Finished Reading: Marvel Comics The Untold Story by Sean Howe 📚

This book chronicles the history of Marvel comics from the formation of Timely Comics in 1939 to the time Marvel became a household name alongside the release of the Avengers movie and the company’s purchase by Disney.

I’ve been reading comic books for about two years. I started reading them digitally when I decided to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther comics, and I started buying them physically last year as a replacement hobby when I quit drinking.

I’ve read issues of Captain America and Avengers that date back to the mid-2000s, but besides that I’ve only read very recent books. It was fun to get exposure to older story arcs and characters, and to learn about the creative process of different books over time.

However: this isn’t a history of the Marvel Universe, but of Marvel, the company. And as it is told in these pages, Marvel has indeed acted like a corporation over the years: it’s jerked around it’s employees, employed hostile marketing tactics, and been subject to the dubious financial maneuvers of it’s various owners over the years. It was entertaining to read about the great culture that certain Marvel bullpens garnered, but this book also included lots of minutia about business plays, which I found pretty boring.

By now it’s well-known how Jack Kirby and other early comic book creators were not compensated proportionally for their contributions to the Marvel canon, and a large part of this book focuses on the various attempts over the years by creators to retain the rights to the creators they made while at Marvel, and how Marvel worked to protect its IP. I think this book does a good job at showing both perspectives to the argument - if anything, I came away from this book with more sympathy for the practical realities that Marvel has to consider.

I enjoyed this book… but it’s not one that I’d necessarily recommend to others unless you’re an invested reader of Marvel comics.

My vintage comic book reading list is now a mile long… and I’m excited to dig in!