Grade: A

Lies, deceit, grandstanding, backroom deals, backstabbing, and the creation of some of the most iconic characters and story-lines in modern history. This is the history of Marvel Comics. Author Sean Howe takes us through over a century, starting with Martin Goodman and comic books starting to take shape in popular culture, all the way to present day with Marvel owned by the monster corporation Disney and pumping out movies and merchandise in addition to the comics themselves. Everybody knows the name Stan Lee, and he is the one figure that hovers throughout the entirety of the book, and even casual comic fans will recognize the names of Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, Frank Miller and Grant Morrison, but Howe details the contributions, failings and personalities of dozens of other writers and artists that have come and gone over the years. What’s amazing about it is that Howe manages to actually bring all these people to life and get a sense of who they are/were. The strength of this book is that it’s interest is in the people behind the scenes rather than exhausting us with the history of the characters, which any good comic fan already knows anyway.

Regarding Stan Lee: It’s debatable how much, if anything, he actually had to do with any of the creative process throughout the years. He is officially credited with creating such characters as Spiderman, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men just to name a few, and many people take that at face value. This book details how Jack Kirby probably did most of that creating, if not all of it, and essentially got screwed both in a financial sense and a pop-culture sense. That comic book nerds know the legend of Jack Kirby is little comfort to a man who died bitter and resentful, and mostly broke. What makes this book unique is that it doesn’t try to take sides on these issues of creator vs. company. It acknowledges Stan Lee as an amazing salesman who took credit for all these things, but it hardly paints him as a villain. He’s his own tragic figure in fact, taken advantage of by the company while getting screwed in business deals with internet start-ups, while constantly dreaming of Marvel characters being turned into Hollywood movies. That he got his wish as an old man after trying to make it happen since the 1970’s is a testament to his ability to play the long game. Still, he’s something of a tragic figure in that he became a legend for something he really had little love for. He still pines for what might’ve been. He’s quoted saying “I wish I had the time to be a novelist. I think I could have done better. I mean, I would have loved to have written a great novel. I would have loved to have written a great bunch of screenplays. I would have loved to have written a Broadway show. I didn’t have any big compulsion to write comics. It was a way of making a living.” The great champion of comics over the years was just trying to make a buck. In fact, he originally took on the pen name Stan Lee only because he imagined himself becoming a serious writer one day.

This is not Stan Lee’s story though. It’s a story, as the name suggests, of Marvel. The artists, the business men, the presidents, the salesman and everyone in between, Sean Howe brings it all to life. He does it with a fan’s eye but without getting overly sentimental about anything. He freely acknowledges the lack of quality certain eras contained and details the reasons why it went downhill. Each generation brought with it new ideas and new shortcomings. This is not a book about how after a rough road everything is now fine in Marvel land. The company still has its problems, especially in comic sales, and the royalties paid to the artists has still never been solved in any kind of satisfactory way. But it’s the characters that will live on. The artists and the writers come, they leave, and come back. They quit in grand gestures, as stances against the exploitation of the creative staff, sometimes solitary and sometimes in groups, but then they come back because they make comics and there are just not that many paying gigs for comic book writers and artists. Their professional lives parallel the comics they write. The superheroes that die and come back and are stuck in stasis are really the creators who keep telling their stories. There seems to be no permanence in their world, but really it’s only the illusion of change.

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