I’ve read in several places that Stan Lee, in the early days of Marvel Comics, didn’t want to call his premier criminal organization the Mafia. So he changed it to “Maggia.”
Why? Was there a real danger of his waking up with a horse head in his bed if he used the normal name?
Probably the best answer is that if you call something by a fictional name you don’t need to worry about what happens in real life. You’re free to make up your own rules and situations.
Ed McBain did much the same thing in his 87th Precinct mysteries. They’re obviously set in Manhattan, but he called it Isola so that he didn’t have to keep abreast of procedural changes in the New York Police Department.
But what really makes no sense is when you change a name that’s already fictional even when you have movie rights to the original text. For no intelligible reason, Ralph Bakshi changed the name of Saruman to Aruman. 
Moved to CS.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
He did? I don’t remember that. The IMDb doesn’t agree either.
Yeah, but it’s the Bakshi Lord of the Rings. Complaining about a name change in that is like being in New Orleans during Katrina and complaining that the Superdome leaks. It’s the least of your worries…
Marvel, DC and Charlton Comics were all backed with mob money (Charlton more than the other two). The reason Vinnie Colletta got so much work from Marvel and DC in the 70s was that he was working off a gambling debt to mobsters. If your company is part-owned by Shriners, it’s a good idea not to have lots of villains who wear burgundy-red fezzes.
I don’t have a precise cite for this, although it was mentioned in passing in several Comic Book Artist articles and interviews.
Recent Marvel comics mention Maggia and Mafia as separate organizations; the Maggia has scientific expertise and ties to Hydra. The Mafia is what Frank Castle mostly tangles with in recent years.
Are you serious? Bet the guys in pinstripes got a kick out of being called “cowardly and superstitious” then. :eek:
< Ahem. >
:rolleyes:
From one of the longest, most detailed movie reviews ever written to savage an inferior flick:
http://flyingmoose.org/tolksarc/bakshi/bakshi.htm
Uh, I think Krokodil would have been better served to sprinkle a few “allegedies” in there, but it’s not exactly a secret. Mobsters were interested in comics distribution as a front for distribution of hooch (and birth control and skin mags). The comics industry was created largely as a marriage of convenience between a bunch of gangsters and pornographers. Comics writer Gerard Jones treats this in his new book “Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book.” (I haven’t read it yet.) The mobsters also had plenty of legitimate assets (warehouses, trucks, etc.) that they acquired for their black market trade but which could also be used for comics, and a legit business would allow they to stay out of the sights of the IRS while still being able to depreciate the stuff. It also seems too much a coincidence that the congressional hearings that led to the end of EC Comics and the development of the Comics Code were led by Estes Kefauver, who made his bones fighting the mob. There are also rumors that the mobsters used the paper in comics as a front for owning large non-timber producing forests that they used for mash, but I take from interviews that Jones couldn’t corroborate that.
It does seem ironic that the mafia bankrolled a medium that was concentrated almost exclusively on showing heroes beating up mobsters, at least before and after the War. But ultimately, I don’t think they cared about anything but the money comics brought in and the ways they could be used to front the black market.
–Cliffy
And, of course, places like “Metropolis”, “Gotham City”, and “Central City” aren’t based on New York at all. No no no no.
Bosda: what was that eye roll for?
It’s not quite a rumor:
From his review of MEN OF TOMORROW: Geeks, Gangsters And The Birth Of The Comic Book (Basic Books; New York, 2004).
But, per the book, most mobsters were out if the industry by the '50s (IIRC).
I suspect it was one of those stupid Comics Code rules that were used to mess with EC Comics* like the “No zombies, vampires, werewolves, (witches?)” rule that made Marvel call the walking dead “zuvembies” for a year or two when they were first introduced to the Marvel Universe in the early '70s.
Other rules were "Can’t have “Weird”, “Shock”, “Terror”, or “Horror” in the titles (again,IIRC) which pretty much took out EC’s whole line.
Given that, and given how many of the EC Shocksuspenstories/CrimeSuspenstories (and even moreso their competitor’s lamer imitations) dealt with “the mob”, I’ve always thought (and vaguely recall someone saying) that there was a “No depiction of organized crime” clause. Note that I’ve never seen a cite for it.
The eye roll was ’cause I don’t believe it.
I been a comics fans since 74, and this is the first I’ve heard of this, the first & only hint of this, that I’ve ever encountered.
I suspect that this book was written for sensationalism, rather than truth. One or two guys with shady connctions buy a partial share in a New York based comics firm, and the whole industry is “mobbed up”. :smack:
A great many firms in major cities have (allegedly) had “silent partners” at various times, and these relationships tended to be temporary.
As for the timber thing, I doubt that there’s a connection. Timber was certainly used to smuggle booze into the country, but so were barrels, crates, & even a line & pump arrangement crossing the bottom of the Detroit River. Creating a paper mill industry & buying up groves of trees is just stupid, and unnecessary. There was an ample timber industry in Canada anyway, & the raw lumber could be bought with much less fuss. And they didn’t need to hide the stuff in Canada–it was legal there. So that whole section of the story doesn’t ring true.
“Why not just give Gandalf a chainsaw and be done with it?” That is some funny shit.