The Broadest Sense of Marvel Comics

This is a stylistic note for The Comma Splice.

I often write about Marvel Comics, that being the publishing company that released Marvel Comics #1 in 1939, and Captain America Comics #1 in 1941, and Strange Tales from the early '50s to the late '60s, and Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962, and The Fantastic Four from 1961 on, and, and, and...

The company wasn't always called Marvel Comics. Publisher Martin Goodman, related by marriage to its longest-lasting editor-in-chief Stan Lee, was a bit of a shifty character, with a bewildering array of corporations in his portfolio. The name in the small print could have been Timely Comics, or Atlas Magazines, or Magazine Management Co. Inc., or Zenith Publishing Corp.

In biology they have the Latin term sensu lato, meaning "in the broadest sense." When I worked in biotech, our publications on the bacterium that causes Lyme disease referred to Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato, because much like the situation with Marvel Comics there are a bunch of other bacteria broadly similar to B. burgdorferi that can cause Lyme, and it's not always totally obvious what the differences between them are. And so, much like with Marvel Comics, it makes sense to just refer to the most famous one while making a sort of expansive gesture at the others.

If I'm writing about a predecessor of Marvel Comics on this site, unless there's a specific reason to use Timely or Atlas or whatever, I'm just going to call it Marvel Comics and add a link to this page on first use.

The same goes for the predecessors of DC Comics, whose names over the years are less bewildering but still include All-American Publications and Detective Comics, Inc., and National Periodicals. Maybe there will be some future post that makes it important or less confusing to call out one of these forerunners by name, but otherwise as far as we're concerned it's all simply DC Comics.