In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, discover how Marvel created a hero based on a gimmick for his debut…and then didn’t use the gimmick!
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and twenty-fifth 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 pat of this installment’s legends.
NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I’ll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!
COMIC LEGEND:
Marvel had a finished 3-D comic book that had to be transformed into a regular comic book when the 3-D printing cost too much
STATUS:
Technically False, but Very Close to Being True
Even before the public freaked out over Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent and his claims that comic books caused all that was wrong in society, comic book sales were majorly slumping in the early 1950s. So when World’s First, a 3-D comic starring Mighty Mouse, sold over a million copies in 1953, while costing more than twice as much as a standard comic of the time, companies took notice in a BIG way.
A separate organization set up to meet this wave of interest was begun by Leonard Maurer, his brother Norman and cartoonist Joe Kubert, who created a particularly good 3-D process (it was very popular back then for people to try to develop 3-D processes). The group (calling themselves American Sterographic Corporation) licensed their process to any comic company willing to pay.
The 3-D boom was a large pie, and everyone wanted a piece.
Things went bad, though, when William Gaines tried to sue everyone. As noted 3-D expert Ray Zone explainde years ago:
With a patent search, Gaines discovered an October 13, 1936 Patent (no. 2,057,051) by Freeman H. Owens which was a Method of Drawing and Photographing Stereoscopic Pictures in Relief and described reproduction of a newspaper cartoon drawing as a “stereoscopic relief picture” with separate parts of the cartoon “copied on separate transparent sheets” and “opaque on the back to correspond with the outline in each case.” The sheets, “advantageously celluloid,” were recombined and copied “to make the pair of stereoscopic views” by shifting them laterally.
“A month before its expiration,” notes [Leonard] Maurer, “Gaines bought the Freeman Owens patent — which never turned up in our patent search — from the dying inventor for a few hundred bucks.” Then Gaines initiated suit for patent infringement on all the publishers of 3-D comics including St. John. “That suit,” says Maurer, was “based on surreptitious individual tape recordings of meetings with Joe and Norman, where Gaines accused me of stealing the Owens patent out of the patent office (big joke). It triggered the resignation of Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Elder, who had gotten confidential disclosures of the entire process from me and felt betrayed by Gaines when phony accusations came out in court.
“The famous Judge Liebowitz threw the case out with the comment that the Gaines deposition read like a ‘fantasy story out of Mad Comics.’ But, it served its purpose, and ruined all my chances to license the 3-D Illustereo process to anyone other than St. John.
Gaines’ action, along with the high cost of making 3-D comics (and the high cost of the comics themselves), effectively destroyed the 3-D comic market. An interesting side-note is that, just as this action began, Harvey Comics was launching a very aggressive campaign in support of its comic, Captain 3-D. The perfect storm of high cost of individual issues, high overhead and legal fees destroyed them, even though Captain 3-D was a high quality product produced by the Joe Simon and Jack Kirby team of artists.
Many years later, Roy Thomas paid tribute, in a way, to Captain 3D with the creation of a new superhero for Marvel called The 3-D Man. Working with artist Jim Craig, Thomas planned to launch a new comic book one-shot starring Spider-Man that would be done in 3-D, with the new hero, 3-D Man, being a back-up feature in that comic. However, after Craig started working on the comic, Thomas had to let him know that the budget for the 3-D printing was too high and so the project fell apart (Thomas wrote about this in a text page in Marvel Premiere #36). Without the 3-D hook, then, there was no reason for it to be released as a one-shot, so instead, the story was just worked into an arc in Marvel Premiere, starting with #35…
The interesting thing is that since Craig started working on the project as a 3-D comic before it fell apart, as Craig noted to Chris Brennaman in TwoMorrows’ Back Issue #71, then you can still see some of the early art for the comic book…
and see where there had originally been a 3-D effect…
Neat stuff! Thanks to Roy Thomas, Jim Craig and Chris Brennaman for the information!
CHECK OUT A TV LEGENDS REVEALED!
In the latest TV Legends Revealed – Was The Doctor on Doctor Who originally going to be called “Doctor Who”?
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 [email protected]. 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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