also fought space aliens and monsters in his first appearance.  The next two characters, Ant-Man and Spider-Man, demonstrated that something else was being done here, even though it's still not clear what.

Ant-Man started off as a one-shot science fantasy story that made as much sense as any Marvel title at the time.  A scientist invents a shrinking machine so he uses it to investigate ants.  Seriously.  This story was cover-dated shortly after Fantastic Four #1.  It would be several months before the character was brought back.  His second appearance was cover-dated the same month as Amazing Fantasy #15 which brought Spider-Man to the world.

Stan Lee usually took all the credit for everything, but I think on a least a few occasions, he said Martin Goodman was the one pushing this ant character over-and-over.  It's one thing to base one of these characters on bugs but there's a couple at once.  Spiders aren't insects but they're similar enough that it's an obvious thought.  Can't use cockroaches, the Wasp would soon be added as Ant-Man's girl-sidekick and Kirby had already done the Fly for Archie Comics so that wasn't usable.  But why bring Ant-Man back?  And why keep him around?

Then there's Spidey, created around the same time.  Whatever other criticism he deserves, this is a place where I would say Stan Lee had something specific in mind, or at least got it from Martin Goodman.  He was the first one who was an unabashed superhero, although his origin was a new twist for the genre.  The character's creation was also strange.

Lee gave his initial idea to Jack Kirby, who drew six pages or so, which Lee didn't think worked very well, so he turned to Steve Ditko and there was the character we know today.  But what happened to Jack Kirby's story?  We have never seen his work, it is said that he had a teenager living with his aunt and uncle, had a web-shooting gun and fought an evil scientist who lived just down the street.  Ok, in hindsight, we can see why Ditko's creation was far superior, but that still doesn't explain why Kirby's story wasn't printed.

Goodman was known to insist everything be used before he'd pay for any new material.  He had fired all the artists for that reason several years earlier when he discovered lots of unpublished finished works were just sitting around.  Editor Stan Lee may decide Kirby's story wasn't what he wanted, but there's still the sixteen books they publish every two months that need to be filled up somehow.  And Kirby had to have been paid for the work or he'd have made sure to talk about that in later years about his fights with Marvel.  Marvel's lawyers would see he has a claim to the character if they didn't pay him for it.  So why wasn't it ever used, or even shown to the fans in the following decades as a novelty?

My guess, which is what I've been building up to here, is that the overall goal was to create a franchise.  This is what Goodman had gotten from his golf game with an unnamed DC executive.  They would get around to copying the Justice League soon, but for whatever reason, they needed new characters to do it.  Using a rip-off of Challengers of the Unknown was a way to not get too close to the superhero genre right away, as well as to get new Kirby stories similar to what he had been doing for DC.  The company was overseeing work done by other companies, as control for its own sake or with the plan to eventually own these characters too.

I don't think Goodman got this from chit-chat during a golf game.  Or if he did, it was receiving instructions from DC.  I've wondered if his golf partner had been Jack Schiff, telling him how to get more work from Kirby, but just looking at who else was at DC at the time, it could be anybody.  Or it could be some staffer whose name never showed up in the comics history books.  They already had Hollywood connections, with Superman and Batman showing up in movies and tv.  The offices weren't full of just artists, editors and a guy in charge, there would be people who were paid to think years in advance.

There is also a range of 'who created what.'  Stan Lee gets his name on everything no matter what.  He freely admitted that he always demanded credit but he was also willing to let others do the work, which is why Kirby and Ditko were able to do so much brilliant work.  Unlike Lee, they did work they'll be remembered for outside of Marvel.  There were also times when they did their own thing.  Most notably Ditko with Spider-Man and Kirby with Fantastic Four and Thor, but there were new characters created this way.

Ditko created the first Doctor Strange story on his own and then brought it into the office.  Lee never liked writing the character, probably because he seemed to be the type who needed some connection to the starting point, even if it was just a conversation where someone else had all the ideas.  Kirby wanted to do war stories so he created Nick Fury, who was also useful in modern stories as an older man who still had adventures.  Daredevil is the only major Marvel character not co-credited to Kirby or Ditko and shows what Stan had to offer on his own, someone who wouldn't be interesting for a couple decades.

The X-Men were minor characters that just seem to have been a need to create yet-another title, so why not come up with them all getting superpowers for the same reason.  Kirby would quickly leave the title but he does seem to have started developing some of the ideas he would develop later on in his career.  Iron Man stands out as having the least contribution by Lee or Kirby, the only major character with others co-credited for creation.  Along with giving Ant-Man a girl sidekick, they finally had enough to get the Justice League rip-off they had been aiming for all along.

The multiverse would continue as a use for corporate intellectual property.  Both Marvel and DC would exploit this for various reasons in decades to come.  In the late-70s, they were finally able to work together on crossovers, before Marvel's editor-in-chief Jim Shooter ruined that, just as they were planning to do an Avengers/Justice League crossover.  Twenty years later, the companies started working together again and were finally able to make that happen.  Then they split up again, which is the status they're still under now, but both companies are pushing the multiverse yet-again.

They've planned for this for a long time, arguably since the "Flash of Two Worlds."  The audience has a certain view of multiverses, then we get tired of them and move on to something else.  The corporations have a different view.  They can connect with each other to exploit their decades-old intellectual property.  They can plan this in private, at golf games or wherever the elites get together, and everyone else is expected to pay for that.