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Rolling Stone
2008-03-24 16:29:30

ROLLING STONE, Sept. 16, 1971

Been meaning to upload this link for awhile now, but just hadn't gotten around to it. This is a transcript of a background article about Marvel that first saw print in ROLLING STONE Magazine in 1971.

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Chamber/8346/rs91.facefront.1.html

It's a very candid piece, and paints a provocative picture of a then-ten-year-old Marvel Comics and what it was like to work there. Definitely worth the time to read over the four pages.

It's worth remembering that, in 1971, the notion that we'd still be here reading and talking about many of the same characters would have been ludicrous to most. Comics had always been a cyclical business, and almost everybody in 1971 thought that super heroes must inevitably be on their way out again. That's why there was such a gold rush on to find the next big genre--sword-and-sorcery looked like it might be a contender, and there were a lot of new mystery (watered-down horror comics without much horror), war and western comics being churned out in this period. But the classic Marvel, Stan's Marvel, was still seen as something of a fad (even by Stan himself), and the common wisdom was that everybody was going to be doing something else very soon (possibly in another field entirely.) It wasn't until the 1980s, and the real advent of the direct market as a legitimate means of distribution that most people began to think that the business as a whole might still have a future.

The author, Robin Green, not only worked at Marvel as Stan's gal friday a few years previous, but she went on to a career in television, where she's presently best known as one of the Executive Producers on THE SOPRANOS.

And yes, Flo Steinberg still works here.

More later.

Tom B

I veto cycling super-hero comics our of style.

Posted by kyle-latino on 2008-03-24 19:10:59

Your Code's Showing
Something's up with this blog, the words are running into the table to the right. Makes it a bit hard to read.

Posted by PseudoSherlock on 2008-03-25 08:56:03

Ah
I even looked at the page's source, which shouldn't have been necessary. It looks like it just won't wrap the URL you posted as it's seeing as one big, long word that is has to be printed out in one line and then it's adjusting all the other lines to match it.

It looks like Firefox makes it the ugliest as it writes the words over the tables to the right, making them unreadable. In IE it just expands the blog table to match the width.

Sorry...I have too much time on my hands and like to solve problems.

Posted by PseudoSherlock on 2008-03-25 09:13:23

anyway
sure they must had been some persons to bury the super-heroes , saying it will just be kinda fireworks.But this is also true that the super-heroes genre tend to renew with taking inspiration into the pulps you're talking about.

Posted by notapotatoe on 2008-03-25 09:51:43

Simple solution
A simple solution to the table-wrapping problem for Tom....

Instead of just posting the URL as plain text, it can be posted as a HTML href link. And the label of the url can then be shortened or contain spaces...

Posted by Zigy on 2008-03-25 10:39:26

Fun article (save for some really obnoxious typos, I hope that's from whomever transcribed the article and not the original writer).

And really good to hear Flo's still at Marvel. That was easily the most entertaining part of the article. And while I had known (or at least vaguely aware) about Steranko's career as an escape artist, I hadn't known about his life of crime. Very interesting.

Posted by JdRavnos on 2008-03-25 16:45:29

The one thing that bugged me about the article was the constant use of "Spiderman". Pet peeve. And she worked at Marvel, she should have known better.

Posted by Jordan D. White on 2008-03-25 16:48:28

Great article. I stumbled across this a few months ago. A great candid look at the bullpen of the time. The black text on purple background on that webpage is rather offputting though...

Posted by Fnord Serious on 2008-03-26 00:08:12

Super heros never go out of style baby!

People need there heros

Posted by Seru1 on 2008-03-26 20:27:16

....but you will

Posted by notapotatoe on 2008-03-27 13:02:14

...dude

Posted by notapotatoe on 2008-03-27 14:09:12

i'd love to read the article,
but it needs to be fixed. Sorry tom.

Posted by Anson17 on 2008-03-27 18:12:02

Array

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