Plot Summary
Marvel Comics: The Untold Story offers a chronological look at the history of the multibillion-dollar comics company and an inside look at the people who created the characters America has grown to love. The book is based on more than 100 interviews with writers, artists and others from inside Marvel. It follows the company from the beginning, through Hollywood blockbusters and big screen bombs, and even through the collapse of the comic book market. It turns out Marvel was begin as a get-rich-quick scheme in 1939, and has grown in the decades since from an unknown underdog to a huge corporation.
This book is really about the editors, artists and writers who made up the Marvel team over the years, often called the Marvel Bullpen. It pits the creative minds against the corporate leadership that tried to control them, arguing for credit and control. Most of the creative team was low-paid, and got little credit for creating Spider-Man, Iron Man, Wolverine, Captain America and many other household names for generations of comics fans.
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are just two of the members of the Bullpen who are profiled. Lee led the Marvel team for decades, proving to be a steadfast leader and a competent writer and editor in the best and the worst years of Marvel’s history. A less well-known name today, Kirby was one of the company’s most prolific creative minds. He created Captain America in 1940, fought in World War II, and then returned to create most of Marvel’s marquee characters over a three-year period in the 1960s.
Author Sean Howe has written about the entertainment industry for Spin, the Village Voice, New York and the Los Angeles Times. He previously served as an editor at Entertainment Weekly. Marvel Comics, published in 2012, is his first book.
“Very interesting. I collected (mostly Marvel) comic books regularly from 1979 through 1982 or so. I started with The Hulk and The Thing (Marvel Two-In-One) but eventually became obsessed with X-Men starting with #132 (The cover shows Sebastian Shaw tossing Storm on a pile of defeated X-Men). I had found myself in the middle of the Dark Phoenix saga! I saved up money to buy back issues to get the whole story. This book shows how the talent flowed back and forth between Marvel and DC, as writers and artists got pissed off at their editors or each other and jumped ship, and how certain trends affected the industry, such as multiple collectible covers, huge price hikes, toy tie-ins, crossovers, deaths of major characters, returning to the basics, etc. It’s too bad comic books are so expensive now, but it’s great that decent movies are now being made from comic book source material. I can’t wait for Days of Future Past!”
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Brian (4 out of 5 stars)
Publisher 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.
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