Although I have always been an avowed
partisan of DC Comics, I inevitably go through my phases of reading
and even collecting various Marvel Comics – most notably from about
1975 through the early 1980s when I was as rabid an “X-Fan” as
you'll ever find, and in more recent years acquired a deepening
fascination with the wild innovation of the first decade or so of
“Silver-Age” Marvel in the 1960s – and I have a
more-than-passing familiarity with the basic continuity of that comics
Universe itself as well as the history of the comics company
throughout its now seventy-plus years. But I'd never, until now, read
such a systematic, albeit idiosyncratic, narrative of the full
history from beginning until virtually the present as appears here.
Howe writes a fascinating story that strips away many of the myths,
digging beneath the facade of the “Merry Marvel Bullpen” (to whom
he dedicates his work) to reveal the usually less-than-attractive
reality of competing creative personalities and interests as Marvel
has come back repeatedly from disastrous implosions of its own making
and recently transformed into an explosion of multimedia domination.
