Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and thirty-second week where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

Click here for Part 1 of this week's legends. Click here for Part 2 of this week's legends.

COMIC LEGEND:

A rival comic book company tried to make their superhero comics look like they were Marvel Comics.

STATUS:

Basically True,

Earlier today, I did an article about the history of Marvel's rivalry with their biggest competitor, DC Comics. I pointed out how Stan Lee went from being very defensive of anyone who knocked a rival for him becoming a major smack-talker of his rivals. You'll notice two of his earliest Bullpen's Bullets where he talks about the other companies specifically mention companies copying him...

Despite his long history of Marvel/DC rivalry, it WASN'T DC that Lee was initially talking about in the column. You see, There was a burst in comic sales in 1966 after Batman the TV series, but one company had already begun copying Marvel before that. Archie's superhero comics looked sort of like this before 1965, "Archie Adventure"...

But then they hired Jerry (co-creator of Superman!) Siegel and former Marvel artist, Paul Reinman, to create a new group of comic books called The Mighty Comics Group, which blatantly copied the cover styles of Marvel Comics of the era!

But look, they also even copied the CREATOR CREDITS OF MARVEL!

Now you know why Lee was so pissed off!


Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed at CBR: Did M. Night Shyamalan base The Sixth Sense on an episode of the Nickelodeon horror show, Are You Afraid of the Dark?


OK, that's it for this week!

Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!

Here's my most recent book, Why Does Batman Carry Shark Repellent? The cover is by Kevin Hopgood (the fellow who designed War Machine's armor).

batshark

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Here's my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends. -- half of them are re-worked classic legends I've featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).

The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it...

If you'd like to order it, you can use the following code if you'd like to send me a bit of a referral fee...

Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed

See you all next week!