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Summary
Summary
The defining, behind-the-scenes chronicle of one of the most extraordinary, beloved, and dominant pop cultural entities in America's history -- Marvel Comics - and the outsized personalities who made Marvel including Martin Goodman, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby.
"Sean Howe's history of Marvel makes a compulsively readable, riotous and heartbreaking version of my favorite story, that of how a bunch of weirdoes changed the world...That it's all true is just frosting on the cake."
--Jonathan Lethem
For the first time, Marvel Comics tells the stories of the men who made Marvel: Martin Goodman, the self-made publisher who forayed into comics after a get-rich-quick tip in 1939, Stan Lee, the energetic editor who would shepherd the company through thick and thin for decades and Jack Kirby, the WWII veteran who would co-create Captain America in 1940 and, twenty years later, developed with Lee the bulk of the company's marquee characters in a three-year frenzy. Incorporating more than one hundred original interviews with those who worked behind the scenes at Marvel over a seventy-year-span, Marvel Comics packs anecdotes and analysis into a gripping narrative of how a small group of people on the cusp of failure created one of the most enduring pop cultural forces in contemporary America.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The comic book publisher that spawned roughly half of Hollywood's summer franchises roils with its own melodrama in this scintillating history. Journalist Howe, editor of Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers, recounts the saga of Stan Lee and the other auteurs who broke the square-jawed-and-earnest mold to create quirky, neurotic, rough-edged superheroes with a Pop Art look, including Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, and the X-Men. Howe's exploration of the vast Marvel fictive universe, with its crazily grandiose plots and thousands of bizarre characters-the psychedelic 1970s birthed Angarr, a hippie supervillain who "blasted people with bad trips and primal screams"-is affectionate and incisive. But he focuses on the battle between the forces of art and commerce at the Marvel offices, where writers, artists, and editors wrestle for control of story arcs, titanic egos clash over copyrights, and creative oddballs confront the heartless, power-mad suits from marketing. Adroitly deploying zillions of interviews, Howe pens a colorful panorama of the comics industry and its tense mix of formulaic hackwork, cutthroat economics and poignant aesthetic pretense. Like comic books, his narrative often goes in circles; the same antagonisms keep churning away on successively grander platforms. Still, Howe paints an indelible portrait of the crass, juvenile, soulful business that captured the world's imagination. Photos. Agent: Daniel Greenberg, Levine Greenberg Literary Agency. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An impeccably researched, authoritative history of Marvel Comics. Former Entertainment Weekly editor Howe (editor: Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!: Writers on Comics, 2004) interviewed more than 150 former Marvel employees, freelancers and family members to weave together a tapestry of creative genius, bad business decisions and petty back-stabbing. Progenitors of Spider-Man, the Avengers and the X-Men, Marvel's rocky road to merchandising success is as epic as any of the company's four-color adventures. Howe pulls no punches as he details the fledgling enterprise's slow rise from Timely Publications in 1939 to its official emergence as Marvel Comics in 1961, when the groundbreaking brilliance of writer Stan Lee and artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko led to the creation of the company's most iconic characters. In an era before movie-making technology facilitated lucrative cross-merchandising, however, Marvel struggled financially while its editors massaged the bruised egos of freelancers who poured their lifeblood into creations in which they didn't retain an ownership stake. Kirby, bitter over what he perceived as Lee's efforts to take undue credit for his stories, ultimately left, becoming a rallying point in the struggle for the rights and compensation of writers and artists. Lee relocated to Hollywood in an effort to bring Marvel's characters to the big screen, a frustrating endeavor that would take decades and a procession of other individuals to come to fruition. Compared to the thorough account of Marvel's formative years, Howe gives relatively short shrift to recent corporate machinations--including only a brief mention of Disney's $4 billion purchase of Marvel in 2009--and the work of current superstars, but that's a minor quibble in what is otherwise a nuanced and engrossing narrative of a company whose story deserves its own blockbuster film. Brilliantly juxtaposes Marvel with its best characters: flawed and imperfect, but capable of achieving miraculous feats.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Howe's in-depth account of Marvel's business history, revered personalities, and pop-culturally ingrained characters boasts exhaustively researched and intricately integrated information. And loads of it, as this isn't just one story it's a bunch of knotted tales strung together. It's Stan Lee and Jack Kirby creating a pantheon of modern American superheroes. It's the rote staff changes and personnel quirks that made Marvel the company it was. It's the siren call of Hollywood cash that made it the company it is today. It's a look at the American comic-book industry as a whole over the last half-century. It's a priceless collection of anecdotes about the artists and writers reflecting and filtering the eras they worked in. The most timely strand threads through issues of creators' rights and intellectual property, an argument that's heating up today's comics climate. Casual fans may find more than they bargained for, but for the Marvel faithful, this is the definitive book on the company responsible for aligning the cosmos in their favorite fictional universe.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EVEN if you didn't grow up making a beeline for the local emporium on New Comic Book Day - also known as Wednesday in most places - odds are Marvel Comics has entered your consciousness recently. This year alone, a film about one Marvel superhero team, "The Avengers," smashed a box-office record and made more than $207 million on its opening weekend. The glossy August issue of Marvel's "Astonishing X-Men" showcased the same-sex wedding of the hero Northstar and his boyfriend. And soon a free-to-play online video game, Marvel Heroes, will allow players to virtually stomp the bad guys as Spider-Man, Iron Man, Wolverine, Captain America and scores of other classic characters. That's the modern Marvel. But for those who remember the smudgy days of bright ink on cheap paper, of Captain America belting Hitler right in the chops and Spider-Man spouting the sentiments of Ayn Rand, Sean Howe has collected the history with a fanboy's dedication to continuity and detail. As with every two-bit, four-color superhuman donning tights to fight crime, there's an origin tale, and "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" lays it out. Howe, a former editor at Entertainment Weekly, draws on interviews with more than 150 people who worked at or were associated with Marvel over the past 73 years to chronicle a scrappy company whose artists and writers waged battles against supervillains, social ills and (perhaps most insidious of all) corporate marketing departments. Howe begins the book with Marvel's best-known employees: the writer and editor Stan Lee, and the artist Jack Kirby. Both enter the story around 1940 - back when Marvel was still known as Timely Comics - with Lee promoted from office boy to snappy editor, and Kirby cranking out his trademark brawny characters and dynamic page layouts. (Kirby, who died in 1994, had a profound effect on many young comics fans, including Michael Chabon, who acknowledged a "deep debt I owe in this and everything else I've ever written to the work of the late Jack Kirby, the King of Comics" in the author's note in his 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.") It's after World War II - and a 1954 Senate subcommittee hearing on comic books and juvenile delinquency - that Marvel's story really takes off. In 1961, Lee and Kirby collaborated on the first issue of "The Fantastic Four," which introduced a squabbling team of superheroes (Mister Fantastic, Invisible Girl, the Human Torch and the Thing) who combated internal dysfunction while fighting the Mole Man, a partly blind supervillain with a penchant for sinking cities and blowing up power plants. Compared with the earnest Justice League of America, the DC Comics team that included Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman among others, the Fantastic Four were deeply relatable. They were imperfect co-workers who skipped the masks, crabbed at one another and got the job done. After years of pulpy plots and three-headed monsters, Lee and Kirby had pulled off the comics equivalent of the literary shift from Victorian melodrama to Chekhovian realism. "For the first time in years, it looked like Marvel had something special on its hands," Howe writes. (Besides, the noble but boring Superman was no match in charisma for the Thing, an animated pile of orange rocks known to holler, "It's clobberin' time!" before battle.) Once Marvel found its mojo in the early 1960s, Spider-Man, the X-Men and its other familiar characters begin popping up in Howe's timeline, all products of the Marvel "Bullpen" of writers and artists. Its close rival DC had more money and better-known characters, but Marvel, the gutsy underdog, was the first "to evoke, even metaphorically, the Real World," The Village Voice observed. Marvel's attempts at diversification in the late 1960s and early 1970s - both in its characters and its media formats - are where the book gets particularly intriguing. Superhero comics have stereotypically been a pale man-boy's world in both creation and readership. Initial efforts to develop a broader range of characters came off as cynical and clumsy: a black hero named the Coal Tiger, a kung fu expert and son of Fu Manchu named Shang-Chi and a series of cringeworthy, female-driven books with titles like "Night Nurse" and "Shanna the She-Devil." (The cranky character of Wolverine, born in Alberta and created to "exploit the Canadian market," has lasted a bit longer.) "The X-Men," another Lee and Kirby invention that first appeared in 1963, eventually gave Marvel an excellent platform for exploring social issues and making its readership more inclusive. By 1981, Howe writes, "the shocking revelation that the X-Men's silver-haired archenemy had been a child prisoner at Auschwitz ramped up the title's long-present themes of bigotry and persecution and pointed to the direction that 'The X-Men' would take for the decades to come, in which discrimination toward mutant characters was put explicitly in the contexts of racism and homophobia." Magneto, the aforementioned silverhaired archenemy, was ultimately portrayed by Ian Mc Kellen in the 2000 film "The X-Men," which brought the Marvel Universe successfully to the big screen on the eve of the 21st century. While Marvel movies have made more than $5 billion over the past dozen years in the United States alone, Howe reveals that it has been a long and arduous journey for the comics to achieve mass popularity in the moving pictures. Early flops included cheap cartoons like "Fred and Barney Meet the Thing," low-budget TV shows (although in defense of the 1970s and '80s "Incredible Hulk," Bill Bixby was very good as the tortured Dr. Banner) and failed attempts to turn Spider-Man into a musical. Theatrical intentions for the webslinger were in the works long before the Broadway curtain officially went up in 2011 for the injury-plagued "Spider-Man: Call an Ambulance," er, "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark." For a book about a visual medium, " Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" frustratingly lacks illustrations for reference or nostalgia. A quick Web search, however, finds a companion image blog crammed with art at seanhowe.tumblr.com. To the scholar of the Marvel canon, familiar names (Steve Ditko, Jim Steranko, Marv Wolfman, John Byrne, Chris Claremont) pop up regularly and fill in the back story of Marvel's long ride. To the casual reader hoping for Robert Downey Jr.'s quips on the set of "Iron Man 3," Howe's great big book of Marvel history may prove dense and overwhelming. "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" itself is an epic crossover story. Narrative crossover - a technique Marvel began to seriously explore in the 1960s - is "the idea that these characters shared a world, that the actions of each had repercussions on the others, and that each comic was merely a thread of one Marvel-wide mega-story," Howe writes. He's referring to the likes of Ant-Man and the Wasp, but as this colorful history demonstrates, he might also have been describing those other "partners-in-peril": Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and the rest of the Merry Marvel Bullpen. Marvel pulled off the comics equivalent of the literary shift from Victorian melodrama to Chekhovian realism. J. D. Biersdorfer is the production editor of the Book Review.
Choice Review
Howe's study helps plug a huge gap in comics research--the shortage of critical appraisals of the industry. He avoids boring statistical analyses, must-be-there scholarly theory, and nondecipherable terminology, and provides a flowing narrative that intermingles the plots and characters of its comic book stories with the often unscrupulous machinations of the Marvel corporation and the disgruntlement prevalent among many of its staff. The picture Howe paints of Marvel is anything but flattering; throughout, he quotes editors, artists, and writers who call Marvel a place of stressful and broken lives, legal entanglements, firings, rude and disrespectful behavior, sabotage, betrayal, and shady deals. Sources relate how Marvel comic books transitioned into commodities for speculating investors, emphasizing quantity over quality, collectors' editions based on image rather than substance (e.g., 3-D hologram-enhanced covers), complicated storylines, overpopulation of characters, and tie-ins to movies, trading cards, and other merchandise. Howe shows the benefactors to be the owners and top management. Research for this book was exhaustive, relying on personal recollections of more than 150 Marvel-related personnel and the perusal of many comics periodicals and documents. The result is a significant contribution to both scholarship and fandom. Now, for a similar treatment of DC comics. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty, practitioners, and general readers. J. A. Lent independent scholar
Library Journal Review
In this revealing, legend-skewering tome, former Entertainment Weekly editor Howe provides a behind-the-scenes history of Marvel, from its 1939 origin, when pulp magazine publisher Martin Goodman accepted a proposal to enter the burgeoning superhero comics market, to the present, when many of the company's characters are known worldwide. Delving into Marvel's inner business and editorial workings, Howe presents a parade of famed creators and creations from Jack Kirby and Captain America onward, but also devotes much space to controversy: a parallel parade of shattered loyalties, abandoned veterans, disastrous business deals, compromised creativity, and a work-for-hire business model that often meant authors and illustrators were not rewarded their ideas as well as many expected. VERDICT Howe's extensive research gives the book much detail that will fascinate comics fans, while his fast-paced, anecdotal style and business-world focus will expand his audience to general readers. There are some organizational problems and questionable statements; exact dates are often unclear; and Howe manages to misquote the most famous line in all of superhero comics. But this engaging history is recommended.-S.R. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.