Quote:
He was simply grinding out whatever his boss (and uncle) told him too.



...and what that uncle was telling him, constantly for twenty years before Marvel finally broke out and began to create something genuinely new, was, I believe, to follow trends, not try to create them.
We're used to thinking of Marvel as the company that changed comics, but we forget that Martin Goodman was not an innovator. Let me repeat that: Martin Goodman was not an innovator, either temprementally or intellectually, as his business practices show.
When other companies had success with a certain genre, whether it was superheroes, or romance comics, or teenage humor, or funny animals, or westerns, or horror that was working for other publishers, his general practice was to test the waters himself, and then if his effort was well received, to cancel a batch of old titles to make room for a bunch of new ones in the new genre, effectively flooding the racks and insuring his own representation by sheer force of numbers.
Marvel still does this, despite no longer having to fight for rack space--it's in the company's genes, I think.

What I think happened in this case was that Goodman saw the halfhearted superhero revivals being tried at other companies--Prize, Ajax-Farrell, ME, etc.--and told Lee to try it himself. When sales were indifferent, he pulled the plug. It's as simple as that. It was all just a bunch of interchangeable ways to try to sell printed paper, we have to remember that.
Wop bop a loo bop, a lop bam boom.
--Little Richard