Lee & Kirby
Legend has it in 1961, longtime magazine and comic book publisher Martin Goodman was playing golf with either Jack Liebowitz or Irwin Donenfeld of rival DC Comics, then known as National Periodical Publications, who bragged about DC's success with the superhero team the Justice League of America. While film producer and comics historian Michael Uslan has partly debunked the story, Goodman, a publishing trend-follower aware of the JLA's strong sales, confirmably directed his comics editor, Stan Lee, to create a comic-book series about a team of superheroes. According to Lee in 1974:
“ Martin mentioned that he had noticed one of the titles published by National Comics seemed to be selling better than most. It was a book called The [sic] Justice League of America and it was composed of a team of superheroes. ... ' If the Justice League is selling ', spoke he, ' why don't we put out a comic book that features a team of superheroes?' ”
Lee, who'd served as editor-in-chief and art director of Marvel and its predecessor companies, Timely Comics and Atlas Comics, for two decades, had by now found the medium restrictive. Determined "to carve a real career for myself in the nowhere world of comic books, Lee concluded that:
“ For just this once, I would do the type of story I myself would enjoy reading.... And the characters would be the kind of characters I could personally relate to: they'd be flesh and blood, they'd have their faults and foibles, they'd be fallible and feisty, and — most important of all — inside their colorful, costumed booties they'd still have feet of clay.
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