Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

It's hard not to make this review about me, as annoying as that would be to read, because of how important comics - and Marvel Comics in particular - were to me (and still are, to some degree), but I won't go there.

The history of this company, and its expansive modern mythology, is seriously fascinating reading - especially if you are familiar with their output. If you aren't, you may well find yourself getting a hold of some of their amazing work that you've never heard of before (esp. the books from the 70's). It is also the history of a corporate juggernaut that chewed up and spat out all the people who devoted the most to it. Aside from the Ballad of Jack Kirby, which could be its own 600pg tome, there were so many bodies left in show more ditches. People who devoted decades of their lives and were the most popular creators of their time, cut off without a single word about their involuntary departure. Then you have the superstars of the early 90's, who were (esp. in the case of McFarlane and Liefeld) unscrupulous hypocrites who bragged about burning their bridges - only to go on (in several cases) to treat others even more unfairly than the parent company they sought to replace.

It's a story of greed, and the magic that somehow managed to grow in the tiny green spaces not touched by corporate corruption and a virtual derth of human decency. It's one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read, and it has had what I think will be a lasting impact on me.

The summation on the cover, that it was a company that "gave people what they wanted while it took from them what they had" is better wording than I can generate. I'm going to write to a few of the creators who we're lucky enough to still have with us, to thank them for their work. show less

This book is terrific! Very thorough, very engaging! I felt like it touched on pretty much everything - I don't feel like anything significant was left out - and yet it read easily and quickly. That's an impressive achievement.

It's fascinating to discover that the behind-the-scenes political and economic machinations of the Marvel company are as byzantine as the fictional Marvel Universe itself. It's interesting to know more about what underlay the oscillations in the quality of the comics over the years.

I should note that I read a pre-publication copy of this work and so the following may no longer be relevant...

I would like to see some graphic representations of some of the information in this book. A timeline would be nice, and maybe show more some kind of family-tree like structure to clarify some of the relationships between Marvel and the other companies mentioned. There are a whole lot of names and relationships and interactions that this book covers and easily accessed visual references might help the reader to keep it all straight.

All told, though, I didn't feel that it was too much of a challenge to follow along.

This is a great gift to anyone interested in the history of Marvel! show less

I’ll say right up front that if you are not an avid reader of Marvel comics, you won’t get much out of MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY by Sean Howe. I’ll also add that I am one of them, a Marvel reader for more than a few decades who has hung in there through thick and thin and thick again as the quality of Marvel comics has been inconsistent to say the least. This book gives us the inside dope on the company that gave popular culture Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, X-Men, Doctor Strange, The Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and The Punisher, among very many. What went on behind closed doors from the beginning was a far different picture than the happy Marvel Bullpen Stan Lee claimed it to be, and things only got worse as the show more company was sold to one corporate entity and then another, most of them only interested in the money they squeeze out of merchandising the characters and selling their rights to TV and movies.
Most of all, it is the story of how talent got screwed over repeatedly by management, year in and year out, as great artists and writers were denied the compensation they were due as their creations earned the company millions, while they got a pittance. In the early days, on every artist’s paycheck was printed a boiler plate forfeiture of future earnings from all work on condition of cashing the check, a typical practice for what was considered work for hire. And sadly, in later decades, when the writers and artists had gotten wise and were earning the big bucks, they turned out to be just as big a douche bags as management-I’m talking about the likes of Scott McFarlane and Rob Liefeld.
Stan Lee, the man whose name is synonymous with Marvel Comics comes across as the ultimate huckster, a man who did some good work, with critical contributions from Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, back in the 60’s that laid the groundwork for the Marvel comic universe, and who rode the gravy train thereafter. The back and forth over who created Spider-Man and the FF is laid out once again, and it makes a damning case that Lee has long hogged the credit due others; what is really galling is the millions of dollars Lee has earned over the decades until this very day from his lifelong association with Marvel, while Jack Kirby, without whom there really would not have been a Marvel Comics, had to spend years suing the company to get his own artwork returned to him. The prickly Ditko, who managed to insert Ayn Rand’s Ojectivist philosophy into the early Spider-Man books, comes off as the anti Stan Lee in every way.
There are tales of “chemical enhancement” by some artists in the 70’s which will not come as news to anyone who read certain titles during that era. I enjoyed tidbits such as why Peter Parker’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy was murdered by the Green Goblin in 1973: she was a boring character. Chris Claremont, the man who made the X-Men books a powerhouse, is dismissed after a sixteen year tenure because editor Bob Haras didn’t get the way he was writing the characters. There is the infamous Jim Shooter, who created the very first Secret Wars mini-series to promote action figures and talked openly of killing off all the Marvel heroes and starting over. How Jim Starlin bought the rights to the old Fu Manchu novels to use in the comic, Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu only to discover Sax Rohmer’s books to be utterly racist. We learn that there was a deal on the table in the mid 80’s for DC to sell their super hero titles-Superman, Batman, The Flash and the rest-to Marvel; how different would history have been if that deal had gone through. There is the mania for crossovers and Big Events in the late 80’s and early 90’s; the special and variant covers fad that turned off fans by the millions and nearly busted the whole comic book industry by the end of the decade.
The book goes into the details behind the Heroes Reborn fiasco, where the renegades at Image were rewarded while many long time Marvel artists and writers, among them John Romita and his wife, were shown the door. The story of the Heroes World distribution scheme is laid out, and how many comic shop owners, the backbone of the industry, were subsequently forced to close their doors. Corporate mismanagement is a running theme throughout the book, as one owner proves to be worse than the previous, with a rogue’s gallery that include Avi Arvid, Joe Calamari, Ron Perelman, Carl Iachan, and Ike Perlmutter, the worst of a bad lot.
There are a few good guys like artist Neal Adams, who tried to organize the artists into a union in the 70’s and Mark Gruenwald, an editor whose love for Marvel drove him to an early grave because of the distress he felt over what was happening at the company.
It’s ultimately the story of a bunch of rich men trying to make money in a niche industry they didn’t even remotely understand or cared to take the time to learn anything about; it’s a tale of how the arrogance possessed only by those who believe great personal financial success automatically bestows competence in all human endeavors led to disaster. By the end of the book, after Disney purchases the company and the movie version of THE AVENGERS becomes a box office blockbuster, I marveled (pun intended) that the comics had survived this long. The only reason I could come up with was the patience and love of fans like myself for the unending adventures of Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, Charles Xavier’s mutants, The Hulk in all his forms, along with Doctor Doom, Magneto, Doctor Octopus and the rest of the 2000 plus denizens of the Marvel Universe. We’ve hung in there for the reboots, revamps, Secret Wars, Secret Invasions, Civil Wars, Ages of Apocalypse, Clone Sagas, Brand New Days, Days of Future Pasts, World War Hulks, Ultimates and Superiors and all the rest down through the years. In the end, the saddest thing to learn was that, for the most part, the creators of our beloved heroes and villains did not love them as much as we did. Many reviewers have this space to vent their spleens at Marvel and the comic book industry in general and I fully understand their pain; Sean Howe’s well written and researched book will only add fuel to the fire. show less

I didn't grow up with Marvel; I read Archie comics almost exclusively until I discovered indie comics as a teen. I bought one issue of Wolverine because I liked the X-Men animated series and it ended up being Wolverine and Sabretooth fighting for 32 pages while they watched news footage of a police beating. I had no idea what the hell was going on, and I still don't, and that colored my perception of Marvel Comics for a long time: ultra-violent muscle porn with way, way too much continuity. And as I learned from this book, that definitely seemed to be the case in the 90s, and they didn't like it either.

I guess all I mean to say is that I'm not necessarily the target audience for this. I don't love comics, but I am interested in them as show more a medium. I love junk culture, culture made to be disposed of, and comics really were that for a very long time. It seems Marvel was at the forefront of comics being considered anything other than kids' stuff, and they really helped usher in this modern era where low-art genre trash (and I say that as someone who loves low-art genre trash) is the biggest moneymaking force in popular culture.

From reading the book you get the impression that working at Marvel was pretty much always hell for one reason or another (I'm not sure I've read another book about culture history where one company was bought and sold so many times). But through that hell the writers and artists produced some outstanding work, creating characters and stories that have resonated for decades.

They also produced the Clone Saga and Rob Liefeld worked there for way too long, but hey, nobody's perfect. show less

There's an ugliness uncovered by this book that I really had never considered before about Marvel The Business. Backstabbing, outright theft and piracy, and he-said/he-said swirl around in such operatic scale that it's surprising that ANYTHING got published at all!
Hundreds of interviews and deep research kick over the fallen log of Marvel's history; I read in horrified fascination about all the things that squirmed out from under it.
Oh, I still consider myself a Marvel Fan, no question; but it's still the characters I love, not the business practice.

Sean Howe's Marvel Comics: The Untold Story begins with a quick account of Timely and Atlas Comics before turning to the launch of the Marvel Age with the Fantastic Four. From there, he examines the early Bullpen and the explosion of creativity that accompanied the cultural resurgence of comics in the 1960s. Howe effortlessly weaves between the business side of comics and the lives of writers, artists, editors and others, while using letters (both published and unpublished) and excerpts from college talks to give insight into the public's reaction to the comics. He moves into the 1970s and 1980s, when Marvel went from the underdog in the industry to the leading publisher, culminating in the speculator market bust of the 1990s. The human show more stories of people trying to tell their stories and make a living or control the ideas they brought to the company provide a dramatic counterpoint to the business wheeling and dealing of publishers and corporate vice presidents. These stories make this a particularly harrowing look at the unforgiving nature of the comics industry, though there may exist parallels elsewhere in publishing. All of this ends with a focus on the cyclical nature of the stories, which reflect the cyclical nature of the industry, as Howe writes, "Multiple manifestations of Captain America and Spider-Man and the X-Men float in elastic realities, passed from one temporary custodian to the next, and their heroic journes are, forever, denied an end" (pg. 432). show less

As someone who didn't grow up reading comics but has spent twenty years as a sideline observer of the fandom, I found this is an excellent history of Marvel.

It is also a profoundly depressing book. The author clearly strove and I think largely succeeded at an even-handed approach, taking no sides to the extent that's possible. There were plenty of episodes where people just plain behaved badly, though, and there's not much to be done about that.

It's food for a great deal of thought on the history and future of publishing in general, the dangers of monopoly in any creative industry, and the difficulties inherent in cooperative creative work. I recommend it.