Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

At first I was a little skeptical about the subtitle of Sean Howe’s 2012 book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. I grew up reading Marvel Comics and have read other books on the company’s history. After finishing Howe’s version, however, I’m happy to report that his investigative journalism into Marvel’s past is quite impressive, and the book makes for a truly fascinating read.For the first couple chapters, I wasn’t so sure. In Chapter 1 Howe covers the entire history of Marvel, formerly known as Timely Comics, up through the 1950s. That’s the entire Golden Age in less than 30 pages! Howe isn’t really concerned, however, with the myriad genres that Timely used to publish—western, horror, romance, funny animals, and so on. This is really a history of what Marvel is most famous for—the superheroes, beginning with the Silver Age pantheon created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and in some cases, Steve Ditko. Chapter 2 covers the birth of the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, the Avengers, X-Men, and Spider-Man. Howe’s recaps of origin stories and mythologies get a little long-winded, leaving one to wonder when the “untold story” is going to begin.From that point on, however, the book really hits its stride and becomes incredibly addictive, with vivid details and surprising revelations on every page. This isn’t a literary history of Marvel’s creative glories, but rather a true business history, replete with mergers, acquisitions, and struggles for administrative power. I’ll confess some of the financial and legal details were over my head, and at times, I could have used a little less detail. Over the course of superhero comics history, writers and artists continually defected from Marvel to DC and back again, and Howe keeps you apprised of each and every arrival and departure. Nevertheless, it’s better to commit sins of excess than omission, and Howe’s thorough, behind-the-scenes exposé of life inside the Marvel bullpen is probably the next-best thing to working there.Though written in the third person, the book has the feel of an oral history, likely because Howe interviewed about 150 former Marvel employees. Howe lets all sides get their two cents in without passing judgment. The long-fought battle between Lee and Kirby over creative ownership of certain characters, for example, is handled in a fairly balanced manner. Howe diligently follows the trail of rancor, and neither party comes out smelling like a rose. Stan the Man comes across as somewhat pathetically clueless, while King Kirby is depicted as taking his justifiable grievances to delusional excess. In general, Howe subtly favors individual creators over big business, but he always presents both sides of an argument.Though Howe celebrates the company’s creative triumphs, his overall picture of the Marvel empire is rather unflattering. As he charts the trajectory of the publisher through boom and bust periods, he makes it pretty clear that over time the company has sacrificed creative quality in favor of commercialism, diluting the integrity of its treasured characters for a quick buck. As one of the many fans Marvel lost in the ‘90s, I have a tendency to agree with him, which is perhaps why I enjoyed the book so much. There are other good books on Marvel history out there, like the self-congratulatory Marvel Chronicle: A Year by Year History or Mark Evanier’s excellent biography Kirby: King of Comics, but if you’re looking for one book that’s going to give you the clearest, most complete picture of the Marvel story, this is it.

As a longtime comics fan with an interest in comics history, I found this book a good read, worth the purchasing and reading, but not the last word on the subject. The strongest element is the coverage of Marvel history from the 1970's through the 90's. The accounting of the pre-Fantastic Four period 1939 through 1961 is relatively thin, perhaps because of the lack of primary sources still around, and/or because most of the material produced by Timely/Atlas/Marvel during the early period was not of much current fan interest (except for a hard core of collector aficionados). During that first couple of decades, the policy of publisher Martin Goodman was to see what was selling for other comics publishers and jump on the bandwagon-- first superheroes, then horror, crime, romance, teen humor, etc.-- with competently produced but often uninspired knockoffs. Indeed, "Fantastic Four" itself was another knockoff, a jump back onto the superhero bandwagon started by DC, except that Stan Lee (by his own admission pretty much a hack writer up until then) and Jack Kirby decided to try doing superheroes in a different way.The story of Marvel's "Silver Age" glory days from FF #1 through about 1971 is a many-times-told tale. It is told here competently but with a bit of a "you had to be there" feel... if you didn't already know what the early stories of the FF, Spider-Man and the rest were like, and how they were different from what DC and other publishers were producing at the time, you might not get a clear idea from this book. And even though this is not a history of DC comics, the book might have gained from looking further at how the rise of Marvel was a response to a previous resurgence at DC, and how Marvel in turn influenced-- and was influenced by-- DC. (By the 1970's and beyond, writers, artists and editors were all jumping back and forth between the two companies, and DC's handling of its classic characters was thoroughly "Marvelized"..which I'm not saying was a bad thing.)As I said, the freshest information in the book for me was the look at behind-the-scenes goings-on at Marvel during the 1970's, when the wave of fans turned creators that started with Roy Thomas took over the store... a development that definitely had its up and down sides. Again, here, the author is maybe a bit thin of descriptions of the actual comics being produced and their significance.A comment of my own not so much about the book as some previous reviews... as a reader of the comics, I'll defend Stan Lee from charges that he was a mere hack stealing credit from Kirby, Ditko and others. Looking at the comics produced during those few years of the 60's-- and comparing them to the comics produced by Kirby and Ditko before and after that period, on their own or with other collaborators-- it seems clear to me that for a while there was a genuine synergy between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and between Lee and Ditko, enabling them to produce work that was "more than the sum of its parts".From the standpoint of a reader, again, I'll make somewhat of a defense of the infamous Jim Shooter. He may not have been a fun guy to work for, but I've always liked Shooter's own writing, and from my reader's standpoint, when Shooter became Marvel editor-in-chief, the effect, at least at first, was to "get the trains running on time" without snuffing out creativity. The Marvel Comics produced under Shooter's early editorship, I thought at the time and still do, were part of a kind of "Third Golden Age" of the late 70's through mid '80's... along with comics produced by DC and by the burgeoning independent publishers of the time. (I'd like to see a good overall history concentrating on this period of the 1980's.)

OK

Great purchase, I have received it sooner than I expected and it's in perfect condition. Thanks and we will do business.

Lots of interesting detail on the comic book industry. A lot of information on Stan Lee and what others thought of him, especially Jack Kirby. Also lets you know who was responsible for the creation of many marvel characters.

Sean Howe schafft es, Unterhaltung mit Information zu mischen. Ein Buch, das sich flüssig liest und viele Insider Infos liefert. Für mich war vor allem die Geschichte der 90er besonders interessant, da hier unheimlich viel hinter den Kulissen gelaufen ist, was die Comics schlechter und schlechter machte. Es war auch die Zeit, als ich selbst mit dem US-Comic sammeln angefangen habe. Viele der redaktionellen Entscheidungen damals waren schlichtweg Wahnsinn, ihr Hintergrund wird hier nun aber aufgeklärt.Toll ist, daß Howe auch jenseits von Lee und Kirby den Werdegang vieler Autoren und Zeichner mit verfolgt, auch wenn auf den beiden Gründervätern natürlich besonderer Fokus gelegt wird. Fast schon tragisch ist es, in diesem Buch mitzuerleben, wie sich die beiden zunehmend entfremdeten und am Ende Lee sich kaum traute, auf Kirbys Beerdigung zu erscheinen. Sehr eindrücklich war für mich auch die Schilderung eines Radiointerviews mit Lee, in das Kirby sich einklinkte und das quasi das letzte Mal war, daß die beiden miteinander redeten.Einzelschicksale und der Lauf der Comicgeschichte bekommen in diesem Buch beide genügend Raum. Das Englisch ist problemlos lesbar (bei mir hakts immer nur bei Finanzthemen, aber das interessiert mich auch am wenigsten) und am Ende war ich traurig, daß die Erzählung - denn das ist es eigentlich, was Howe tut, er erzählt das Märchen von Marvel - zuende ist. Gott sie Dank geht die Geschichte aber ja noch weiter!

At 437 illustration-free pages, and between hard covers, I'm grateful I had the holiday haitus to read it in, its bulk might have ruled it out as a travel read (it would have easily tipped me over Ryanair's hand-baggage allowance).I'd love to recommend it to everyone, and being a proper book rather than something on a Kindle I can happily lend it to my friends who want a gander, but I'm not sure who would be as interested as me in what is, to a very great extent, a 400 page fanzine article.That's not to say it's not well-written. It is very well written, and exhaustively so, listing hundreds of interviewees and people who've helped with research. It is expertly structured, drawing the reader through a narrative that remains compelling even through its hardest-to-follow events.But those events are the 60-odd year history of Marvel comics. And who's interested in that?Well, I am. And as I say I am unsure who else would be whose life had not been so influenced and intertwined with Marvel's. I read the comics as a child, and was one of a privileged generation of British kids in the 70s and 80s who were able to read reprints of the earliest Marvel classics from the 60s in weekly pocket-money comics at the same time as being able to buy the most exciting of the brand new comics fresh from the States. I then found myself writing and drawing for fanzines in the 80s as Marvel and the whole comic business went through an explosion of popularity and a creative revolution. And to top it all, in the 1990s, I wound up writing and drawing for Marvel comics, answering directly to the House Of Ideas in New York city.And for most of this time I'd had a vague idea of what went on behind the scenes. In the 80s we read about the raw deal that had been given to the creators of these star characters, we knew Jack Kirby got nothing for being co-creator of everyone from the Fantastic Four & The Hulk to the Avengers & The X-Men, and that Steve Ditko was similarly hard done-by over Spider-Man. And in the 90s I knew, first hand, that the comics business was prone to ups and downs when I was on the wrong side of Marvel's filing for bankruptcy and was one of the two-thirds of the company's employees who found themselves suddenly out of work.Now this book spells out in excruciating detail what went on behind the scenes. Great parts of the book are romantic and inspiring and make me want to rush to my desk and draw comics. (Indeed, when just one chapter into the book, I did just that and drafted half a dozen pages to a graphic novel/film proposal that I'd plotted a year ago). The story of how Stan Lee & Jack Kirby had gone from the highs of the wartime Captain America comics to the lows of the McCarthy era when, in the late 50s, Stan is given the job of firing most of the staff as the comics industry teeters on the brink of collapse, only for their little-noticed back-room not-quite-superhero comic The Fantastic Four to begin a renaissance in comics that no-one could have imagined, is a legend that deserves telling well and gets just treatment here.The creative highs and lows and the struggle between the various waves of idealistic storytellers and money-minded executives is something that will come as no surprise to anyone who's read histories of any creative industry from the music business to Hollywood. And by the time we get to the 1970s, this book may start to shake off the attention of anyone who wasn't there at the time. But to someone who was a reader, as I was, it is a genuine revelation to me just what was going on behind the scenes. I guess, were this about about a car manufacturer or a chain of grocery stores, it would have no more nor less in the way of action and incident - and apart from a shocking number of people dying young, through stress or unhealthy lifestyle, this book is not full of events that would pass muster on even the dullest of soaps - but because it involves names I know well, comics that were the centre of my life, and a good few people I've subsequently met and worked with, it is riveting. I know things about, and have read stories from Jim Shooter, Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas, Sol Brodsky, Joe Quesada, Martin Goodman, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Steve Gerber, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Todd Macfarlane, Grant Morrison and dozens more that I didn't know before and that I'm glad I do now.As I think back over it to pick out anecdotes worth repeating, I'm finding myself thinking that no-one else might much care what Jack said to Stan on a radio phone-in in the 80s, or what bizarre suggestions various editors-in-chief made to writers over the years, or how come Vince Colletta ended up inking so many comic strips despite being the fans' least favourite. And I'm amazed at myself when the book gets to the corporate buyouts of the 1990s and what began as a story of bright young creators bustling with ideas that excited a generation turns into an arcane Financial Times article about leverages, buyouts and takeovers, and I'm still reading and enjoying it.See if you imagine this sentence coming from an interesting book: "Perelman's various holding groups... filed for Chapter 11 protection in Wilmington Delaware: Mafco Holdings, which owned MacAndrews & Forbes, which owned Andrews Group, which owned Marvel III Holdings, which owned Marvel Parent Holdings, which owned Marvel Entertainment Group and Marvel Holdings." Well it does. Though I will concede it's not the book's most interesting sentence.I feel proud to be part of Marvel's history. Not that I'm mentioned in the book or anything. But in the book we find Stan Lee in the late 60s asking colleagues "Why would you want to get into the comic book business?... the most you can say for the creative person in the business is that he's serving an apprenticeship to enter a better field". And ten years later we have Gerry Conway saying the same thing to fans at a con. Well now I say stuff like that to the kids I teach. And luckily, just like it did back then, it just makes them want to get into comics all the more. Comics are funny that way.Congratulations to Sean Howe for dedicating himself to writing this book. I hope he will find a host of readers as satisfied by it as I am.