Running for 13 issues (cover-dated Aug. 1967 to May 1969), it included among its contributors such notable writers and artists as Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Gene Colan, Bill Everett, John and Marie Severin, and Roy Thomas.
Its mascot, Forbush Man, introduced in the first issue, was a superhero wannabe with no superpowers and a costume of red long johns emblazoned with the letter "F" and a cooking pot, with eye-holes, covering his never-revealed head.
His secret identity was eventually revealed in issue #5 (Dec. 1967) as Irving Forbush, Marvel's fictitious office gofer.
[2] Editors Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich pitched a comics series that would poke fun of other companies' characters, but Stan Lee decided that it should focus its satiric lens on Marvel's own output.
Strange) in a West Side Story pastiche; "The Origin of...Stuporman", a Superman takeoff recalling Wally Wood's influential "Superduperman" in Mad #4 (May 1952); the Ecchs-Men in "If Magneat-O Should Clobber Us", parodying not only the X-Men and Magneto, but also the high melodrama of 1960s Marvel titles; and Marvel characters visually standing-in for the baseball-player protagonists of the otherwise faithfully rendered famous poem "Casey at the Bat".
Fury and His Howling Commandos, and cartoonist and Marvel production manager John Verpoorten contributed a Marvel-character version of the Beatles' Sgt.
Robert Crumb's album cover art for Big Brother and the Holding Company was parodied by Herb Trimpe.
[1] Radio and TV personality Paul Gambaccini said that he coined the term "Brand Echh" in his letter published in The Amazing Spider-Man #7 (Dec.