Title: Marvel Comics Pdf The Untold Story
“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
“Exhaustively researched and artfully assembled, this book is a historical exploration, a labor of love, and a living illustration of how the weirdest corners of the counterculture can sometimes become the culture-at-large.”
— Chuck Klosterman
Operating out of a tiny office on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s, a struggling company called Marvel Comics introduced a series of superhero characters with eye-catching bright costumes, smart banter, and compellingly human flaws that thrilled not just children but also pop artists, public intellectuals, and campus radicals: The Fantastic Four. Spider-Man. The Hulk. The X-Men. Iron Man. Thor. Daredevil. All of them interacted in the same epic universe, weaving a tapestry of stories that, taken together, would become the most elaborate fictional narrative in history and serve as a modern American mythology for millions of readers.
For the first time, Marvel Comics tells the stories of the men who made Marvel, including Martin Goodman, the self-made publisher who forayed into comics after a get-rich-quick tip in 1939; the late Stan Lee, the energetic editor who would shepherd the company through thick and thin for decades; Jack Kirby, the WWII veteran who’d co-created Captain America in 1940 and, twenty years later, developed with Lee the bulk of the company’s marquee characters in a three-year frenzy of creativity that would be the grounds for future legal battles and endless debate. 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 dominant pop cultural forces in contemporary America.
What a job! I don't know what must have been harder, having to read decades of low profile fanzines (for contemporaneous interviews with comics professionals) or having to parse out every he said/she said of the behind the scenes soap opera of the Marvel Bullpen.Any comics fan who wants to know about the history of the comics business and how it changed over the years would do well to read this. However, those without a pre-existing interest in comics will probably love or hate the inclusion of such anecdotes as how writer/artist John Byrne may or may not have shouted at and threatened future writer Peter David (then a PR staffer) over sending out preview pages to the press that revealed the shock ending to Byrne's Alpha Flight #12 - and how they still feud about it to this day. Is this tidbit emblematic of the state of the business at that moment in time, or a fanboy space-filler that slows down the overall story? (If you'd say the latter, consider this a four-star review.)Howe is a very, very skilled writer, who must have had quite a job trying to make thousands of anecdotes fit properly into their historical place, as well as the thematic and social flow of the book -- as well as make it easily readable and feel briskly paced. In real life, events do not fall neatly into place by year or regime. So Howe has to jump around a little bit to draw an errant story into the correct context. Speaking as a comics reader and a former biographer, I think he pulled it off masterfully.I only hope for his sake he hasn't made too many enemies in the comics professionals' world - in attempting to give multiple sides of every story, he's probably pleased no one. (Not to mention fanboys on the internet who love to trash everything.) A couple of places I thought I'd caught Howe in a mistake, but it turned out I was wrong. (Steve Englehart feuded with Joe Quesada over writing the FF? Not possible! I'd forgotten the limited series "Fantastic Four: Big Town.")Kudos to Howe for collecting all this info, parsing it, organizing it, and making it a breezy read.An Epic Story That I Wish Was Even Longer Gossip is always tantalizing. Gossip that surrounds a hobby in which you've had a long-standing interest for the better part of two decades is outright addictive.As someone who's read the credit captions on the comics for years and who follows company and creator news on the online comics websites, I've know about the broad strokes of Marvel's history. This work, which relies on firsthand accounts of industry veterans, fleshes out that history to an obscene degree.The narrative is truly enjoyable. Although the cast of "characters" is tremendous (and probably a bit confusing if you aren't already familiar with many of the names), each subject covered is engrossing. There are some strands to this history that unite the piece as a whole; for example, all throughout Howe makes digressions to trace out what I would describe to be the pitiable path taken by Stan Lee, Marvel's longtime public figurehead, keeping with him even after his star has waned.Of particular interest to me were the ever-present corporate influences stemming from the top, the changing dynamics of the Marvel Bullpen, the editorial politics of 1970s Marvel (a decade that was a big blank for me beforehand), and, of course, the backstabbing.I only wish that the story continued! While I understand why some histories shy away from very recent events, reckoning them to be too fresh and best deferred for retrospective analysis, it is odd that the book effectively ends with the Bill Jemas era of the early 2000s. Howe refers, in passing and in the last few pages, to a few storylines after that era, but it would have been interesting to get a more in-depth look at the current Marvel. What's the backstory with Buckley, Fine, and Alonso? Hopefully we'll get a follow-up down the road.The only drawback was an occassional sense of temporal dislocation in the narrative. With the kind of story that Howe undertook, with its multiple layers, several levels, and stories within stories, I couldn't always tell whether one vignette was intended to follow upon another or was meant to be understood to have occurred in parallel with the one before it. It didn't really hurt the story, but I would have appreciated more month/year references within the main text. (There are citations in the back, but it's a hassle to keep referring to those while reading.)
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