Marvel Comics
Marvel's competitive advantage from 1961 onward was a single editorial decision: give the heroes ordinary problems. Where DC's characters were archetypes, Marvel's had rent arrears, chronic illness, bad tempers and unhappy marriages, and they lived in a real city rather than a fictional one.
About Marvel Comics
Marvel's competitive advantage from 1961 onward was a single editorial decision: give the heroes ordinary problems. Where DC's characters were archetypes, Marvel's had rent arrears, chronic illness, bad tempers and unhappy marriages, and they lived in a real city rather than a fictional one. The run of creation between 1961 and 1966 — the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, Black Panther — is probably the most commercially significant burst of character design in the history of popular fiction, and it was produced by a very small number of people, principally Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. The company was near bankruptcy in the 1990s, sold film rights to its characters piecemeal to survive, and then built the highest-grossing film franchise ever made out of the ones it had left.
Marvel sold film rights to Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four during its 1990s financial crisis, which is why those characters spent years outside the shared film universe.
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Key eras
| Era | Years | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Timely and Atlas | 1939–1961 | Captain America debuts in 1941; the superhero line largely lapses after the war. |
| The Marvel Age | 1961–1970 | The Lee–Kirby–Ditko period that produced most of the company's core characters. |
| Cinematic era | 2008– | Iron Man launches a shared film universe that reorders the whole industry. |