Imagine a present day in which old comic books and superheroes are of interest only to a coterie of geeky, aging fanatics. Where the names Tom Mix and Captain America are equally remote (just like 97% of everything Martin Goodman ever published). Those of us who are among the geeky fanatics might regard him as the man who made many artists’ visions possible – the non-artistic enabler of the forgotten art and mythology of comic books. If he’d ended up as a middle-class retiree in Florida, coming out to comic book conventions to swap stories with Jack Kirby, we might think of Martin Goodman as a quirky, square, accidental hero. A guy who built a family business that enabled Captain America to exist, that enabled the early shop work of Bill Everett and Carl Burgos to get an airing through a major newsstand publisher, and who had the good sense to allow Stan Lee to do what he did in the Sixties.

Instead, we know him as the first person to refuse Marvel comic book creators a share of the accumulating value of their creations. As he always had, he regarded the properties he’d bought as his own, and then he sold all the important ones for less than the value of Ant Man. From the lofty perch of 2014 parent company Disney, Martin Goodman was as clueless as Jack Kirby.