Marvel Comics

August 13, 2012
The comic book publisher that spawned roughly half of Hollywood’s summer franchises roils with its own melodrama in this scintillating history. Journalist Howe, editor of Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers, recounts the saga of Stan Lee and the other auteurs who broke the square-jawed-and-earnest mold to create quirky, neurotic, rough-edged superheroes with a Pop Art look, including Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, and the X-Men. Howe’s exploration of the vast Marvel fictive universe, with its crazily grandiose plots and thousands of bizarre characters—the psychedelic 1970s birthed Angarr, a hippie supervillain who “blasted people with bad trips and primal screams”—is affectionate and incisive. But he focuses on the battle between the forces of art and commerce at the Marvel offices, where writers, artists, and editors wrestle for control of story arcs, titanic egos clash over copyrights, and creative oddballs confront the heartless, power-mad suits from marketing. Adroitly deploying zillions of interviews, Howe pens a colorful panorama of the comics industry and its tense mix of formulaic hackwork, cutthroat economics and poignant aesthetic pretense. Like comic books, his narrative often goes in circles; the same antagonisms keep churning away on successively grander platforms. Still, Howe paints an indelible portrait of the crass, juvenile, soulful business that captured the world’s imagination. Photos. Agent: Daniel Greenberg, Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.

November 15, 2012

In this revealing, legend-skewering tome, former Entertainment Weekly editor Howe provides a behind-the-scenes history of Marvel, from its 1939 origin, when pulp magazine publisher Martin Goodman accepted a proposal to enter the burgeoning superhero comics market, to the present, when many of the company's characters are known worldwide. Delving into Marvel's inner business and editorial workings, Howe presents a parade of famed creators and creations from Jack Kirby and Captain America onward, but also devotes much space to controversy: a parallel parade of shattered loyalties, abandoned veterans, disastrous business deals, compromised creativity, and a work-for-hire business model that often meant authors and illustrators were not rewarded their ideas as well as many expected. VERDICT Howe's extensive research gives the book much detail that will fascinate comics fans, while his fast-paced, anecdotal style and business-world focus will expand his audience to general readers. There are some organizational problems and questionable statements; exact dates are often unclear; and Howe manages to misquote the most famous line in all of superhero comics. But this engaging history is recommended.--S.R.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2012

In the early 1960s, minor-player Marvel Comics introduced a host of brightly bedecked and brave but sometimes humanly fallible superheroes like Spiderman; now it's the No. 1 comics company in the world. Here's an unauthorized history from former Entertainment Weekly editor Howe; the 35,000-copy first printing seems small.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2012
Howe's in-depth account of Marvel's business history, revered personalities, and pop-culturally ingrained characters boasts exhaustively researched and intricately integrated information. And loads of it, as this isn't just one storyit's a bunch of knotted tales strung together. It's Stan Lee and Jack Kirby creating a pantheon of modern American superheroes. It's the rote staff changes and personnel quirks that made Marvel the company it was. It's the siren call of Hollywood cash that made it the company it is today. It's a look at the American comic-book industry as a whole over the last half-century. It's a priceless collection of anecdotes about the artists and writers reflecting and filtering the eras they worked in. The most timely strand threads through issues of creators' rights and intellectual property, an argument that's heating up today's comics climate. Casual fans may find more than they bargained for, but for the Marvel faithful, this is the definitive book on the company responsible for aligning the cosmos in their favorite fictional universe.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

Starred review from August 15, 2012
An impeccably researched, authoritative history of Marvel Comics. Former Entertainment Weekly editor Howe (editor: Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!: Writers on Comics, 2004) interviewed more than 150 former Marvel employees, freelancers and family members to weave together a tapestry of creative genius, bad business decisions and petty back-stabbing. Progenitors of Spider-Man, the Avengers and the X-Men, Marvel's rocky road to merchandising success is as epic as any of the company's four-color adventures. Howe pulls no punches as he details the fledgling enterprise's slow rise from Timely Publications in 1939 to its official emergence as Marvel Comics in 1961, when the groundbreaking brilliance of writer Stan Lee and artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko led to the creation of the company's most iconic characters. In an era before movie-making technology facilitated lucrative cross-merchandising, however, Marvel struggled financially while its editors massaged the bruised egos of freelancers who poured their lifeblood into creations in which they didn't retain an ownership stake. Kirby, bitter over what he perceived as Lee's efforts to take undue credit for his stories, ultimately left, becoming a rallying point in the struggle for the rights and compensation of writers and artists. Lee relocated to Hollywood in an effort to bring Marvel's characters to the big screen, a frustrating endeavor that would take decades and a procession of other individuals to come to fruition. Compared to the thorough account of Marvel's formative years, Howe gives relatively short shrift to recent corporate machinations--including only a brief mention of Disney's $4 billion purchase of Marvel in 2009--and the work of current superstars, but that's a minor quibble in what is otherwise a nuanced and engrossing narrative of a company whose story deserves its own blockbuster film. Brilliantly juxtaposes Marvel with its best characters: flawed and imperfect, but capable of achieving miraculous feats.

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