Blurb

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.

Review

This was subtitled The Untold Story, but it could have easily been Marvel Comics: Why They All Left Eventually Pissed Off.

While this was exhaustive, expansive and all that, I’m not sure this is a book I would recommend to fans of Marvel Comics, unless you really want to know who all was pissed at who. This was the fake reality shows brought to nerd culture, only it was not set up drama. This book will not make you a bigger fan of Marvel comics, and quite possibly could have the opposite effect. It reads like a list of reasons why Marvel Comics made it despite trying really hard not to, corporate wise.

I did not grow up a comic kid. And I only know the surface stuff when it comes to creators, editors, corporate culture, et al. So much of this was stuff I did not know. Some of it was. I’m not sure the new knowledge was worth the trouble, or the bleak picture of the comic industry that gets painted within.