Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

Sean Howe

Oct 2013 · Harper Collins

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

For those of us Gen-Xers and older, who maybe once thought about going into the business, or even those wondering about the REAL history of modern comics, this is a must-read. It's amazing all the coincidences and chicanery that happened for us to have the comics we know/knew. Granted, Howe seems to grow bored somewhere in the Shooter-era, and the book seems to hasten to an end. I'd wager due to people still in the business not wanting to open their mouths for fear of reprisal. Still, I hope for a sequel.

Everything you possibly wanted to know about Marvel. The ups, the downs, the trials and tribulations. This book is the definitive authority. A must for comics fans the world over.

Now I can find out how these characters were invented, and how they've changed over the years. Thanks, Sean Howe!!!

About the author

Sean Howe is the editor of Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!: Writers on Comics and the Deep Focus series of film books. He is a former editor and critic at Entertainment Weekly, and his writing has appeared in New York, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, Spin, and The Village Voice. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.