The Curtis (Curtiss) Marvel Magazine Era

When Marvel Stepped Sideways — and Got Dangerous Again

The Curtis Marvel magazines were where Marvel went to get its hands dirty in the 1970s.

Not classy. Not polished. Just thick black ink, restless energy, and the feeling that anything too weird, too rough, or too disreputable for the Comics Code could be smuggled in through the magazine rack.

In the early to mid-70s, Marvel stepped sideways into black-and-white magazines and discovered just how far it could push horror, pulp, and “adult” adventure once the Code wasn’t hovering over every panel. The Curtis (or Curtiss, depending on where you read it) imprint wasn’t about prestige or bookstore respectability; it was about freedom bought with cheap paper, larger page size, and looser rules.

Under the Marvel Magazine Group banner, the Curtis-era line included titles that still define the period for collectors today: Dracula Lives, Tales of the Zombie, Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, Planet of the Apes, and of course The Savage Sword of Conan. These magazines weren’t side projects — they were Marvel experimenting outside the Comics Code, in horror, martial arts, and pulp science fiction.

For a few years, Marvel genuinely felt dangerous again in those pages.

Then the air slowly leaked out of the balloon. Titles were cancelled or folded into others, branding shifted toward the safer Marvel Magazine Group, and only a handful of survivors — most famously The Savage Sword of Conan — limped into the 1980s. There was no dramatic crash. Just a slow peeling away of everything that wasn’t absolutely earning its space on the rack.

What Those Magazines Actually Were

The black-and-white Curtis books lived in a strange borderland. They were distributed through Curtis, often carried a different trade dress than the regular Marvel comics, yet still starred very recognisable faces: Conan, Dracula, assorted Marvel monsters, kung fu heroes, pulp icons, and film licences.

You didn’t find them on the spinner rack with Spider-Man. You found them wedged between horror digests, men’s adventure magazines, and exploitation paperbacks — exactly where they belonged.

The pitch was simple and aggressive for its moment:

skip the Comics Code entirely

talk directly to older teens and adults

lean into horror, violence, and mood

go straight at Warren’s Creepy and Eerie on their own turf

Inside, this wasn’t just marketing spin. Stories ran longer. Layouts breathed more. Artists took full advantage of black-and-white to play with shadow, texture, grime, and silence. These didn’t feel like slightly oversized comics; they felt like cheap, affectionate pulp artefacts, closer to paperbacks or exploitation magazines than to superhero monthlies.

Key Titles — and the Feel of the Line

Strip away the logos and a rough map of the era looks like this:

Savage Tales, The Savage Sword of Conan, Dracula Lives!, Tales of the Zombie, Vampire Tales, Monsters Unleashed, Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, Planet of the Apes, Marvel Preview...

Some books — Savage Sword of Conan in particular — arrived almost fully formed, like they’d been waiting for exactly this format. Others still feel, even now, like experiments that never quite figured out what they wanted to be.

What ties them together is the sense of Marvel looking for a second identity beyond superheroes. Sword-and-sorcery, martial arts, Euro-style horror, pulp adventure, film tie-ins, even a sideways glance at underground comix via Comix Book — it’s all there, rubbing shoulders in the same narrow corner of the newsstand.

Reading across the line today feels less like a curated imprint and more like rifling through a long box full of someone’s very specific 1970s obsessions.

Why the Curtis Line Rose

The timing wasn’t an accident.

The Comics Code was still tight, especially on horror and explicit violence, and magazines were the loophole big enough to drive a barbarian through. If you wanted zombies, decapitations, or genuinely unsettling vampire stories, you were not going to get them in a standard 32-page color comic.

At the same time, Warren had already proven there was a paying audience for black-and-white horror magazines aimed squarely at an older crowd. Marvel hates leaving a market to someone else, and creators were eager for longer page counts, moodier art, and genres — Conan’s world, kung fu, pulp adventure — that simply breathed better in a more generous format.

Add to that the fact that newsstand magazine distribution still looked reasonably healthy in the early 70s, and it made perfect sense for Marvel to imagine the magazine line as a genuine second pillar. For a brief window, you can feel the company believing exactly that.

Why It Faded Without Ever “Crashing”

The end wasn’t a bonfire.
It was a spreadsheet.

Black-and-white magazines were more expensive to put together, and a chunk of the horror titles simply didn’t pull their weight. Around the mid-70s, you can watch the weaker books quietly disappear as the numbers stop justifying the effort.

Layered on top of that were Marvel’s internal headaches of the period — rapid editorial turnover, shifting priorities, and a reflex to protect the core color-comic line first. Horror and kung fu cooled faster as cultural trends than superheroes ever did, and the magazine wing had never been fully woven into Marvel’s day-to-day machinery.

Once the direct market started to matter and color comics offered a clearer path forward, trimming the magazines stopped being a question of if and became a question of how fast. The answer turned out to be: slowly, but steadily.

What Made It Through

By the time the dust settled, only the hardiest organisms were still kicking.

The Savage Sword of Conan is the obvious survivor, carrying the torch well into the next decade. Around it, you get a slimmed-down Marvel Magazine Group presence and the occasional experiment tied to characters or brands Marvel knew would sell.

The message was blunt: the format could live, but only when bolted onto something with undeniable demand and a clearly defined audience.

 Only a few Curtis-era concepts proved durable enough to survive into the 1980s — and Savage Sword of Conan was the clear winner. It wasn’t just popular; it fit the magazine format perfectly.

That’s why early and mid-run issues remain the most liquid part of the Curtis market today.

 

Collector’s Sidebar

Many of the issues listed below appear intermittently on FCL depending on condition and sourcing. Availability changes weekly.

Top 15 Curtis Marvel Issues to Hunt

Check current Curtis-era magazines in stock
https://www.frenchcomicslovers.com/collections/marvel-magazines

Here is a list of selected important titles of the Curtiss magazine line

Savage Tales #1

Savage Tales #2

Savage Sword of Conan #1

Savage Sword of Conan #4

Marvel Comics Super Special #1

Marvel Preview #7

Dracula Lives! #1

Tales of the Zombie #1

Vampire Tales #1

Monsters Unleashed #1

Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #1

Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #19

Planet of the Apes #1 

Marvel Preview #2

Marvel Preview #4

Condition matters more than most collectors expect. Magazine spines, corners, and paper quality are brutally unforgiving.

Browse Marvel magazine-format comics
https://www.frenchcomicslovers.com/collections/marvel-magazines

Read Them. Then Decide.

Seen from today, the Curtis Marvel magazines don’t read like a failed detour. They feel like a necessary pressure valve.

This is Marvel at its most restless — chasing horror, pulp, kung fu, film licences, and a whiff of the underground, sometimes all in the same month. The quality swings wildly, but even the clumsy issues feel honest in a way later, focus-grouped “mature reader” product often doesn’t.

If the Silver Age is Marvel’s mythic text, the Curtis magazines are the tape-traded bootlegs: grainy, over-inked, occasionally out of tune, but absolutely vital if you want to understand how the company grew up — and what it chose to shed on the way.

For FCL readers, they aren’t a side note. They’re a missing chapter — a pocket era where Marvel briefly remembered it could be weird, rough, and a little bit disreputable, and put that feeling right on the magazine rack for anyone curious enough to pull one down

Curtis-era Marvel magazines were never meant to be pristine collectibles. They were meant to be read, folded back, and absorbed.

That’s exactly why strong, honest copies — clean spines, solid covers, intact interiors — matter more than chasing technical perfection.

If you want to experience this era the way it was meant to be experienced:

Marvel Magazines, Horror and Monsters
https://www.frenchcomicslovers.com/collections/marvel-magazines
Includes Conan, horror, Planet of the Apes, kung fu, and oddities when available.

Full checklist of the Curtiss Marvel magazine: https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Curtis_Magazines