Kevin Book Review - Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

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I'm going to do something I haven't done on this blog yet. A book review! Before you get all excited and think I'm cultured, I'm sure you already saw the title of this post. Of course it's a book about comic books. I'll try to be as eloquent as possible, since we're taking care of serious business here.

What we have here is an unauthorized look behind the history of Marvel Comics. This book is built on more than a hundred interviews the author, Sean Howe, had with many of the professionals that worked at Marvel Comics over the years.

I was completely engrossed in this book, but as I was reading it I kept thinking whether I would recommend this book to my non-comic friends. I'm leaning slightly towards no. Let me explain why. The audience for this book is clearly fans of comic books. The majority of the stories hinge on your working knowledge of the creators with each turn of the page. There are ends of chapters that end with a cliffhanger along the lines of something like, "And the person who submitted the finished pages was a young [insert creator here]". That's good for me, but a normal person will not get why that's significant.

This book does not take time to explain why each creator is significant within the industry. Sure it will talk about how someone was able to write a book so long because they had clout, but you won't know the cultural impact their work had or why fans hold it in such reverence. I think that's a trapping of the book that it was not be able to avoid. So to enjoy this book on many levels, you will need to do some research.

As a story about a company that has more brand recognition than ever before, it is completely fascinating. I did not realize how much of the creative process hinged on the ability of the artist when it came to the early 60's and 70's. I totally see now why creators such as Jack Kirby was increasingly bitter through the back half of his career. You know it's sad when one of the creators of Superman is relegated to being just an editor, just so he can pay the bills.

One of the main through-lines of this book is how many of the creators put their hearts and souls into creating characters, only to get nothing in return. The cutthroat way Marvel treated their creators is very oft putting. I understand that while you work for a big company like this, anything you create belongs to the company. As you read, you see a trend where artists begin to hold back and put their true passions into creator owned books. You also get a glimpse into the very ugly legal battles that ensue.

If you were ever wondering whether these creators were on drugs when creating all these stories, guess what? They were. Were there tales of office politics? Of course there were. For the comic fan, the people involved is what makes this truly interesting reading.

My only real gripe with this book as a comic book fan is this. A lot of space is given to Marvel from it's inception to the early 80's. The era when I started reading was the early 90's until now. That was the stuff I wanted to read about and that is glanced over in the last hundred or so pages of the book. That era that was deeply personal to me and it got short shrift.

In the end, this is a very good book that is full of very many fascinating anecdotes. Will you, a normal fan enjoy it? I think so, but you will probably feel lost for most of it. That's why I'm here. Ask me and I would be more than glad to nerd out for you!