---
product_id: 1273897
title: "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story"
brand: "sean howestephen hoyeharperaudio"
price: "10519 som"
currency: KGS
in_stock: false
reviews_count: 7
url: https://www.desertcart.kg/products/1273897-marvel-comics-the-untold-story
store_origin: KG
region: Kyrgyzstan
---

# Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

**Brand:** sean howestephen hoyeharperaudio
**Price:** 10519 som
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- **What is this?** Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by sean howestephen hoyeharperaudio
- **How much does it cost?** 10519 som with free shipping
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## Description

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

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![Marvel Comics: The Untold Story - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91jtDbzH0jL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    From excelsior to excess
  

*by K***N on Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2017*

At first I was a little skeptical about the subtitle of Sean Howe’s 2012 book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. I grew up reading Marvel Comics and have read other books on the company’s history. After finishing Howe’s version, however, I’m happy to report that his investigative journalism into Marvel’s past is quite impressive, and the book makes for a truly fascinating read.For the first couple chapters, I wasn’t so sure. In Chapter 1 Howe covers the entire history of Marvel, formerly known as Timely Comics, up through the 1950s. That’s the entire Golden Age in less than 30 pages! Howe isn’t really concerned, however, with the myriad genres that Timely used to publish—western, horror, romance, funny animals, and so on. This is really a history of what Marvel is most famous for—the superheroes, beginning with the Silver Age pantheon created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and in some cases, Steve Ditko. Chapter 2 covers the birth of the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, the Avengers, X-Men, and Spider-Man. Howe’s recaps of origin stories and mythologies get a little long-winded, leaving one to wonder when the “untold story” is going to begin.From that point on, however, the book really hits its stride and becomes incredibly addictive, with vivid details and surprising revelations on every page. This isn’t a literary history of Marvel’s creative glories, but rather a true business history, replete with mergers, acquisitions, and struggles for administrative power. I’ll confess some of the financial and legal details were over my head, and at times, I could have used a little less detail. Over the course of superhero comics history, writers and artists continually defected from Marvel to DC and back again, and Howe keeps you apprised of each and every arrival and departure. Nevertheless, it’s better to commit sins of excess than omission, and Howe’s thorough, behind-the-scenes exposé of life inside the Marvel bullpen is probably the next-best thing to working there.Though written in the third person, the book has the feel of an oral history, likely because Howe interviewed about 150 former Marvel employees. Howe lets all sides get their two cents in without passing judgment. The long-fought battle between Lee and Kirby over creative ownership of certain characters, for example, is handled in a fairly balanced manner. Howe diligently follows the trail of rancor, and neither party comes out smelling like a rose. Stan the Man comes across as somewhat pathetically clueless, while King Kirby is depicted as taking his justifiable grievances to delusional excess. In general, Howe subtly favors individual creators over big business, but he always presents both sides of an argument.Though Howe celebrates the company’s creative triumphs, his overall picture of the Marvel empire is rather unflattering. As he charts the trajectory of the publisher through boom and bust periods, he makes it pretty clear that over time the company has sacrificed creative quality in favor of commercialism, diluting the integrity of its treasured characters for a quick buck. As one of the many fans Marvel lost in the ‘90s, I have a tendency to agree with him, which is perhaps why I enjoyed the book so much. There are other good books on Marvel history out there, like the self-congratulatory Marvel Chronicle: A Year by Year History or Mark Evanier’s excellent biography Kirby: King of Comics, but if you’re looking for one book that’s going to give you the clearest, most complete picture of the Marvel story, this is it.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    Worthwhile though not brilliant
  

*by W***Y on Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2012*

As a longtime comics fan with an interest in comics history, I found this book a good read, worth the purchasing and reading, but not the last word on the subject.  The strongest element is the coverage of Marvel history from the 1970's through the 90's.  The accounting of the pre-Fantastic Four period 1939 through 1961 is relatively thin, perhaps because of the lack of primary sources still around, and/or because most of the material produced by Timely/Atlas/Marvel during the early period was not of much current fan interest (except for a hard core of collector aficionados).  During that first couple of decades, the policy of publisher Martin Goodman was to see what was selling for other comics publishers and jump on the bandwagon-- first superheroes, then horror, crime, romance, teen humor, etc.-- with competently produced but often uninspired knockoffs.  Indeed, "Fantastic Four" itself was another knockoff, a jump back onto the superhero bandwagon started by DC, except that Stan Lee (by his own admission pretty much a hack writer up until then) and Jack Kirby decided to try doing superheroes in a different way.The story of Marvel's "Silver Age" glory days from FF #1 through about 1971 is a many-times-told tale.  It is told here competently but with a bit of a "you had to be there" feel... if you didn't already know what the early stories of the FF, Spider-Man and the rest were like, and how they were different from what DC and other publishers were producing at the time, you might not get a clear idea from this book. And even though this is not a history of DC comics, the book might have gained from looking further at how the rise of Marvel was a response to a previous resurgence at DC, and how Marvel in turn influenced-- and was influenced by-- DC.  (By the 1970's and beyond, writers, artists and editors were all jumping back and forth between the two companies, and DC's handling of its classic characters was thoroughly "Marvelized"..which I'm not saying was a bad thing.)As I said, the freshest information in the book for me was the look at behind-the-scenes goings-on at Marvel during the 1970's, when the wave of fans turned creators that started with Roy Thomas took over the store... a development that definitely had its up and down sides.  Again, here, the author is maybe a bit thin of descriptions of the actual comics being produced and their significance.A comment of my own not so much about the book as some previous reviews... as a reader of the comics, I'll defend Stan Lee from charges that he was a mere hack stealing credit from Kirby, Ditko and others.  Looking at the comics produced during those few years of the 60's-- and comparing them to the comics produced by Kirby and Ditko before and after that period, on their own or with other collaborators-- it seems clear to me that for a while there was a genuine synergy between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and between Lee and Ditko, enabling them to produce work that was "more than the sum of its parts".From the standpoint of a reader, again, I'll make somewhat of a defense of the infamous Jim Shooter.  He may not have been a fun guy to work for, but I've always liked Shooter's own writing, and from my reader's standpoint, when Shooter became Marvel editor-in-chief, the effect, at least at first, was to "get the trains running on time" without snuffing out creativity.  The Marvel Comics produced under Shooter's early editorship, I thought at the time and still do, were part of a kind of "Third Golden Age" of the late 70's through mid '80's... along with comics produced by DC and by the burgeoning independent publishers of the time.  (I'd like to see a good overall history concentrating on this period of the 1980's.)

### ⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Three Stars
  

*by A***D on Reviewed in India on October 2, 2016*

OK

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*Last updated: 2026-03-03*