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Marvel Comics  Table of Contents

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Marvel Comics  Actions

American company
Also known as: Atlas Comics, Timely Comics
Written by Tim DeForest
Fact-checked by
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated: Mar 7, 2024 • Article History

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Marvel Comics, American media and

entertainment company that was widely
regarded as one of the “big two”
publishers in the comic industry. Its
parent company, Marvel Entertainment,
is a wholly owned subsidiary of the
Disney Company. Its headquarters are in
New York City.

The Avengers

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Category: Arts & Culture

Date: 1939 - present

Headquarters: New York City

Areas Of Involvement: history of

publishing • superhero • comic book

Related People: Jack Kirby • Stan Lee

Related Facts And Data: Black Panther -

Facts

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Corporate history

Why are superheroes so popular?

Learn more about the history and popularity
of superheroes.
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The precursor to Marvel Comics was

founded in 1939 by pulp magazine
publisher Martin Goodman. In order to
capitalize on the growing popularity of
comic books—especially those starring
superheroes—Goodman created Timely
Comics. Timely’s first comic book was
Marvel Comics no. 1 (cover dated
October 1939), which featured several
superhero characters, most notably the
Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner.
Timely Comics introduced many
superhero characters during comics’
“Golden Age” in the 1940s, most
importantly Captain America, who first
appeared in Captain America Comics no.
1 (March 1941). Timely characters were
often portrayed as fighting against the
Nazis and the Japanese even before the
United States entered World War II. As
the 1940s came to a close, superheroes
fell out of vogue with comic book readers,
and Timely canceled the last of its books
in this genre in 1950. In 1951 Goodman
formed his own distribution company,
and Timely Comics became Atlas
Magazines. Though there was a brief
experiment in bringing back superheroes
such as Captain America in 1953, Atlas’s
output was mostly in other genres such
as humour, westerns, horror, war, and
science fiction.

Britannica Quiz

Marvel or DC?

In 1956 rival company DC Comics

ushered in the so-called Silver Age of
comics by reintroducing superhero titles
with significant commercial success. In
the early 1960s Atlas changed its name to
Marvel Comics. For several decades
Marvel and DC were the top companies
in the industry. Throughout the 1980s
and ’90s Marvel changed hands
numerous times, becoming a publicly
held company in 1991. Questionable
management decisions and a general
slump in sales in the comic book industry
drove Marvel Comics into bankruptcy in
1996. The company emerged from
bankruptcy in 1998 and began to
diversify its output, launching imprints
aimed at a variety of demographics and
expanding its cinematic offerings under
the Marvel Studios banner. In 2007
Marvel began publishing digital comics.
In 2009 the Walt Disney Company
purchased the parent company of Marvel
Comics.

The Marvel universe

Stan Lee

The shared storytelling palette known as

the Marvel universe was unveiled in 1961,
when Goodman responded to the
growing interest in superhero books by
commissioning writer Stan Lee and artist
Jack Kirby to create the Fantastic Four.
With the release of Fantastic Four no. 1
(November 1961), readers were
introduced to a superheroic setting that
was, nevertheless, rooted in the real
world. Lee and Kirby attempted to make
their comic book characters more
original by allowing them to interact with
each other in a realistic fashion,
including heroes often fighting or arguing
with each other. This trend continued
with a flood of other superhero
characters introduced by Marvel Comics
during the early 1960s, including Spider-
Man, the Incredible Hulk, and the X-
Men. Lee wrote the majority of Marvel’s
books during that time, and Jack Kirby
and Steve Ditko were the most important
and influential artists.

Spider-Man
Spider-Man as portrayed by Tobey Maguire in
Spider-Man 2 (2004).

This more realistic approach to

characterizations built up Marvel’s
reputation and began to attract
university-age readers. Stories also began
to deal with social issues such as
pollution, race relations, and drug abuse.
A Spider-Man story arc from 1971 dealing
with drug abuse had to be published
without the approval of the Comic Code
Authority—the self-regulatory body that
had policed comic content since 1954—
despite the fact that it was portraying
drug use in a negative light. This caused
the Comic Code Authority to revise its
policy in such matters.

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a new

generation of creative talent emerge at
Marvel. In 1967 Jim Steranko began to
write and draw stories featuring secret
agent Nick Fury in the anthology book
Strange Tales. Steranko was influenced
in his work by James Bond films and the
psychedelic and Op art movements, and
the resulting stories melded
groundbreaking visuals with equally
innovative storytelling techniques. Writer
Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne
began a long collaboration on The
Uncanny X-Men in 1975. The pair
revitalized the flagging series with
characters such as Wolverine and
complex story arcs that soon made the X-
Men franchise one of Marvel’s best
sellers.

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In 1985 Mark Gruenwald started a

critically acclaimed 10-year run as the
writer of Captain America. That same
year he also began the miniseries
Squadron Supreme (1985–86), a
deconstructionist take on superheroes
that preceded Alan Moore’s graphic novel
Watchmen, published by DC Comics. The
1980s also saw Frank Miller’s stint on
Daredevil, which took that book in a
darker and grittier direction, reviving
sagging sales and making it one of
Marvel’s best sellers. In 1988 Todd
MacFarlane began a popular run as artist
on The Amazing Spider-Man. Four years
later MacFarlane and a number of other
popular artists, including Jim Lee, Erik
Larsen, and Rob Liefeld, left Marvel to
found rival Image Comics, a company
that allowed creators to retain the
copyrights of their characters.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Publicity image for Avengers: Age of Ultron
(2015), directed by Joss Whedon.

During the 1990s and early 2000s a new

wave of writers, including Brian Michael
Bendis (Daredevil, The Avengers),
Jonathan Hickman (Fantastic Four), and
Ed Brubaker (Captain America), became
well known for their mature and
sometimes controversial takes on
Marvel’s characters. The 2010s saw the
emergence of another new wave of talent,
with writer Matt Fraction and artist
David Aja turning in a visually arresting
run on Hawkeye, longtime Spider-Man
writer Dan Slott teaming with artist Mike
Allred for a bold take on a classic
character in Silver Surfer, and writer G.
Willow Wilson and artist Adrian Alphona
breaking new ground with their critically
acclaimed Ms. Marvel.


Black Panther
Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa/Black
Panther in Black Panther (2018).

In the 21st century Marvel’s profits were

increasingly derived from toys, video
games, and other merchandise featuring
their most popular characters and from
the production of a string of
commercially successful movies. Those
films differed from prior efforts to
translate comics to the big screen in that
they were set in a single shared world.
That ambitious plan generated huge
dividends with The Avengers (2012), a
film that featured Iron Man, Thor, and
Captain America—three heroes that had
scored individual blockbuster successes—
and grossed more than $1.5 billion
worldwide. The Marvel Cinematic
Universe, as it came to be known, grew
into one of the most lucrative franchises
in film history. Its success spawned a
wave of television programs, beginning
with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–20) on
ABC and continuing with Daredevil
(2015–18), Jessica Jones (2015–19), and
Luke Cage (2016–18), a string of
critically lauded series that appeared on
Netflix. In 2015 an agreement between
Disney and Sony brought Spider-Man
(who had previously appeared only in
Sony-produced films) into the shared
universe; the character would
subsequently be available for use by both
studios. Marvel Studios, the company’s
film and television division, continued to
set records with its flagship Avengers, but
it also packed theatres with relatively
unknown heroes such as the Guardians
of the Galaxy (2014), Ant-Man (2015),
and Doctor Strange (2016). In addition,
Black Panther (2018) became the first
Marvel movie to win an Academy Award;
it received Oscars for costume design,
original score, and production design. By
2020 more than 20 films had been
released under the banner of the Marvel
Cinematic Universe, and the franchise’s
cumulative global box office receipts had
topped $22 billion.

Tim DeForest

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Home  Entertainment & Pop Culture

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Black Panther  Actions

fictional character
Written by Peter Sanderson , David Roach See All
Fact-checked by
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Article History

 Table of Contents
Top Questions

Who is Black Panther? 

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Black Panthers? 

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outside of print media? 

Black Panther
Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa/Black Panther
in Black Panther (2018).

Black Panther, comic strip superhero

created for Marvel Comics by writer Stan
Lee and artist Jack Kirby. The character
first appeared in Fantastic Four no. 52
(July 1966).

Origin and early stories

Black Panther
Promotional art for Black Panther (2018),
starring Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa/Blac…
...(more)
Panther.

Seeking to address the dearth of Black

characters in comics, Lee and Kirby
created T’Challa, a member of the royal
family of the fictional African country of
Wakanda. Wakanda was depicted as a
peculiar mix of futuristic technology and
traditional life, a dichotomy produced by
the presence in the country of Vibranium,
a rare and nearly indestructible meteoric
ore. After the death of his father at the
hands of the villainous Ulysses Klaw,
T’Challa claimed the throne as well as the
mantle of the Black Panther. Upon
becoming the Black Panther, T’Challa
was exposed to a mystical herb that
enhanced his strength and agility to near-
superhuman levels. After meeting the
Fantastic Four, T’Challa decided his
powers would be put to best use in the
service of all humanity, although
Wakanda traditionally had been closed to
the outside world, and so he flew off to
New York, leaving his people behind.

Britannica Quiz

Marvel or DC?

The Black Panther joined the Avengers in

1968, where he became a mainstay for
the next several years. Although the
character predated the revolutionary
political organization of the same name,
Marvel briefly changed the Black
Panther’s name to the Black Leopard in
an attempt to dissociate the two. A short
time later he was back to being the Black
Panther again, and in 1973 he headlined
his own book for the first time. The
“Panther’s Rage” story arc ran for two
years in Jungle Action, a series written by
Don McGregor and drawn for the most
part by the African American artist Billy
Graham. Reflecting the times’ interest in
African roots and Black consciousness in
general, the strip returned T’Challa to a
Wakanda riven by infighting and
sedition, where he managed to balance
superheroics with musings on
colonialism and democracy. For the
duration of the tale, the strip featured an
all-Black cast, something that had never
before been attempted in mainstream
superhero comics, and the innovations
continued in a later story, which saw the
Panther take on the Ku Klux Klan.

Poor sales prompted Marvel to cancel

Jungle Action before the Klan story was
finished, and it was replaced in 1977 with
a new Black Panther title by Jack Kirby.
This new direction was as far from the
gritty realism of McGregor’s tales as it is
possible to imagine, as it featured a time-
traveling frog statue said to belong to
King Solomon, the Yeti, and a group of
Wakandan nobles known as the Black
Musketeers. This title too was short-
lived. Sporadic appearances over the next
two decades kept the Black Panther in
the Marvel firmament, but he was
increasingly marginalized. Miniseries in
1988 and 1991 were solid, if
unspectacular, attempts at revitalizing
what was effectively a lapsed franchise.
The first tackled apartheid, and the
second dealt with the Panther’s search
for his mother, but neither led to
anything substantial. With Black
characters no longer a comics novelty
and with role models such as the
characters of Milestone Comics—which
had more relevance to their readers than
a wealthy African king—it seemed as if
the Panther’s time had passed.

Black Panther in the 21st

century

Black Panther
(From left) Lupita Nyong'o, Chadwick
Boseman, and Danai Gurira in a publicity sti…
...(more)
from Black Panther (2018).

In 1998 writer Christopher Priest

reintroduced the hero as part of the
slightly more adult “Marvel Knights” line,
in a critically acclaimed series that
continued until 2003. For this
reinvention, a now aging T’Challa returns
to the urban jungle of New York in a
deftly written political thriller that
balances intrigue with no small amount
of humour. Priest’s run on the comic
introduced the Dora Milaje, a team of
female bodyguards drawn from all the
tribes of Wakanda. Film director
Reginald Hudlin was the initial writer on
both the Black Panther series that ran
from 2005 to 2008 and the next one,
which ran from 2009 to 2010. During
this time T’Challa was briefly married to
Storm of the X-Men, a union that joined
Marvel’s most prominent male and