MIGHTY MARVEL COMIC CONVENTION Program Book

As comic book conventions began to grow and become a thing in the 1970s, Marvel decided to try their hand at organizing shows specifically dedicated to that one single company. The first Mighty Marvel Comic Convention was held on March 22-24 of 1975 at New York’s Hotel Commodore. The event did well enough that a second such convention was also held the following year, after which Marvel threw in the towel and returned to simply being guests at conventions organized by others.

As a keepsake of the event, all guests were given a copy of this Mighty Marvel Comic Convention program book, which featured an assortment of articles and inside information about the company and its publishing efforts.

George Olshevsky, who would go on to craft the earliest Marvel indexes and who owned a complete collection of Marvel’s output dating back to the beginning, was commissioned to write an account of the Golden Age days of the firm. The information contained within it is relatively basic, but much of it wasn’t widely known in 1975 when this booklet was issued.

The booklet also reproduces this opening page of the first Jack Frost story from USA COMICS #1, signed by Stan Lee and illustrated by a young Carmine Infantino, who was at this moment the publisher of rival National Periodical Publications.

Roy Thomas then contributed an extended (and verbose) accounting of how Conan the Barbarian came to be adapted by Marvel and what went into it becoming such a popular series. This piece originally ran in an issue of Marvel’s now-defunct fan magazine MARVELMANIA and was repurposed here.

The program book also reprints the set of sample Spider-Man newspaper strips that Stan Lee and John Romita had worked up in order to sell the series to newspaper syndication. Apparently, despite what is said here, the reason the strip didn’t sell is that Marvel executive Chip Goodman never shopped the samples around–they were found still in his desk drawer, unopened, after he was let go by the company. A few years after this, the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN newspaper strip was successfully syndicated, but these early sample strips were not used as a part of it, dating from a much earlier time.

Sam Rosen lettered these samples, which were almost certainly produced at the twice-up size of original artwork prior to around 1967. As you can see, the strips had a lot more copy than newspaper strips of the period typically would have.

I believe this printing represented the first time these sample strips were shown publicly, though they’ve been reprinted several times since then.

We’ll look at more of the Mighty Marvel Comic Convention program book in the weeks ahead.