Fun Facts About Marvel Comics

1. Marvel Comics was close to not existing at all.  In 1937 Marin Goodman and his wife were vacationing in Europe and wanted to take the Hindenburg airship back home. Goodman was unable to get two seats next to each other, so the couple took a plane back home. Had they been aboard the airship, they could have perished in the infamous Hindenburg disaster. Upon his return to the United States, Goodman founded Timely Comics (which would eventually become Marvel Comics) and hired Stanley Lieber, who we all know as Stan Lee.

2. Michael Jackson was a huge fan of Marvel, Spider-Man in particular. So much so that when word of a Spider-Man movie surfaced in the late 90s, he tried to buy the company so he could star as the webslinger. Thankfully, that did not happen.






3. Mutants trying to get accepted as human, as opposed to freaks of nature is a central theme in X-Men. Ironically, Marvel has spent a considerable amount of time trying to make a case that X-Men figurines should not be considered humans because of a tax rule that would cost them more money.



4. The Ultimate version of Nick Fury was purposefully dawn to resemble Samuel L. Jackson without the actor's permission. After learning this, Jackson agreed to be cast as Nick Fury in any future film involving the character instead of taking Marvel to court.




5. Marvel issues the No Prize to any reader who points out an error in their comics. Even though it's a way of trolling pedantic readers, the prize is highly sought after.






6. A weird rule during the early days of Wolverine was hat he could not have visible arm hair while in costume, but out of costume it was totally fine.






7. In the mid 90s Marvel and DC created a shared imprint called Amalgam which featured mashups of Marvel and DC superheroes. Notable examples included Dark Claw (Batman + Wolverine), Super Soldier (Super Man + Captain America) and Iron Lantern (Iron Man + Green Lantern)

8. Marvel helped with the creation of Transformers. The company was approached by Hasbro in the 80s to help create a backstory, so Editor-In-Chief Jim Shooter wrote up the relationship between the Autobots and Decepticons. Writers Denny O'Neal and Bob Budiansky created Optimus Prime and Megatron.





9.  Marvel first Star Wars comic was released in March 1977 with a July 1 cover date, about two months before A New Hope's premiere.








10. Editor-In-Chief Jim Shooter bought the black suit Spider-Man idea from a fan for $220 in the 1980s. He gave the fan a shot at writing the comic, but that didn't work out too well and the idea was used to create Venom.





[via GamezUp]