70 years ago, a new publishing company named Marvel Comics stuck its toe into the first waters of the comic book industry. Before they became a pop culture powerhouse publishing famous superheroes like Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man, Marvel's first ever comic book featured a daring new anti-hero named the Sub-Mariner, created by legendary artist Bill Everett. 70 years later, Everett's watery creation continues to be one of the pinnacles of the Marvel Universe of superheroes, as attested to by its recent option as a major motion picture. Bill Everett invented comics' first anti-hero in 1939; an angry half-breed (half-man, half sea-creature) that terrorized mankind until uniting with the Allied Forces to conquer fascism's march across Europe during World War II. But the reasons to celebrate Bill Everett's monumental career in comics books don't stop with his water-based hero. Everett was a master of many comic genres, and was one of the pre-eminent horror comic-book artists in the 1950s (before government and societal pressures led the comics industry to censor itself with the imposition of the Comics Code Authority), producing work of such quality and stature that he ranked alongside the artists who produced similar material for the justifiably lauded EC Comics.

The Secret History of Marvel Comics digs back to the 1930s when Marvel Comics wasn't just a comic-book producing company. Marvel Comics owner Martin Goodman had tentacles into a publishing world that might have made that era’s conservative American parents lynch him on his front porch. Marvel was but a small part of Goodman’s publishing empire, which had begun years before he published his first comic book. Goodman mostly published lurid and sensationalistic story books (known as “pulps”) and magazines, featuring sexually-charged detective and romance short fiction, and celebrity gossip scandal sheets. And artists like Jack Kirby, who was producing Captain America for eight-year-olds, were simultaneously dipping their toes in both ponds. The Secret History of Marvel Comics tells this parallel story of 1930s/40s Marvel Comics sharing offices with those Goodman publications not quite fit for children. The book also features a comprehensive display of the artwork produced for Goodman’s other enterprises by Marvel Comics artists such as Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, Alex Schomburg, Bill Everett, Al Jaffee, and Dan DeCarlo, plus the very best pulp artists in the field, including Norman Saunders, John Walter Scott, Hans Wesso, L.F. Bjorklund, and Marvel Comics #1 cover artist Frank R. Paul. Goodman’s magazines also featured cover stories on celebrities such as Jackie Gleason, Elizabeth Taylor, Liberace, and Sophia Loren, as well as contributions from famous literary and social figures such as Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, and L. Ron Hubbard.