Introduction

From starting out in producing a comic strip for a New York newspaper, Stan Lee birthed Marvel. Challenged by future head and creator of DC comics, Stan Lee found the drive to produce his own band of superheroes who had their own excursions and events. 

The development of the brand which developed from comic books soon spiralled toward visual aspects such as television programmes, first generation games for now least common platforms such as gameboy colour and gamecube, before breaking into the film industry and slowly gathering a larger following and popularity. 

Accessed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy

Marvel is all focused on participation of the fanbase which is very important in terms of distirubtion, "hype", and involvement of fans. The following has significantly grown from a niche market surrounding the comics to the multimillion blockbuster films you seen today with a few links between that helped the development process. 

As a brand, Marvel has learnt to diversify, not just to create a wider audience and following, but to produce a lot of different texts to meet the needs and interests of the audience and to peak their interest. This has been significantly developed as the popularity has grown and stretched from Newspaper readers, to younger kids and beyond. 

My case study looks into the need to have role models in an imperfect society and the popularity within this, as well as the need to participate with the texts and give their input and take through fan websites. I've looked into the variety of cross platform texts that have been made available to fans as well as how these have grown the fanbase, showing the success in the process of creating various texts for various platforms to appeal to as many types of people as possible, in the US, UK and worldwide.