Big Names In The Comic Book Industry
In order to understand how religion affects the comic book industry, it is also good to know of the biggest names in the comic book indsutry. This list includes writers, critics, analyzers, and companies that are important within the comic book industry.
Marvel Comics
Marvel Comics has been the top dog in comic book publishing recently, with their well received high profile events, strong sales, and popular characters. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has helped bring in new readers and have kept the spotlight on superheroes as a popular medium. Their characters are down to earth and people feel they can relate to them, a form of comic character that Marvel pioneered. Marvel certainly isn't without fault, but has weathered the storm of the comic book world fairly unscathed, making them the top in comic book publishing.
Detective Comics (DC)
Alongside Marvel, DC Comics is the other of the "Big Two" comic book publishers. They have a bevy of super powerful characters, with near godlike powers that were some of the first that comics had to offer. Their trinity of characters - Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman - are some of the most well known and iconic superheroes out there today, making their first cinematic appearance together in 2015's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
DC also has some of the most well-known graphic novels and series of all time. Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Sandman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Fables, Y The Last Man, and many more make up their more mature Vertigo imprint comics. They have really pushed the boundaries in terms of comics for adults with their Vertigo line, with the likes of Watchmen and Sandman frequently considered some of the best comics of all time.
Dark Horse
Dark Horse first became know for their licensed properties - Star Wars, Aliens, Predator, and others. They have also become well known for their creator-owned lines with Hellboy, The Goon, Sin City, Groo, The Umbrella Academy, and more. They have also been a
place for creators to keep their properties going, with Joss Whedon continuing his Buffy series alive through comics.
Dark Horse continues to be a place for creator-owned lines, as well as a place for people looking to further license their properties into new markets. Great Dark Horse comics include Matt Kindt's Mind MGMT, and BPRD, an extension of Mike Mignola's Hellboy universe.
Stan Lee
The greatest comics writer of all time, Stan Lee's career spanned almost the entire history of the medium. Hired by Timely Comics in 1939 as an office boy, Stanley Lieber learned the basics of comics storytelling from then editor Joe Simon and top artist Jack Kirby. When the two quit, young Stanley was placed temporarily in charge. However, as time went on, the position became a permanent one and finding himself busy writing for almost all of the company's many titles, the young editor adopted the pseudonym of Stan Lee. Except for a short break for military service, Lee stayed on the job as editor-in-chief, art director, and head writer through the 1950s and a radical downsizing of the company. Throughout, he honed his writing skills developing an efficient, often tongue-in-cheek style that nevertheless captured the personalities of his subjects.
When the market seemed to bounce back some, he re-hired Jack Kirby and fellow artist Steve Ditko and with them, began turning out a new group of super-heroes who would revolutionize the industry and save Marvel from looming failure.
Roy Thomas
Weaned on golden age comics, Thomas was active in fan publications before breaking into the industry as a professional in 1965. He worked under tyrannical editor Mort Weisinger at DC Comics for about a week before quitting to go to work for Marvel as Stan Lee's understudy. There, he learned the basics of comics scripting and, working with the Marvel method, began taking over from Lee some of the company's top books including Avengers, Daredevil, and X-Men. There, his innate sense of the larger picture compelled him to take the foundation that Lee had established and build upon it, tightening Marvel's continuity into a vast universe of interconnected cogs and wheels.
Otto Binder
Otto Binder was a graduate of the science fiction pulp mill who often wrote in tandem with brother Earl as Eando Binder with the team's greatest claim to fame being their Adam Link stories. Binder followed a third brother, Jack, into the comics field and quickly settled down at Fawcett Comics. There, he wrote for various strips until becoming the main writer for the company's biggest star, Captain Marvel, turning out a body of work full of whimsy and imagination. After writing almost a thousand stories for the Marvel family of titles, Binder moved to DC in 1948 picking up with the Superman family where he left off with Captain Marvel's. He continued to write steadily for decades until retiring from comics in 1969.
Kevin Smith
Kevin owns the comic book store "Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash" in Red Bank, New Jersey. Smith's long-time friend and comic book artist Walt Flanagan manages the store. The store is the center of AMC's reality television program "Comic Book Men" (2012), in which Smith makes appearances in every episode. The show premiered on February 12, 2012 with 6 hour long episodes. The second season will start October 14, 2012, and will contain 16 half-hour episodes. He has also written several comic book series for DC
Comic Book Round Up
ComicBookRoundup.com gathers critic reviews for comic books all in one place and gives an overall rating for each issue based on individual reviewer's scores. ComicBookRoundUp.com visitors can post their own ratings and/or reviews for comics which are taken into account when calculating an issue's overall user rating.
The aim is to give comic book fans one place to go to for reviews and to also find new sources of reviews that they may not have known about before. Every review snippet has a link to the full review on the website the review originated from.