If the powers that be come across too much like profit-seeking mustache twisters, however, Howe also drives home the financial realities of the “repeatedly endangered industry” that motivate their ethically questionable tactics. To the credit of Lee and co-creator Jack Kirby, however, the result was not the rip-off Goodman requested but a wholly original idea - a superpowered family called the Fantastic Four. After learning that rival DC Comics planned to launch a superhero team called the Justice League of America in the early 1960s, Marvel Comics publisher Martin Goodman issued a mandate to writer Stan Lee: Steal this idea. One early anecdote sums up the historical attitude of corporate comics rather succinctly.

Nearly every artist or writer who appears to make a significant contribution to the Marvel Universe - “the most intricate fictional narrative in the history of the world” - seems to wind up feeling alienated, exploited or discarded.

Sometimes called the “House of Ideas,” Marvel emerges with a rather checkered past regarding its treatment of the people who came up with those ideas, including the creators of iconic characters like Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Hulk, who were denied not only royalties but sometimes even credit for their creations.

Sean Howe’s book traces the byzantine histories of the colorful characters on the comics pages and in the Marvel offices, from the inception of the superhero in the 1930s through the modern era, and finds the real and the fictional equally laced with epic triumphs, tragic reversals of fortune, backstabbing and melodrama.Įxhaustively researched with the input of more than 150 sources, “Marvel Comics: The Untold Story” paints the publisher as perpetually torn between creative and financial impulses, between the idealistic, progressive spirit of the genre, and the corporate body where it resides. Superhero comics has always been a bit of an oddball, a niche genre with a small but fiercely devoted fan base and a penchant for stories about flawed, outcast heroes who struggle not only to save the world but find their place in it. “Marvel Comics: The Untold Story” performs an act of what superhero comics fans might term “retcon” - or retroactive continuity - by returning to the beginning of the superhero industry and telling the tale again with a number of previously invisible heroes suddenly added to the story: the men and women who created superhero comics.

The untold story marvel