His parents were Jewish immigrants who had met in the United States after separately moving from their native Vilna, Lithuania, then part of Russian Empire.

[5][6] Circa late 1929, future Archie Comics co-founder Louis Silberkleit, then circulation manager at the magazine distribution company Eastern Distributing Corporation, hired Goodman for his department, assigning him clients that included publisher Hugo Gernsback.

[15] With a hit on his hands, Goodman began assembling an in-house staff, hiring Funnies, Inc. writer-artist Joe Simon as editor, and Timely's first official employee.

[17] In 1941, Timely published its third major character, the patriotic superhero Captain America by Simon and artist Jack Kirby.

With the post-war lessening of interest in superheroes, Goodman established a pattern of directing Lee to follow a variety of genres as the market seemed to trend, such as romance in 1948, horror in 1951, Westerns in 1955 and Kaiju monsters in 1958.

This united a line put out by the same publisher, staff and freelancers through 59 shell companies, from Animirth Comics to Zenith Publications.

[27] Authors that Lion published included such notables as Robert Bloch, David Goodis and Jim Thompson.

In response, Lee and artist Jack Kirby created The Fantastic Four #1 (cover-dated Nov. 1961), giving their superheroes a flawed humanity in which they bickered, worried about money and behaved more like everyday people than noble archetypes.

Lee, Kirby, such artists as Steve Ditko, Don Heck, Dick Ayers, John Romita Sr., Gene Colan, and John Buscema, and eventually writers including Roy Thomas and Archie Goodwin, ushered in a string of hit characters, including Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, Daredevil, and the X-Men.

Goodman remained as publisher[33] until 1972, which included supporting Lee's decision to disregard the Comics Code Authority's disallowance of an anti-drug themed story-arc featured in The Amazing Spider-Man requested by the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which discredited the censor.

Perfect Film & Chemical renamed itself Cadence Industries in 1973, the first of many post-Goodman changes, mergers, and acquisitions that led to what became the 21st-century corporation Marvel Entertainment Group.

As well, there was such ephemera as a one-shot black-and-white "nudie cutie" comic, The Adventures of Pussycat (Oct. 1968), that reprinted some stories of the sexy, tongue-in-cheek secret-agent strip that ran in some of his men's magazines.

[36][37] By the late 1960s, these titles had begun evolving into erotic magazines, with pictorials about dancers and swimsuit models replaced by bikinis and discreet nude shots, with gradually fewer fiction stories.

Another division, Humorama, published digest-sized magazines of girlie cartoons by Ward, Bill Wenzel and Archie Comics great Dan De Carlo, as well as black-and-white photos of pin-up models including Bettie Page, Eve Meyer, stripper Lili St. Cyr and actresses Joi Lansing, Tina Louise, Irish McCalla, Julie Newmar and others.

Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and the American Comic Book Revolution.

Bloomsbury.... worked for Independent News [partly founded by Eastern Distributing founder Paul Sampliner] alongside future [Archie Comics] publishers and rivals John Goldwater and Louis Silberkleit [as well as with] Frank Armer, who helped distribute Harry Donenfeld's Detective Comics.