Marvel Comics: The Untold Story – The Behind-the-Scenes Company History of Martin Goodman, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and a Dominant American Force Paperback – October 1, 2013

This book gives a history of Marvel comics, and by extension the comic book industry that it influenced and dominates. It is full of behind the scenes human drama that as young readers would not matter much to us, but those revelations fill in a lot of cracks and fascinate as we grow older and want to better understand the world we live in and the reading material that shaped many of us.Growing up, comic books were my companions and Marvel comics had a magic that warmed me that continues to this day. I will still sit down in a library or bookstore and spend a few hours reading stories from my past or new ones that are being developed now. Comics were fun, they connected with some part of me that needed what they offered. Maybe they kept me distracted from some things in life that might have dragged me down had I focused on them. Comic books were a kind of lifeline for me. At the end of most lifelines we cling to is a human being and that is true here as well. Marvel comic books, those magnificent modern myths were, like all myths, created by people and this book discusses those people and the way they shaped the Marvel company. What emerges is a picture of a reality we never suspected as children. We love the art but frequently the artist is not who we imagined.The author, Sean Howe does a good job exposing the human interaction, the creativity, the contracts, the admirable, the petty, the honorable, the idiosyncratic, all the ingredients of life are present in the Marvel comics’ story and they are compelling reading. For me reading so long ago Lee and Kirby and all the players in the Bullpen were simply having fun. Like so many who read them I imagined Marvel comics to be a theme park where dreams were encouraged and indulged. When reading the works of Lee, Kirby, Ditko, Steranko, the pure pleasure lept off the page and inside the reader. We all thought, surely Marvel is a place where gifted people have fun all day and night. This book turns that idea on its ear and gives a deeper sample of a more adult reality. Human beings, the kind that live and work in offices, made Marvel comics and for all the deep joy they brought to their adoring audience, the backstage perspective exposes the fully human aspects that I never would have understood as a kid reading those stories. The business of Marvel comics is what we have come to expect from profit oriented enterprises. There is no shortage of cheated artists, corporate objectives, or swollen egos. Marvel comics was, and is, a mix of talented, heroic, selfish, flawed, grand or tunnel visioned human beings trying to tell great stories in a structure that needs it on Tuesday in order to keep the lights on and the shareholders happy. Comics are a human construction, and creating art and fun is not always artful and fun. This is partly an examination of art as business.Who is this for? Mostly comic geeks like me, although history of business students might enjoy seeing the ontogeny of the Marvel organism as it evolved from some guys trying make a living with sequential art and seeing it grow into a very odd animal indeed. There is much for everyone to reflect on in this story. There could be a deeply complicated discussion of an art from where the stories and characters are handed from creator to creator and never age or really die and there is no true end. Perhaps most importantly it could be a test of your character. As you are exposed to the behaviors of everyone who made or make Marvel run you might find yourself examining your choices and where you might have made your stand had you been there.

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.)

As a man in my mid 40s, I started reading Marvel comics back in the early 70s and soon was buying back issues from the 60s at comic book shops to fill in my collection. My interest peaked in the 80s and then waned, but I always picked up one or two books and thumbed through a few more. And always Marvel. I had no interest whatsoever in DC as their characters didn't seem as real to me.So I was very curious to read the behind-the-scenes action that led to the plots I followed as a kid. And I wasn't disappointed. This book was a revelation in many ways. I had always bought into the image of the Marvel "bullpen" that Stan Lee presented in his soapbox columns, and it was very enlightening to find out how things really worked. I also had a long suspicion that the cosmic storylines of Jim Starlin in Captain Marvel and Warlock were heavily influenced by drug use, which indeed turned out to be the case.It was not surprising to see that creative types being paid peanuts under high pressure became peevish and argumentative, but it was entertaining to read about, if a bit sad as well.All in all, I would recommend this book for anyone who read Marvel comics as a kid. It tells the untold story of why things went the way they did.

Good. Wished that I had ordered the hardcover though. Hubby liked it.

OK

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

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.