| Magazine Management | |
| Parent: | Magazine Management |
| Defunct: | 1981 |
| Founded: | 1971 |
| Country: | United States |
| Headquarters: | New York City, New York |
| Keypeople: | Archie Goodwin, Don McGregor, Doug Moench, Gerry Conway, Marv Wolfman, Roy Thomas, Steve Gerber |
| Publications: | Black-and-white comics magazines |
| Genre: | Horror, fantasy, martial arts |
| Imprints: | Marvel Monster Group, Marvel Magazine Group |
Magazine Management, the magazine and comic-book publishing parent of Marvel Comics at the time, released a number of magazine-format comics in the 1970s, primarily from 1973 to 1977, in the market dominated by Warren Publishing. The line of mostly black-and-white anthology magazines predominantly featured horror, sword and sorcery, and science fiction. The magazines did not carry the Marvel name, but were produced by Marvel staffers and freelancers, and featured characters regularly found in Marvel comic books, as well as some creator-owned material. In addition to the many horror titles, magazines in this group included Savage Sword of Conan, The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, Marvel Preview, and Planet of the Apes.
The magazine format did not fall under the purview of the comics industry's self-censorship Comics Code Authority, allowing the titles to feature stronger content than mainstream color comic books, such as moderate profanity, partial nudity, and more graphic violence. In addition to original content, many issues included reprinted material, including a number of horror stories from Marvel's 1950s predecessor Atlas Comics that originally were published before the 1954 introduction of the Comics Code.
Lead editors for the magazine group were Roy Thomas, Marv Wolfman, and later Archie Goodwin and John Warner. Tony Isabella, Don McGregor, and David Anthony Kraft also spent stints editing magazine titles.
Writer Doug Moench contributed heavily to the magazines, including to the entire runs of Planet of the Apes, Rampaging Hulk, and Doc Savage, while also writing for virtually every other title in the line. The magazines featured fully painted covers by illustrators including Earl Norem, Bob Larkin, Ken Barr, Luis Dominguez, Neal Adams, Frank Brunner, Boris Vallejo, and Joe Jusko. Marvel production manager Sol Brodsky, who in 1970 had helped launch the short-lived Skywald Publications line of black-and-white horror magazines before returning to Marvel, served as production manager here as well.[1]
Initially, the only company brand on the magazines was the "three C's" Curtis Circulation Company logo[2] (Curtis being Marvel's distributor and an affiliated company). The Marvel Comics brand and logo did not always appear on the cover or in the indicia; the only obvious relation to Marvel being the publisher's name, Magazine Management, a name that the four-color comics stopped using in 1973 but was retained for the black-and-white magazines.[3] Nonetheless, Marvel characters appeared regularly in the magazine line, and many of the magazine titles were featured in the four-color comics' house advertisements. The Curtis imprint was reduced to "CC" in 1975.
The magazine line was Marvel's second attempt at entering the black-and-white comics magazines market: in 1968, Marvel had experimented with the format with the two-issue superhero entry The Spectacular Spider-Man[4] and the one-shot The Adventures of Pussycat.
In 1971, attempting to compete in a market dominated by Warren Publishing and smaller publishers like Eerie Publications and Skywald Publications, the company launched Savage Tales, which debuted in the spring — and was immediately canceled. Roy Thomas, a Marvel writer-editor who became the company's editor-in-chief in 1972, recalled that: