Book: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe


Book Review 'Marvel Comics: The Untold Story' by Sean Howe
A wild-ride history of the company's creation from the people who built it, including the mad genius Stan Lee

Hollywood Reporter
Those who know Marvel mainly in its current incarnation as the Disney-owned pop-culture juggernaut — since 2008's Iron Man, Marvel movies have grossed more than $2 billion worldwide — will find it hard to connect that statistic with the motley crew of artists and writers behind such iconic figures as Spider-Man and Iron Man that Sean Howe vividly captures in his new history of the company.

In tracing Marvel's story from its origins as a pulp magazine publisher founded by Martin Goodman in 1933 through its alternating decades of boom and bust and onto its acquisition by Disney in 2009, Howe introduces a cast of characters that includes Captain America creator Joe Simon, the inventive and prickly Jack Kirby, the dour but brilliant Steve Ditko and cerebral Chris Claremont, who transformed the second-tier X-Men into a hit.

At the center of this freewheeling carnival was Stan Lee, whom Howe reveals as a combination of Budd Schulberg's Sammy Glick and Mark Twain, who mixed the immigrant hunger for success with a uniquely American gift for tall-tale telling. If Stan Lee didn't exist, Marvel Comics would have had to invent him. continue
by Andy Lewis

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Submitted by Ezra