In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn about how it was determine Marvel would have a Man-Wolf before they knew who Man-Wolf would be.
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and nineteenth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for the first part of this installment's legends. Click here for the second part of this installment's legends.
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COMIC LEGEND:
The Spider-Man foe, Man-Wolf, was named before anyone knew who Man-Wolf was actually going to be.
STATUS:
True
I don't want to give you the false impression that the comic book industry has ever been this very prim and proper type of business, but at the same time, there are definitely certain periods that were MORE wide open than others, and one of the most prominent examples of this was the early 1970s. The reasons for this were twofold. The first is that Marvel Comics had been coming on VERY strong in sales once it was free of its previous distribution deal (their earlier distribution deal was done through a distributor owned by their biggest rival, DC Comics, that limited the amount of titles that Marvel could release. It was a lot less strict than in the early days of the Marvel Universe, but once Marvel was free of it, the company was obviously MUCH freer) and had even briefly passed DC in market share in the late 1960s/early 1970s before moving ahead for more or less good in the early 1970s when both companies raised their prices along with their page counts, but Marvel then lowered its prices (and page count) quicker than DC (when you are dealing in an impulse buy industry, price point plays a major role) and pushed ahead for good. Once Marvel was ahead, it basically underwent a "display space" war with DC throughout the 1970s. Both companies wanted as much rack space as possible to crowd the other one out and the way to do so was to expand expand expand.
Okay, so Marvel was in heavy expansion territory at the time, so that's one major factor in the "wild" nature of the era, but another was the 1971 relaxion of the Comics Code Authority. When the Comics Code went into effect, one of its major drags was on the horror comic industry, as the Code almost seemed written to specifically limit those titles, as those and crime comics tended to be what freaked the public out the most. In 1971, though, the Code was, like, "Eh, whatever, fine, do monster comics if you want, so long as they are in the tradition of the 'classic' monsters like vampires, mummies and werewolves."
And once Marvel COULD do monster comics, they did monster comics like CRAZY. Roy Thomas has talked often about how Stan Lee would typically have a title in mind and say, basically, "Go do that." A lot of it had to do with titles that could be trademarked. Werewolf couldn't be trademarked, but Werewolf By Night could be...
Dracula couldn't be trademarked, but Tomb of Dracula could be...
So upon the successful launch of Werewolf By Night, Stan Lee wanted another werewolf book and Roy Thomas recalled in TwoMorrows' Comic Book Artist #13 in an interview with Jon B. Cooke, “Stan just wanted a character called Man-Wolf. It was that whole Marvel-flooding-the-market- thing! If you’ve got Dracula, you can have Morbius. If you’ve got Werewolf, you can have Man-Wolf."
Over the years, there's been some dispute over who came up with the idea of Man-Wolf ultimately becoming John Jameson, which he did in Amazing Spider-Man #124...
In TwoMorrows' Back Issue #44, in an interview with Scott Williams, Gerry Conway said it was him, and while Roy Thomas had previously said (in that same Comic Book Artist interview), "We didn't have a concept for Man-Wolf, and Gerry and John Romita were trying to come up with something. My only contribution was to say, 'Hey, make it J. Jonah Jameson's son! He was an astronaut, and he went up in space, and he found a moon rock, and it turns him into a wolf!' Just like Morbius was a science-fictional vampire, we could make Man-Wolf a science-fiction werewolf" he has since noted (in his handy list of characters that he has created over the years that John Cimino maintains) that the only thing he definitely suggested was that Man-Wolf would get his powers from a moon rock, so he's basically conceding that Conway could be right that Conway was the one who said to use Jameson.
Thanks to Thomas, Conway, Williams and Cooke for all of the great information!
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MORE LEGENDS STUFF!
OK, that's it for this installment!
Thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually anymore, but I used it for years and you still see it when you see my old columns, so it's fair enough to still thank him, I think.
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! Also, if you have a correction or a comment, feel free to also e-mail me. CBR sometimes e-mails me with e-mails they get about CBLR and that's fair enough, but the quickest way to get a correction through is to just e-mail me directly, honest. I don't mind corrections. Always best to get things accurate!
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