Review: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

Writer: Sean Howe
Published: HarperCollins, 2012; $26.99

Most published histories of Marvel Comics have been decidedly narrow in their scope. Several have focused on Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and the superhero explosion of the early 1960s; others, like the Marvel-endorsed Marvel Universe and Marvel Chronicle, have centered on the evolution of the company’s characters and continuity. One book, Dan Raviv’s Comic Book Wars, has been written about Marvel’s legal wranglings in the 1990s (including its two years of bankruptcy and eventual sale to Toy Biz), and to my knowledge, it’s the only book to devote itself fully to a single period in Marvel history other than the 1960s. No other book has attempted to look as broadly (or as candidly) at the company’s business practices, publishing strategies, and editorial philosophy as Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

The enduring figures that emerge in Howe’s book aren’t fictional characters like Spider-Man, Captain America, and the Hulk, but real-life personas ranging from Lee, Kirby, and Martin Goodman in Marvel’s early years to Steve Gerber, Chris Claremont, Frank Miller, and Jim Shooter (among many others) in more recent ones. Of course, Marvel has published so many comics, and its characters have been the focus of so many cross-media tie-in products (ranging from action figures to billion-dollar movie franchises), that it would take far more than one book to detail the entirety of the company’s output. A book like this must utilize some principles of selection to narrow its focus, in other words, and the ones Howe chooses are fairly transparent: the longest and most detailed sections of the book cover the 1970s comics – written and illustrated by a motley crew of acid-trippers that included Gerber, Jim Starlin, and Steve Englehart – which introduced Howe to comic books when he was young.

At other times, though, Howe’s focus seems more arbitrary, and he makes some startling omissions. For example, there is little discussion of Marvel’s forays into licensed properties like Conan the Barbarian, Transformers, He-Man, and the Micronauts during the 1970s and 1980s. Even the acquisition of the Star Wars license merits a mere half a page, with no follow-up on Marvel’s subsequent exploitation of the franchise or the manner in which the company ended up dropping most of its licenses by the early 1990s. And while Howe is quick to point out Marvel’s penchant for allegorizing real-world issues during the 1960s and ’70s, he fails to comment on the often frighteningly conservative nature of so many comics that attempted to do the same in the 1980s, ranging from Secret Wars to The ’Nam (which briefly toppled The Uncanny X-Men, one of the comics Howe discusses most, as the industry’s highest-selling comic book).

In the end, although it’s respectable on the one hand that so much information on Marvel’s history has been gathered in one place, Howe actually tells us fairly little that hasn’t been “told” at some point before. There are even places where he uses misinformation to construct the “story” he wants to tell; Jack Kirby’s tale about encountering a crying Stan Lee as movers carried furniture out of the Marvel offices, for instance, has long been considered apocryphal. It certainly aids Howe in his aim to undermine Lee whenever possible, though, as well as in his characterization of the Lee/Kirby relationship as little more than a decades-long feud.

The book’s almost immediate status at the time of its publication as Marvel’s “definitive” history is interesting, since Howe’s book probably tells us less about Marvel’s history than it does about prevailing opinions toward Marvel (and mainstream superhero comics in general) today. In fact, with its focus on the battles fought between writers, editors, and corporate management, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story actually emerges as a sort of vague protest on behalf of creator rights. The ethics of staging such a protest in a book like this are complicated, though – more complicated, I think, than Howe seems to want to acknowledge. That’s especially true when it comes to his characterization of individual creators as essentially either saints to be pitied or sinners who deserve every lick they take – as people who have either “earned” or forfeited their rights as creators, by virtue of the quality of their work.

Howe’s heart may be in the right place, but linking a creator’s rights with the “quality” of his or her creations, even implicitly, is problematic – not just because “quality” lies in the eye of the beholder, but also because Howe often equates quality with sales figures. (It’s for this reason, I assume, that Howe feels comfortable heaping praise on creators like Frank Miller, despite the casual misogyny inherent to even the “best” of Miller’s work.) Accounted for this way, the efforts of writers and artists are of merit only in proportion to their contribution to an employer’s bank account. Sadly, this is an attitude toward creator rights tacitly espoused by a huge percentage of readers and even creators today, who are either unwilling or unable to stand up for the rights of artists and writers – or even for such universally acclaimed figures as Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, and Alan Moore – when they (or their estates) are deliberately and blatantly wronged by Marvel and DC.

If this argument seems far-fetched, or overly cynical, then consider the example of The Avengers, the 2012 film directed by Joss Whedon. Whedon was paid more to write and direct the film than Kirby was paid by Marvel in his lifetime (and Whedon will be paid even more to work on the sequel), despite the fact that Kirby co-created nearly the entire cast of characters and toiled on the stories Marvel’s films are largely based on for nearly two decades, in some cases. Furthermore, unlike Whedon, Kirby’s name did not appear in the film’s marketing and only appeared in its end credits after controversy was raised over reports of its absence. All of these things were apparently non-issues for casual filmgoers (most of whom likely were not aware of them) or even, more surprisingly, for long-time fans in a better position to know the facts; with a worldwide gross of over $1.5 billion, The Avengers remains the third highest-grossing film of all time. Amidst its success, it was Whedon, not Kirby, who got the credit (and the paycheck).

Whedon is an exception to the rule, though; Avengers was destined for financial success, with or without him. The film was heavily marketed as “Marvel’s The Avengers,” reinforcing a disturbing perception that has entered the public consciousness in the last several years. This perception, aggressively fostered by movie-marketing campaigns but nonetheless bought into (literally) by movie-going audiences, is one of Marvel and DC not as corporations, but as the literal authors of the adventures of their franchised characters (again – “Marvel’s” The Avengers). This is the precise mentality which proponents of creator rights have long struggled to combat, and which threatens constantly to absorb the ideas of so many writers and artists within the ever-widening corporate maw that has already swallowed up so much of America’s intellectual property.

But, more to the point, it is a mentality which histories like Howe’s, in spite of its author’s seemingly good intentions, subtly reinforce. This is perhaps most obvious in the book’s title, which claims “Marvel Comics” (not “the creators of Marvel Comics”) as the subject of its “untold story.” However, it comes through even more clearly in the book’s final chapter, a sparsely written apologia for the last decade of Marvel’s cultural output which ends not with a discussion of the creators, but of their creations. “Multiple manifestations of Captain America and Spider-Man and the X-Men float in elastic realities, passed from one custodian to the next,” Howe writes, discussing the pervasiveness of the characters across all forms of media, “and their heroic journeys are, forever, denied an end.”

With these lines, Howe abandons his sympathetic tone toward comics creators, who are now figured as the mere “custodians” of their own creations. And while on the one hand Howe’s final discussion of Marvel’s focus on corporate synergy is hyper-critical of the company's business strategies, the author ultimately locates tragedy not in the ways the company’s architects have been creatively straitjacketed and legally mistreated over the years, but in the fact that a collection of corporate-owned, fictional characters will never receive a proper end to “their” stories. In the end, Howe asks us to feel moral outrage on the part of multi-billion-dollar franchises rather than for the men and women who built them from the ground up, many of whom have died (or are currently dying) completely impoverished, forced to turn to fans on the Internet for help paying their medical bills.

And so, as with “Marvel’s” The Avengers and so many other examples we might draw from popular culture today, the torch of moral ownership is passed smilingly from creator to corporation. The seduction of Howe to this attitude, despite his affection for the individuals whose creative efforts have resulted in the rich history he celebrates, may well be indicative of more than the failings of a single historian. Indeed, it may point to the ultimate inability of our culture to resist the constant sensory bombardment, staged by multimedia corporations, which we face, morally and intellectually, on a daily basis. It is a frightening world, in which corporations can be popularly imagined as both the legal and moral owners of intellectual property, and in which the obligations we perceive to fictional characters and their corporate masters take precedence over our obligations to other human beings.

A Return (of Sorts)

Here’s the short version: I’m back, and I will be posting more reviews. The first one goes up later today. For the long version, read on…

A lot of things have happened in the world of comics since the last time I posted here: line-wide crossovers and big-budget superhero movies have come and gone, publishers and creators have seen their individual stars rise and fall, hundreds of new graphic novels and collected editions have been released (even as the shadow of “digital” looms over print as the inevitable way of the future), and overall, comic books have penetrated the mass culture to an extent never before seen. It’s an exciting time, fraught with the uncertainty that always accompanies transition.

There have been changes for me on a personal level, too. I finished my master’s degree and I’ve now been teaching college writing courses for two years. Fittingly enough, I’ve come to realize that teaching college freshmen to be better writers makes you a better writer yourself – or, at least, it makes you think more about the kind of writer you want to be. I’ve done a lot of writing in the last two years, most of which I’m extremely proud of. Some of it has had to do with comics – my first presentation at an academic conference, in 2011, was on the Vietnam War comics of Don Lomax – but most of it hasn’t. It took me a while to realize how much I missed it.

I did think about returning to this blog a few times, but something has always held me back. It’s tempting to make the excuse that I’ve simply been too busy – that may have been the case at certain times, but it wasn’t always. A large part of my staying away for so long was that, truth be told, I’ve become fairly dismayed with the direction the comic book industry has taken over the last few years. The downright Machiavellian tactics that Marvel and DC have leveraged against former writers and artists, along with the lowest-common-denominator blockbuster mentality espoused by both companies toward their comic book lines and movie franchises, has weighed heavily on my conscience, especially as someone who once patronized both companies without a second thought.

For a long time, I think I felt that to write about the books Marvel and DC published would be in a sense to condone actions that I found deplorable. I was still very much locked into the perception that a review was fundamentally either a recommendation or a non-recommendation – a mentality that simply couldn’t coexist with my belief that to financially support these companies, out of some naive desire to be “entertained,” was, for me, morally reprehensible. I still often feel this way, although I am trying to see things in less black-and-white terms and to be more understanding of those who have made choices different from my own.

The main thing that’s changed for me is the way I think about criticism. One of the main reasons I stopped posting here was that, by the time I started teaching (shortly after my last post), I was having a hard time seeing writing comic book reviews as being “my place” anymore. I enjoyed doing it, but it was awfully time-consuming and it didn’t seem like the kind of “academic” writing that leads to a tenure-track job – not because of the subject matter, but because criticism is widely perceived as a non-academic form of writing.

Then I came into contact with the work of the film critic Robin Wood, who has expanded my outlook toward many things – not the least of which is the role of criticism itself. According to Wood, the critic is “committed to self-exposure…s/he must make clear that any response to a work of art or entertainment is grounded not only in the work itself but in the critic’s psychological makeup, personal history, values, prejudices, obsessions” (Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan xiii). In this respect, the work of the critic is more personal than that of the scholar or theorist, and as such it is intrinsically braver and riskier. In the hierarchy of criticism, scholarship, and theory, Wood argues, “criticism occupies (or should occupy) the highest position, simply because the critic is the only one centrally and explicitly concerned with the question of value, which is the most important – the ultimate – question” (xiv).

True criticism, in the sense that Wood discusses it, is exceptionally rare. Most reviews of comic books – and, for that matter, of movies, television, literature, and music – do concern themselves with the question of value, but only superficially: “is this a work that’s worth your time, your money?” Far fewer reviews address the question of a work’s intellectual or ideological value: “What arguments, implicit and explicit, does the work make about our society, about how we should live? Carried to their logical extremes, do the arguments hold up?” Frequently they do not, and because so many reviews concern themselves first and foremost with superficial questions, they miss the most crucial aspects of the works they discuss.

I think I came close to writing true, un-superficial criticism a small handful of times on this blog, particularly in my reviews of 9/11 Heartbreaker and Monkey vs. Robot. Those were reviews in which I wrote very personally, with little concern for specifically “recommending” the books in question, and they are among the reviews I remain proudest of having written. By contrast, the posts I’m least proud of are the ones which, in the end, were little more than long-winded recommendations (or non-recommendations). Recommendations have their purpose – in fact, I contribute to a weekly post at the Collected Comics Library which spotlights noteworthy upcoming collected editions – but they are not criticism in the true sense.

I’m not sure whether I have the ability to consciously and consistently produce true criticism or not, but I would like to try. I think it’s what I always wanted to do with this blog, although it took a few years away for me to begin to see how I might go about it. I don’t have all the answers, but I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when I approach my writing here with such a clear objective in mind. The reviews I write going forward will be significantly different, I hope, from most that I wrote in the past – I will not give the books numerical scores, for example, and I will not presume to tell “you,” the hypothetical reader, how to spend (or not spend) your time or money. I can speak only for myself – or, more specifically, as Wood writes, from my own “beliefs and values, political position, background, [and] influences” (xiv). I hope the result will be something unique and interesting that can stand next to the work of the critics and bloggers whose writing I most admire.

I’d like to close this post by giving thanks to several individuals who have played a part in my return to this blog: to fellow bloggers Matches, dl316bh, Kris Shaw, Mark Ginocchio, Doug Glassman, and Collected Editions, for producing excellent content and entertaining my ramblings in the comment sections of their own collected editions blogs over the last two years; to the “regulars” of IGN’s Comics General Board, the community that has been my home on the web for more years than I care to count; to my fellow contributors for the Collected Comics Library’s “Six Collected Editions” column, for producing stellar recommendations each and every week; to all of the people who have left a comment or emailed me about the blog during my absence; and to the CCL’s Chris Marshall, for ultimately getting me back in the game.

See you here later today for the first of the new reviews.

Review: Maximum Fantastic Four

Writers: Stan Lee, Walter Mosley, and Mark Evanier
Artist: Jack Kirby
Collects: Fantastic Four #1 (1961)
Published: Marvel, 2005; $49.99

There’s probably little to say about Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four that hasn’t already been said by people more knowledgeable and more eloquent than me. Still, I feel like I’m constantly reading comments from people who have never read a single page of their work, and I find that terribly saddening. If you’re one of the many people who haven’t experienced this seminal run at least in part, I encourage you to pick up the first Marvel Masterworks: Fantastic Four trade paperback, which collects the first ten issues of the comic. For those already initiated, though, Maximum Fantastic Four is a truly amazing presentation of the series’ first issue, one that fully lives up to its name.

Conceived by the novelist Walter Mosley as a “visual exegesis” of Fantastic Four #1, the book provides perhaps the most innovative reproduction of a single comic book that I’ve ever seen. Nearly every panel is blown up to extraordinary size and devoted its own entire page, with some of the pages folding out to give certain panels an even more dramatic flair. Segments of dialogue and narration are occasionally pushed off the page in order to give more room to the artwork, placing the emphasis on the utter spectacle of Kirby’s artwork rather than the plot itself.

That being the case, Maximum Fantastic Four certainly isn’t the way to read this issue if you’ve never read it before. But if (like me) you’ve already read it several times or more, the presentation here is more than a breath of fresh air; it’s a release, a chance to marvel at the sight of super-powered men (and one super-powered woman) doing the spectacular things that we only wish we could do. Indeed, this book suggests a way of reading comics completely different from that which many readers today are accustomed to – one in which each and every panel is a work of art unto itself, and worthy of individual attention.

It’s a way of reading that I’ve embraced (without even realizing it) ever since I started reading comics by Lee and Kirby as a kid. Over the years, I’ve often puzzled over why I seem to take longer to read my comics than a lot of people do. The answer, it’s clear to me now, is that while I often pause to admire an artist’s work, many readers simply let their eyes fly across the page without taking the time to truly absorb what they’ve experienced visually. In many cases, especially when the artwork is average or subpar, there’s not much fault to be found in that; but, as Mosley reminds us with this book, the rewards for taking our time with artists like Kirby are nearly limitless.

The main content is supplemented with wonderful essays by Mosley and Mark Evanier (author of Kirby: King of Comics). In addition to explaining Mosley’s reasons for creating the book, the two writers also contextualize the comic within its time and provide the reader with a deeper understanding of its enduring influence on American popular culture. If you don’t already believe that it was pure magic flowing from Lee’s typewriter and Kirby’s pen when they created the Fantastic Four, these pieces, in combination with the unique presentation of the material itself, will likely change your mind. In the end, Maximum Fantastic Four is truly an affirmation of the genius of two creators at an artistic peak, one of the many peaks that each would experience throughout his long career in comics. And even more importantly, it’s an affirmation of why we read comics – of that sense of exhilaration and wonder that draws us back again and again to the medium we love.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Review: Marvel Masterworks: Rawhide Kid, Vol. 1

Writer: Stan Lee
Artist: Jack Kirby
Collects: Rawhide Kid #17-25 (1960-61)
Published: Marvel, 2006; $49.99 (HC), $24.99 (TPB)

Rawhide Kid was one of the earliest Silver Age collaborations between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but for whatever reason it’s also one of the least talked about. Beginning just one month before the premiere issue of Fantastic Four, the Lee/Kirby version of the Rawhide Kid was actually what we might call a “relaunch” or a “reboot” today. Sixteen issues of the series, written by Lee and illustrated mostly by Bob Brown and Dick Ayers, had been published from 1955 to 1957, when it was cancelled. It wasn’t until 1961, four years after Kirby had rejoined the ranks of Marvel, that a 17th issue finally saw print. It might as well have been the first issue of a completely different series.

Much like Atlas’s short-lived Black Knight series in the 1950s, Rawhide Kid is surprising in its resemblance to Marvel’s early superhero comics. Like Spider-Man and the Hulk (and unlike the traditional heroes of Silver Age western comics), the Kid is a hopelessly misunderstood, even hated, figure. Branded a murderer and hunted by the law, he’s actually a good-hearted young man who does his best to help out in whatever town he happens to find himself in, no matter how untrusting the locals may be. Some of the best issues in this collection end with the Kid actually playing into his bad reputation to save the day – a gesture that both ingratiates him to the townspeople and necessitates his swift departure at the end of the story.

Lee’s success at shaping the Kid into such a tragic figure (and in so few pages, too) is pretty impressive, especially given that there’s not much of a supporting cast for him to play off of. The lack of recurring characters is the book’s only real weakness, since it leads Lee and Kirby to constantly fill space with scenarios that get somewhat repetitive after a while. In the stock story that grows most tiresome, a generic desperado challenges the Kid to a shoot-out in the hopes of proving himself the fastest gun in the West, only to be shown up by the Kid’s dazzling speed and accuracy with a pair of Colts. This being a mostly bloodless era in comic book history, the Kid’s enemies are always defeated the same way, with their guns harmlessly shot out of their hands.

It’s this basic formula, however, that makes the more unique stories really shine. One of my favorites, in which the Kid vows never to use his weapons again, reminded me of the excellent Bruce Lee film The Big Boss – a fitting connection, since Stan Lee was a professed fan of the martial arts actor (but also an interesting one, in that the comic came out ten years before the movie). Kirby’s artwork here is excellent, and for whatever reason, it’s actually significantly better, from a technical standpoint, than the first few issues of Fantastic Four. The reasons for this difference aren’t clear, but perhaps Kirby felt a simpler style was more befitting of a comic about superheroes (a genre which he hadn’t drawn regularly for a number of years at this point), while a more detailed one was better for westerns.

Either way, Kirby made the right decision; Rawhide Kid legitimately evokes the feel of a classic Hollywood western, and the characters of Fantastic Four stand out, as superheroes arguably should, in colorful, iconic, pop art style. But more on the Fantastic Four next time. For now, Rawhide Kid is a great example of a Lee/Kirby work that straddles two eras of comics – one in which storytellers still clung to the familiar tropes of the Golden Age, and another in which they pushed comics to a place the medium had never gone before. It was a time of emerging self-awareness, playful experimentation, and reluctant ambition. It was a time when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby stood on the edge of greatness.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Review: Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Era Black Knight/Yellow Claw, Vol. 1

Writers: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Al Feldstein
Artists: Joe Maneely, Jack Kirby, Fred Kida, John Romita Sr., Syd Shores, Werner Roth, George Roussos
Collects: Black Knight #1-5, Yellow Claw #1-4 (1955-57)
Published: Marvel, 2009; $59.99

One of the more unusual releases in Marvel’s long-running hardcover series, Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Era Black Knight/Yellow Claw is both a peculiar mash-up of two very different series and a true gem of 1950s comic book storytelling. Make no mistake, there is absolutely no connection between Black Knight and Yellow Claw – one is medieval in setting, while the other is a contemporary spy thriller – aside from their both being short-lived series with art by Joe Maneely. But it’s a nice way of packaging the two titles nonetheless, since neither is long enough to have warranted an individual release.

I went into the book expecting Black Knight to be a little dull, to be honest; Errol Flynn’s depiction of Robin Hood aside, I’m not that interested in the 1940s and ‘50s Hollywood version of the Middle Ages, from which this comic very obviously takes its cues. After only a few pages, though, it became clear that writer Stan Lee was also influenced by, of all things, Golden Age superhero comics. In fact, there’s a lot more to the Black Knight than the average medieval protagonist. Although he spends most of his time as King Arthur’s mild-mannered nephew, that’s really just his secret identity; whenever the king’s life is in peril, he pretends cowardice and steals away to become the Black Knight. In his daily life he’s despised by the court, especially by the woman he loves – who, in the typical fashion of superhero stories, is infatuated with his mysterious alter ego. The formula isn’t at all unlike the one used in the early appearances of characters like Superman, Captain America, and Spider-Man, but seeing it transposed into medieval times gives it a unique spin.

Yellow Claw is a fascinating read as well, albeit for completely different reasons. Although the first issue, like the majority of Black Knight, is drawn by the excellent Joe Maneely, the writing leaves a little to be desired. Penned by Al Feldstein (the former head writer for EC Comics, which had closed shop for good two years earlier), the Yellow Claw character is essentially just a clone of Fu Manchu, an evil Chinese mystic bent on world domination. Despite the formulaic structures of this first batch of short stories, Feldstein does do an admirable job of dodging the racist undertones that have plagued most literary works featuring Fu Manchu and characters modeled after him – and he does so in large part by giving the stories an Asian-American protagonist, in the form of FBI agent Jimmy Woo.

Interestingly, though, Yellow Claw is less remembered for the positive (and progressive) portrayal of its Asian-American hero than it is for the fact that it heralded Jack Kirby’s return to Marvel Comics after several years working for the competition. Kirby picked up the book’s reigns starting with the second issue, from which point he both wrote and drew the comic for three full issues before its cancellation. This was the first work Kirby had done at Marvel since his departure from the company in 1941, and the energy he brings to the page is pretty exciting, even if the stories themselves are too short to leave much of an impact. Still, with its off-kilter plots and bizarre-looking bad guys, it’s a weird and wonderful comic in that special way that just screams “Kirby.”

As good as Kirby’s work is, it’s also worth pointing out what a brilliant and imaginative artist Maneely was as well. His work on Black Knight made me feel I’d been thrown into some early MGM Technicolor spectacular, and his one issue of Yellow Claw is notable for the sheer breadth of convincing facial expressions throughout. Sadly, Maneely was killed in a car accident (at the age of only 32) just three years before the beginning of Marvel’s 1960s superhero revival. It’s fascinating to think of how much different the comics industry might have been if he had lived to contribute ideas to the Marvel Universe, and I’m looking forward to learning more about him in Michael Vassallo’s upcoming biography (which is essentially previewed in a lengthy essay by Vassallo at the end of this volume).

As wildly different as Black Knight and Yellow Claw are, this book turned out to be a really great read. This is a fun book for continuity buffs, too – Jimmy Woo continues to run around with S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Agents of Atlas today, and it was revealed at one point that the modern Black Knight is directly descended from the medieval one depicted here. Between the quality of the stories and the fact that it features the work of two truly excellent artists, it’s an incredibly nicely done package.

Rating: 4 out of 5