Martin Goodman founded Marvel Comics, which was original Timely Publications, in 1939. Goodman was a pulp magazine publisher who was expanding into a new medium of comic books. The post-war comic market saw superheroes falling out of fashion. Timely Publications dropped them for the most part and expanded into different varieties of genres. Martin began using the logo of the Atlas News Company, which was another company he owned. Atlas, instead of taking …show more content…
Atlas Comics became Marvel Comics in 1961, that year that the company launched The Fantastic Four and other superhero titles created by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby and others. Marvel includes well-known characters such as Spider-Man, Wolverine, Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk and Deadpool, such teams as the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy and villains such as Green Goblin, Magneto, Thanos, Hydra and the Red Skull. A lot of Marvel's characters exist in multiple realities and in each universe there certain differences, such as major deaths or changes in powers that change said universe’s history. For example in the Ultimate Universe’s Spider-Man comic Peter Parker, who is the original Spiderman, dies and Miles Morales takes his place as the Web-slinger. All of the Marvel universes together are called the Marvel Multiverse. Characters tend to cross over to other universes which make for interesting team ups and …show more content…
As the industry's other major publishers made exclusive distribution deals with other companies, the ripple effect resulted in the survival of only one other major distributor in North America, Diamond Comic Distributors Inc. In early 1997, when Marvel's Heroes World endeavor failed, Diamond also forged an exclusive deal with Marvel—giving the company its own section of its comics catalog Previews.In 1991 Ronald Perelman, whose company, Andrews Group, had purchased Marvel Comic's Parent corporation, Marvel Entertainment Group in 1989, took the company public. Following the rapid rise of this stock, Perelman issued a series of junk bonds that he used to acquire other entertainment companies, secured by MEG stock. Then, by the middle of the decade, the industry had slumped, and in December 1996 Marvel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy