Original subtitles

Lee: I think Marvel will be known

as the company that has provided

some of the greatest super characters for the public.

Man: We always believed in the tremendous potential

of the Marvel brand.

It's the most dominant pop culture on the planet right now.

They like making movies that they would want to go see.

Marvel movies are the best. They're the funniest.

The real cultural impact occurred

from that meeting of those great minds.

Stan and his flash of genius that a superhero has problems.

Marvel takes it up a notch.

It's what's under the mask that counts.

I'm bringing the party to you.

Brevoort: We understand our characters

and the kinds of stories that we do better than anybody else.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Vancamp: Marvel ... the house of ideas,

creator of some of the most exciting televised

and filmed entertainment the world has ever known.

Join us as we celebrate the 75th anniversary of Marvel

from its early days as a small publishing house in New York

to one of the most influential companies in history.

This is "Marvel: 75 years from pulp to pop!"

sync & correction by f1nc0

Hello. I'm Emily Vancamp, or as you might know me,

Agent 13 from Marvel's "Captain America: The Winter Soldier."

Welcome to director Phil Coulson's office

in the secret headquarters of the Strategic Homeland

Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division

or, as it's better known, S.H.I.E.L.D.

Located in a decommissioned base from the 1940s,

this is where Coulson has gathered a small group of agents

to rebuild the once storied organization on ABC's hit television series

"Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D."

It's appropriate that we find ourselves here in this building

where S.H.I.E.L.D.'s future touches its past

as tonight, we'll go back in time to behold Marvel's unrivaled history,

which all began in a small publishing house

then known as timely comics in 1939.

But first, let's take a look at something more familiar.

Today, I think the Marvel movies ...

everything they do, they do well.

We created Marvel Studios

to exercise more control over our own characters.

The brain trust at Marvel decided

we were gonna found our own movie studio,

we were gonna make our own movies.

Quesada: We don't just go out there

and throw movies against a wall and hope it's a hit.

These all come out of incredible collaboration.

And it's based on passion and commitment to telling good stories.

We have no other agenda but to make great films.

The thing that Marvel does best is they pick the right directors.

- Lee: Good directors, good actors. - When do you ever get to see this

group of actors come together in this kind of fantasy world?

Whedon: You have all these parts,

but how can you possibly bring them together?

Evans: Would Cap shoot a machine gun?

If Joss said it's okay, it's okay.

Man: The reason the Avengers are so great in the comics

is 'cause they're such different personalities.

Right, so you cast the best person for those personalities,

you do your job right, when you put them together,

it's gonna be as fun as it is in the comics.

These are Marvel Comics,

so they're authentic when Marvel makes a movie of them.

- Trying to get me back in the world? - Trying to save it.

Man: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor ...

they've been continually published for over 40 years.

Lee: The movies have made these characters

so popular throughout the world and have given them such glamour.

People know about them and care about them

and want to see them.

The secret to Marvel's current success is, I think,

not compromising on what the fans want but also exceeding expectations.

I can't wait to see what they do next.

We want something new and something unexpected,

not just something familiar.

And that's what led us to announce "Guardians of the Galaxy."

Who?

"Guardians of the galaxy"? Really?

Really? You guys are putting out a movie called "Guardians of the Galaxy"?

Why would you choose "Guardians"? It's so out there.

It has nothing to do with what's going on in the Marvel universe.

And it's one thing to take Captain America

and Iron Man and Thor.

"Guardians of the Galaxy" could not be more,

"okay, what do we do with ... you know, here is some chuck steak."

Who's going to a movie

with a talking raccoon and a walking tree dude?

People saying, "this is going to be Marvel's first failure."

Smith: Every once in a while, you'd see the name Star-lord and be like,

"yeah, I remember when they created that character."

Star-lord, man. The legendary outlaw?

Guys?

Forget it.

Alonso: Bunch of misfits that form a family.

The big difference is that the world that they occupy

is out in the cosmos, it's in outer space.

This is an opportunity for Marvel to put its stamp on the space opera.

Pratt: We're seeing corners of space

that only the truest Marvel fans knew even existed.

Instead of it being an origin story of a particular superhero,

it was an origin story of a team.

I look around at us, and you know what I see?

Losers.

Of course, there were a lot of naysayers, but look what we have.

It's the most successful movie of the year of 2014.

Yes!

Smith: Talk about brilliant. You take something nobody cares about,

that isn't, like, viable or one of your crown jewels

and you turn it into one.

Oswalt: "Guardians of the Galaxy" was extraordinary.

This movie is a box of cracker jacks, but it's all prizes.

Smith: They made this beautiful motion picture

that is a modern-day "Star Wars."

Loeb: The decision to make movies ourselves

transformed the company.

Alonso: The success of Marvel Studios

is a testament to their deep respect for the source material.

Man: This is the culmination

of many, many years of work for us at Marvel Studios.

Quesada: We look at our entire library of characters.

How will this work within the grand scheme,

the plan for Marvel?

Where do we see our company in the next 5 years?

In the next 10 years?

Man: This now represents just the first phase

of what these movies can become.

1939.

America has nearly recovered from the great depression

only to find itself on the cusp of another historical hardship ...

World War II.

At a time when newspapers had little good news to report,

readers turned to the back pages for escape.

The daily comic strips were, at once, uplifting

and reflective of the true american spirit.

Our story begins in New York City.

Martin Goodman was the original founder of Marvel Comics,

which when he started it, was called Timely Comics.

I like to describe him as an opportunistic publisher.

He was never embarrassed to hop on the hottest trend.

Marvel back then was all funny animal comics,

war comics, romance comics, not costumed Avengers.

And then came what's been thought of as the killer app

for the comic book ...

the creation of superheroes.

Brevoort: Superman set off this enormous gold rush

where everybody in the world put out superhero comics.

Sanderson: Martin Goodman wanted to capitalize on this new market,

and the first thing he published was Marvel Comics #1.

Nicieza: Marvel Mystery #1 featured

a brand-new hero called the Human Torch ...

a guy who was an android,

and he caught on fire to be followed by Sub-Mariner,

who was a guy from underwater.

Here, you have two heroes fighting each other,

which had not happened or even been thought of.

Even by the standards of the day in 1939,

Marvel was already making superheroes that were very different.

Brevoort: Stan Lee was related to publisher Martin Goodman.

Martin was actually my cousin-in-law.

I learned that he had an opening in the comic-book department,

and I use the word "department" loosely,

because the whole department consisted of

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.

Sanderson: Joe Simon was the first editor at Marvel.

He worked with artist Jack Kirby,

who is one of the great figures in Marvel history.

Lee: I would fill their ink wells.

I would run down and get sandwiches for them.

And if they needed a dialogue balloon written

and they were too busy, they asked me to put the copy in.

And little by little, I did a little bit more writing as we went along.

The writers and artists of Timely Comics were churning out

fantastically unique stories that embraced the times,

like Burgos' the Human Torch and Everett's Sub-Mariner.

But the times were about to change.

The world was heading to war.

Busiek: America was conflicted over the war.

There were people who wanted to be isolationist,

and there were people who said, "this isn't going to just go away."

Brevoort: A lot of the early comic-book professionals were jewish.

They were very, very concerned

about the things that were going on in Europe.

Busiek: And as the story goes,

Martin Goodman wanted a patriotic hero.

Brevoort: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby came up

with the quintessential american soldier.

Sanderson: As a response to what was going on in Europe.

Of course, patriotism ...

you just couldn't get much more than Captain America.

Steranko: And he symbolized that superheroes were american patriots.

Captain America Comics #1 was, in effect, a call to arms

to the american public that we have to stop Hitler.

Busiek: People did not want America involved in the war.

Kirby: My father and Joe Simon, being jewish,

we started getting death threats from the american nazi party.

They had this idea for the first cover ...

that would be Cap bursting in to some nazi headquarters

and smashing Adolf Hitler in the face.

For late 1940, that's a very provocative image.

This is a man who is alive and is the head of a nation.

Busiek: Once Pearl Harbor hit and we were in the war for sure,

Captain America really hit the zeitgeist.

Man: It was smash success. It was timely's biggest seller.

It was a patriotic type of book, and it was the right time.

"Yeah! He's our guy. This is what we stand for."

And that's what Captain America was to an entire generation.

Kirby: My father was always a very patriotic person.

I think Captain America was probably his favorite character.

Quesada: Cap is a representation of those guys

who are actually on the front lines.

American soldiers were voraciously reading comic books.

Brevoort: Servicemen serving abroad were a huge audience.

Part of it was unsold comics were used as ballast in ships.

The soldiers coming off the ships ... they'll bring comic books,

they leave them around town.

Lee: They were just what the soldiers wanted.

They were stories of good guys fighting bad guys.

Sanderson: Symbols of american resistance to Fascism.

Busiek: I had seen figures that indicated

that Captain America comics sold better than Time Magazine.

Announcer: Throughout the world, throngs of people

hail the end of the war in Europe.

After World War II, we went right back

to doing the same kind of books we had been doing.

Once the war ended,

I think people wanted less of a reminder of the war,

and it was parents not wanting the superhero stuff for their kids,

especially in light of the Frederic Wertham debates

and all of the things that came down on the industry.

Frederic Wertham wrote this book called "Seduction of the innocent"

which, in effect, blamed comics for juvenile delinquency.

They convened hearings to investigate

the effect of comic books on America's youth.

Announcer: And the issue becomes nationwide.

Should books like these be banned from the newsstands?

Tell me how comic books make you feel, Dave.

Well, they don't make me feel too good.

A couple of times, I read a comic book, I threw up.

What the comic-book industry did was say, "mea culpa.

Yeah, we're wicked. We're evil."

The publishers got together and set up a self-censorship organization.

It's the comics code authority.

Lee: He had to send every book to that group,

and they said, "well, this is too violent," or, "that's too sexy."

And they would get the stamp of approval on the cover,

which said this was a decent publication.

The publishers were scared

to publish material that would be deemed questionable.

Kirby: After Wertham published his book,

the comic-book industry, I mean, really took a nose dive.

Over 800 people lost their jobs.

30 to 40 comic-book companies went out of business.

Within months, it was down to 10 or fewer.

And those were struggling.

So it was kind of a down time for comics.

They were fading out like crazy.

Announcer: Tomorrow, previewing our post-war world.

Let's look into a brand-new development ... television.

Man: Television came in. Kids were reading less.

Steranko: America was settling down. Comics reflected that.

The war ended.

Every superhero went to purgatory.

Even Captain America closed shop.

Superheroes just didn't seem to work in the 1950s.

Horror was more popular than superheroes,

which is why the last few issues of the Captain America series

are called Captain America's Weird Tales.

At that time, all I did was write the kind of stories

that the publisher, Martin Goodman, wanted me to write.

Busiek: Goodman chased trends.

You know, tillie the toiler was popular in the newspaper strips.

Goodman would say, "give me some of those,"

and you'd get Tessie the typist.

- Lee: Nellie the nurse. - Millie the model.

- Hedy of Hollywood. - Comic books were just slumming.

O'Neil: The early guys ... the guys before us ...

didn't grow up reang comics. They invented the form.

They invented the form, and they were ashamed of that.

I even changed my name from Stanley Leiber,

which was a normal name, to Stan Lee.

I didn't want Stanley Leiber to be known as a comic-book writer.

O'Neil: If I was at a party, and they said, "what do you do?"

"I work in comic books." that ended the conversation.

I said, "I'm really sick

"of writing these stories that mean nothing.

They're not well-written. They don't have any characterization.

They're just stories. People read them and forget them."

I told my wife that I wanted to quit.

Finally, in 1961, I guess that's when ...

I guess they were on the verge of just closing it all down.

Believe it or not,

some of our favorite heroes and their beloved alter egos

may have never existed

had it not been for the creativity and boldness

of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Stan Lee.

Stan had been in the business for 20-some-odd years,

and he was looking to get out.

Sanderson: Stan himself says he was embarrassed to tell people,

when he met them, that he was working in comics.

And the way he tells it, and the way he's told it for many years,

is he had a conversation with his wife, Joan.

Lee: She said to me, "if you want to quit, before you do,

why don't you write one story the way you'd like to do it?"

"The kind of comic books you would want to read yourself."

- And that set off the light bulb. - "Instead of just one hero,

let's come up with a book with a team of heroes."

And I decided to do it the way I wanted to do it.

O'Neil: So Stan sat down with Jack Kirby.

Man: And Jack came up with the everyman designs of the characters,

O'Neil: And they came up with the Fantastic Four.

Green: The Fantastic Four is a really special story.

It's about a family that was kind of bonded together

by this insane, unique circumstance.

Stan added a level of realism to superheroes

that had never been seen before.

Lee: I tried to give each one of them a separate personality.

Sanderson: It starts out with these four characters

quarreling with each other.

These cosmic radiations that gave them super powers.

Not, like, helpful powers, either.

Weird and kind of very complicated powers.

Brevoort: The earliest issues of Fantastic Four

actually do not look like superhero comics.

Sanderson: They did not have superhero costumes

in Fantastic Four #1.

These comics were just more engaging

and more electric to an audience in 1961.

Man: One of the most popular characters Marvel had,

who was the Thing ... was a monster.

I always liked the movie "Frankenstein."

To me, the monster was the good guy.

Brevoort: The other monster titles that Martin was publishing at the time

all had these big, almost man-in-a-rubber-suit monsters.

Lee: I thought if I could write that type of guy

and make the reader like him,

I'd feel I had accomplished something.

Brevoort: So, the second character that they did was the Hulk.

And the Hulk, too, is not really a traditional superhero.

It was more about the guy who transformed into the monster ...

Bruce Banner ... and his conflicts.

Your Marvel comic book characters ...

the pantheon of Marvel heroes come from the atomic age.

Three... two... one...

Rather than concentrate on the negativity,

let's make fantasy out of that.

Imagine you survived that and became this grey Goliath,

who will later be green,

because grey is not really an appealing color for the Hulk.

You know, things like that captured the imagination.

Martin said, "hey, these are doing well. Come up with another superhero."

I figured, "I want to make him different than all the others."

It would be fun to make him a teenager.

And then, while I was thinking, I saw a fly on the wall,

and I said, "gee, wouldn't it be something

if a superhero could stick to walls like an insect?"

"What could I call him? Insect-man?" Didn't sound dramatic.

"Fly-man?" Didn't have it. "Mosquito-man?"

And then I said, "Spider-man."

Spider-man is, in many ways, the first teenage superhero.

Quesada: What Stan and Steve did was

Peter Parker put on a mask and became Spider-man,

but when that mask comes off,

he still has all the problems of Peter Parker.

Vancamp: We'll get to Spider-man, but let's get to know Peter Parker.

This character felt the responsibility to save his neighborhood.

Stan had Spider-man launder his costume.

He had him get a cold. No superhero had ever gotten a cold.

He wasn't rippling with muscles.

He was just a kid who was bitten by a spider.

When I was attacked by a swarm of bees, I did not become Bee-man.

He's just the typical teenager,

and nobody would know that guy is really Spider-man.

If you think of the kind of on-fire years

for Kirby and Lee and Ditko...

Kirby: Creating titles just one after another.

Very rarely saw my father after that point.

The next ones that they came up with ... Thor and Ant-man.

In the same month thereafter, Iron Man...

Oswalt: Dr. Strange...

Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos,

which would later beget Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

- The Avengers... - Brevoort: Brought a bunch

- of those characters together. - ...the X-Men.

Brevoort: Again, both coming out the same month.

So much invention, so many home runs.

- Boom, boom, boom, boom. - Stan was basically writing everything.

However, he was working with these immensely talented people.

Quesada: I don't think there's enough that can be said

about Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

If there's a Mount Rushmore of comic-book artists,

Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby are definitely carved on it.

Well, Kirby and Ditko made the overall world of Marvel.

Smith: Jack made things dynamic ... big arms coming in your face.

You know, every character was coming at you.

Kirby: My father ... he saw comic books as story boards for movies.

He very early on saw the potential.

Green: Steve Ditko was the definition of Spider-man.

The way that Ditko drew him,

he's so thin and gangly and long and awkward.

Steve was Spider-man and Dr. Strange, and everything else was Jack.

The fact that that many came out of three guys ...

there was some alchemy going on.

Bendis: What's amazing is how much of this came about

in such a short period of time.

There's not a creator in the world

that just doesn't sit back and go, "wow."

The number of characters

that have gone on to the prestige that they have ...

if all of us could do two or three characters,

we would all be happy.

Here's a guy who created a field of characters

that I find it hard to believe anybody will ever be able to replicate.

- It's staggering. - Lee: Martin was very happy,

and he never did say, "go back to the old style."

He was a smart guy.

He wasn't about to say, "let's change them."

No promotion, the worst distribution in the world.

From nothing at all, they built up this huge success.

America was ready for a revival of the superhero.

It was called the marvel age of comics.

Lee: We were dreaming up our own characters and our own

problems, but of course, you can't help but be affected

by what's going on in the world.

Bendis: As our culture gave way to counterculture,

things like government seals on media and entertainment

were becoming less of a plus and more of a negative.

Lee: So I went to my publisher.

I said, "Martin, I think we ought to publish this book

without the approval of the comics code."

Stan said, "eh. To hell with the comics code.

I just won't put it on the book."

What was so revolutionary about Marvel was

they weren't trying to be revolutionary.

They were just, "but this is what's happening."

I remember, like, this great cover of Captain America and the Falcon

running through the streets of Harlem as it burned.

And Captain America is angry.

I love that the character becomes almost, like,

the spiritual embodiment of what the country feels.

Like, if the country's angry, he gets angry.

When we had the cuban missile crisis, we had stories about

"what if missiles were unleashed in the country?"

And "what would we do?"

Man: There was racial equality, there was women's equality,

and Marvel was very good about

the idea of doing women superheroes,

the idea of doing a black superhero.

I grew up in Jackson Heights. I'm of cuban descent.

I'm first-generation born here in the United States.

I remember picking up the Fantastic Four

and seeing a character called the Black Panther.

He was the first black superhero.

Liu: It wasn't necessarily about skin color and being a minority,

but it was about, sort of,

embracing the differences that everyone has.

The X-Men, for example, was for me very impactful

because of the fact that it was a metaphor

for sort of being a minority and being different.

Marvel has done such a good job of being able to sort of reflect

the diversity of what's existing in the world.

That really made Marvel Comics different

from all the other comics and it made it such a ...

almost a rock 'n' roll explosion.

I learned about Stan Lee right from the very beginning,

and not just about Stan,

but about Jack "King" Kirby and "Jazzy" John Romita.

Kimmel: I made a drawing for Stan Lee when I was seven years old.

There he is, manly Stan Lee. I showed this to Stan.

He was, um ... I think disturbed is the word.

Quesada: There was the remarkable Stan's soapbox,

where Stan would tell you about the goings-on at Marvel,

and you would feel as though he was writing solely to you.

The unique thing about this was that the kid right next to you ...

he was reading that soapbox, and he was feeling the exact same thing.

For over 30 years,

Martin Goodman managed to not only entertain,

but also guide Americans

through some of the happiest and darkest days of their lives.

He was ready to retire as publisher of Marvel in 1972,

but before doing so, he had one last duty ...

to name a successor.

The man was now in charge.

Marvel continued to grow rapidly throughout the 1970s,

and Stan Lee appointed the forward-thinking story

editor Jim Shooter as editor-in-chief in 1978

to shepherd Marvel into the next decade.

Starlin: Come the 1970s,

the industry was just filled with young kids like me

because all the older guys were retiring and going off to Florida.

I did my first work for Marvel in the early '70s.

- I was about 16, 17 years old. - Marvel was growing.

Narrator: Stan Lee and Archie Goodwin are working out the schtick.

Starlin: They were going from like 6 books a month to about 23.

So, quite frankly, they were hiring anybody

who could come across the state line and hold a pencil.

Goodwin: It was an amazing, weird place.

There were days we would do things

where we'd probably be arrested if we tried doing them now.

Man: You know, it was like we're just having fun,

and they were willing to see what would work.

There was ... everything was expanding.

Punisher came out of a very dark period in american history.

Thanos is my baby, he was the first character I ever created.

They offered me a monthly book ... Iron Fist.

Shooter: When Marvel expanded

and the number of titles went from like around a dozen to 50,

Stan was doing everything.

Lee: Jim Shooter had been one of the youngest guys in comics.

I think he was writing them when he was 13 years old.

And I was looking for an assistant editor, and I hired him.

First of all, I raised the rates ... doubled them.

And I was able to get away with this 'cause we started selling some books.

Buckley: That does parallel

with the radical shift in distribution for comics that happened

when comics started being sold directly to hobby shops.

The first time I heard of a comic-book convention

was years and years ago,

and it just grew and it grew and it grew.

Woman: How many comic books do you have now,

and what are you gonna do with them?

Keep them until they get, like, a lot ... worth a lot of money.

Buckley: The stores and the conventions

represented something that was, in some ways,

an extension of what you saw come out of Stan.

They were the chat rooms. You know, it wasn't cool

to pull a comic book out of your bag and read it in the lunch room.

Green: There was a comic-book store in my neighborhood.

That became my favorite place to be. That became my community.

As a result, we got sort of the most creative period out of Marvel

short of when Jack and Stan really started the whole thing.

There was nothing that Marvel really wouldn't do.

Shooter: Well, it wasn't so much that Hollywood came calling

as that we were knocking on every door in Hollywood.

We started out, several times, on promising projects,

and then, for one reason or another, they didn't work out.

Lee: We did a lot of cartoons,

and they had the Hulk and they had Iron Man.

They even had theme songs like,

"he is a Hulky, kind of sulky, kind of bulky superhero."

That terrible Spider-man show.

A guy ... his hair was very '70s.

The TV people had decided to improve on the product.

And unfortunately, they didn't have

the special-effects ability that they have today.

Shooter: I remember there was a Captain America movie.

We were pretty excited about it, and then they sent us a video tape.

It was so disappointing. It was so awful.

I don't think there was anybody who made any of those movies

who wanted to do, like, a really cool comic-book movie.

But the best thing that happened was we got the Hulk on TV.

McFarlane: As a 40-, 50-year-old man,

you look at some of the stuff and go, "what?!"

When Bill Bixby sort of put those contacts on,

and all of a sudden,

the sort of bad-wigged Ferrigno came on there ...

When you are eight years old,

which is what I was watching it, it was magic.

Vancamp: As the 1970s came to a close,

conventions came to life

and retail stores began popping up across the country,

selling not only new issues of comic books

but also back issues and collectibles.

Shooter ushered Marvel right into the fast-growing

direct market and into the next decade.

The 1980s were a very interesting time,

because what you saw was the emergence of the anti-hero,

pioneered by a number of very famous seminal comic-book creators ...

Alan Moore, Frank Miller.

And Chris Claremont and John Byrne and Walt Simonson.

Suddenly you had a bunch of people raised on all those

wonderful comics old enough to write those comics,

and they started writing

gritty, graphic, wonderfully grown-up Marvel Comics.

Then you bring in an artist like Jim Lee,

Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane.

Alonso: These were creators that took the superhero

and sort of turned him on his head,

examined their flaws, and it was very popular.

What was happening is that characters like

the Punisher and Wolverine were just super popular,

not because it was a degradation of society or whatever ...

because I just think, I got to tell you,

that I'm 7, 8, 9, 10 years old,

and I got a guy that's gonna go out there and kick some "a."

- That guy's cool to me. - Comics, you know, took another shift.

As we go into the '80s, it was just another level of realism.

Hama: I remember there was a lot of reaction

about "it's getting too dark."

A lot of that flak was great flak.

I mean, you had three books within a year, graphic novels,

hit the New York Times bestseller list for the first time ever.

It was a time when the industry was really booming.

The direct market was buying more and more of everything.

Smith: This was an era of rediscovery of comics

with the artist as rock star.

Everything important that was happening in illustration

was happening in comics.

Shooter: It was also Marvel's most financially effective period.

Marvel finally surpassed DC in sales.

I had a piece of Marvel stock, so I was like, "yes! Oh, my god!"

And then suddenly, it was worthless. They were going bankrupt.

Man: The real rumors of a bankruptcy started in the '80s and '90s.

Their characters were doing very, very well,

but there was something wrong at the business end.

Smith: How do you go bankrupt when you have Spider-man?

You know, how do you go bankrupt when you have Captain America?

The guys in charge at that point came to me and said,

"Spider-man will always sell, thus you're expendable.

other people are expendable." And boom.

Bendis: Stan had always, you know, made this picture ...

the bullpen is rockin' and rollin',

and when I showed up at the bullpen, the lights were off

and the filing cabinets were piled up in the corner

and they were selling them for money.

There was a sense like,

"uh-oh. Am I writing the last Marvel comic?"

All it did is help cement the anger I had towards the people

who basically ruined the company that I had loved to work for.

Buckley: If you went into complete bankruptcy,

then the assets would be the pieces that people get paid back with,

so would someone buy Spider-man and not buy the Avengers?

The characters would have survived.

Them surviving together was a different question.

Loeb: You know, it's only when the hero is at his lowest

can he actually become the greatest.

That, to me, is the greatest superhero story of all time.

There was a chance that the lights were gonna go out.

The people at Marvel, however, decided that wasn't the case.

Around the year 2000,

Marvel then hired me to become editor-in-chief.

Bendis: Joe is an artist and, in many ways, a visionary.

Truly, like ... almost like the spiritual embodiment of Stan Lee.

I have a reputation for being eternally optimistic.

Bendis: We love these characters. We love our art form.

And we wanted just to follow Joe into the light.

Joe is the real deal, because he's a businessman

and he's a writer and he's an editor,

but he can also sit down and draw.

Quesada: We had forgotten what got us to where we were.

The goal was to get back to those roots,

to get back to the things that made Marvel great.

The easy part about it was

that somebody had already written the rule book.

Just go back to the time of Stan, Jack, Steve.

Look at what went on here.

Marvel had been Marvel, you know? Creative freedom, fun.

Stan would look out his window and see the real world.

Jack would look out his window and see the real world.

We decided, "you know what? We're gonna write about our world."

Alonso: It was shortly after 9/11,

and one of the most pervasive debates at the time was,

exactly how much of your liberty are you willing to give up

for more safety?

And we decided to tackle that issue head on

in a comic book called Civil War.

Bendis: They gave me Daredevil,

and then, like, the next weekend, called me up and said,

"hey, we're thinking about starting Spider-man over from scratch.

Is that something you might be interested in?"

Some great storytelling was happening at that time.

Man: We were always expanding.

I mean, Stan had started it, but it was always like,

"here's where we are. Where can we go next?"

Man #2: Out of the ashes of the bankruptcy came a company

that was much stronger and more more able to think about itself

as beyond a comic-book-publishing company.

Brevoort: Up until 2004, 2005,

the way movies were made ... Marvel movies ...

were you would option a particular character or a particular title

to some other production company.

You have to give all the credit to Alan Fine.

We always believed

in the tremendous potential of the Marvel brand.

Alan would come to our publishing summits.

We get together about twice a year

with all our key writers and editors and, you know, brainstorm

and talk about what we want to do with the books

- for the next year to 18 months. - Quesada: Alan was fascinated by it.

He thought it was a great way to work as a creative company,

and he thought that maybe this is a good way

to start applying the way that we come up with

not just ideas for comic books but for everything else creatively.

Man: Marvel decided we were gonna take the leap.

We're gonna make our own movies.

Marvel financed their own movie, and the risk they took was "Iron Man."

That's the first movie from Marvel Studios.

Brevoort: Marvel called in everyone they thought

was an expert on the character on some level.

They flew us out to the airplane hangar they

were making "Iron Man" in and they sat with Jon Favreau

and just went through the whole thing.

Buckley: It was our first movie,

so we did not know what it would do at that point.

People doubted us.

Man: You know, you have the headline like,

"Marvel rolls out the 'B' team."

Brevoort: All they have left is the dregs of their catalog.

This is clearly never gonna work out.

Iron Man is, like, a lower-tier Marvel character.

Tony Stark? Who cares?

Loeb: Robert Downey Jr. and "Iron Man" ... in 2008, both were very risky.

Smith: If "Iron Man" don't work, it all may fall apart.

I kept telling people, "you know, watch out."

Marvel had taken its biggest gamble yet

in bringing the story of Tony Stark to the silver screen,

and the big question on everyone's mind was

"would Iron Man fly at the box office?"

Man: At Comic-Con, when they first showed "Iron Man,"

the place erupted in applause.

The buzz traveled outside of the Convention Center, directly online.

Man: I think people knew this was gonna be something big.

Lee: I couldn't believe how wonderful it was.

Shooter: They understood the sensibilities.

They caught the spirit of it.

Here was a representation of Iron Man, and he looked like Iron Man.

All the iconography that you recognize ...

they made it look like it exists in this world.

The character Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr.,

is as iconic as the red and gold armor itself.

It was the right film at the right time.

Brevoort: It was bigger than anybody expected,

bigger, I think, than we expected.

From there, it's just been one success after another.

What we like about Marvel is the idea of the universe.

Green: Kids today are wearing Thor and Cap and Spider-man

out in the open without fear of persecution.

- What it shows you is the draw of Marvel. - They pulled it off.

Maisel: We were fortunate enough, with the success of "Iron Man,"

to have many options. One of those was the sale to Disney.

They instantly put Marvel on a global stage.

It has given us muscle that we've only dreamed of having.

Man: They're storytellers. That's what we do, too.

And that commonality has enabled Marvel to thrive.

Man: We do something that they don't have.

Smith: Disney had princesses galore, but Disney never had a boy thing.

Now, thanks to the Marvel universe,

they can, like, go into the world of superheroes.

Lee: Add Disney to Marvel, you have a company that nobody can beat.

It starts with the comics.

It always has, and I think it always will.

We've just tapped into the female market.

It's exploded in the last couple of years.

I think the female market

is also just really proud to be comic-book fans.

Secret war is a huge event being carried across multiple platforms

with game-changing ramifications.

They can do no wrong, so I'm ready for "Ant-man."

I'm really excited to see the new Avengers.

Loeb: What's going on at Marvel Television ...

we went to Netflix,

and we brought them Daredevil, Jessica Jones,

Iron Fist, Luke Cage ...

what are affectionately referred to in the Marvel universe

as the street-level heroes.

Turning that into "the Defenders" on Netflix ...

like, that's a comic-book fan's dream come true.

Then we have Marvel Animation.

Takes you on an adventure unlike anything else that's out there.

It really allows for your imagination to run wild.

It's just magical.

Of course, "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D."

Gregg: Trying to bring what's magical about Marvel to TV.

We're very excited about what we're starting to do

in this second season.

Man: Hayley Atwell was a tremendous asset that we had,

so we decided to make a television show about Agent Carter.

Atwell: There's a lot of support for Peggy.

There has been since the first Captain America film,

and it's because of the fans' interest in her that I'm standing here.

As for the future, we'll continue to do

what we've been doing for over 75 years ...

to tell good stories about extraordinary people

doing incredible things against enormous odds.

That kind of describes the Marvel story, as well.

We never can stop. Me need to constantly move forward.

- No guts, no glory. - Lee: Everything that they do

brings people entertainment, enjoyment.

Gregg: It's giant, epic, pop-culture mythology that many of

us grew up on and now new people feel like they grew up on.

The Marvel universe conquered the planet.

We're taking you on a roller coaster. That's what Marvel is.

It's easy to imagine that Marvel's future will be as

successful, bright, and rich as its unparalleled history.

And now for what you've all been waiting for.

Here is a sneak preview of never-before-seen-footage

from Marvel's "Agent Carter."

Carter: Where are you headed?

Stark: Some of my babies have already sold overseas.

I'm gonna pay them a visit.

The rest of them are here somewhere, which is where you come in.

Word is one of the nasty ones

is hitting the market in the next day or two.

- What is it? - Just a piece of paper ...

my formula for molecular nitramine.

Technically, we're not even sure it works,

but, well, let's face it ...

I invented it, so it works.

- If that stuff were ever fabricated... - Boom.

This much would level a city block.

- I'm going to regret this, aren't I? - Absolutely.

But when you're not humiliating him,

that fellow up there's my butler, Edwin Jarvis.

I owe you one, pal.

There are only a dozen fences that can handle something this hot.

You just got to learn which one.

And I figured you'd never have any trouble finding a man.

The trick is finding the right one.

Nice to see you, too, Howard.

The next time you approach a woman in a dark alley,

you might introduce yourself.

I shall endeavor to remember that.

provided my concussion isn't too severe.

Should you need me.

- You're new to espionage, aren't you? - Far from it.

Last summer, I caught the cook pocketing the good spoons.

- What now, Miss Carter? - Now I go to work.

Vancamp: Marvel has evolved beyond just a brand

as evidenced by our love for the characters

that not only entertain us ... but live within us.

Thank you for taking this journey with us, and good night.

sync & correction by f1nc0