pickA fascinating look at the endlessly renewing, creative, flawed entity that is Marvel comics.
Howe does a great job of moving the historical account from its first moments, through the decades, hitting on pivotal people, creations and events, offering a lot of context with details of the comic book industry throughout the years, and the company's restructuring along that path, how Marvel shaped and was shaped, 1/?
Okay but Vengeance, Incorporated is amazing
Isn't it nice that the fans were responding favourably to the chemically enhanced creativity by supplying the artists with more mind-altering substances? 🙃🧪
Was this by any chance an LSD or mushroom-induced trance, Steve?! 😵💫🍄
“ritualistic discharge“ is going to stick with me.
pickI knew how prolific Kirby was in the '60s and I knew had badly Stan Lee and Marvel screwed him over, but I had no idea how many comics he wrote before and after WWII before even creating the Fantastic Four.
"I was being crowded out of the market with my own work, done when I was ten years younger"
Captain America's iconic shield, which was originally triangular, became round because of a dispute over its likeness to another character called the Shield.
I appreciate the honesty inherent in acknowledging the 'he said, she said, they said' when speaking of the early years, filtered through acrimony, law suits, careers that went awry. Also the ongoing attention paid to the tension between artists and writers looking for fulfilling, creative work over which they retained creative control and maybe even ownership, which could be 1w
It's no secret at this point that the artists, for decades, and even to this day, struggle to retain ownership of their work, even creative control, but it turns out the reality is even messier, 1w
What I 'Marvel' at is honestly how the company stayed in business long enough to become an IP farm for 1w
Howe doesn't hesitate to lay out the dirty laundry in the text and the footnotes, but it doesn't feel salacious, rather that it is trying to honour the fact that amongst groundbreaking imagination and epic highs and lows of productivity, commercial success and critical acclaim, there was a constantly disorganized or constantly reorganized hierarchy trying to stay one step ahead of eternally toxic office politics and owner 1w
Aside from the truly wild moments excerpted from the psychedelic 60s, stoned 70s, and coked out 80s, what truly amused me were the times when Howe went direct to reader with the shade, no disgruntled intermediary required. There are evidently comic book moments known as just plain bad, and he does not hold back. 💅🏼
1w
Now I really, really want to read a history of DC comics. 1w