The Secret History of Marvel Comics

Background

This book is a history of the Marvel Comics.

Umm... actually. No it's not. That was just the title. There's a sub-title in small print. Let me see...

This book is a history of "Jack Kirby and the moonlighting artists at Martin Goodman's empire."

(Opens book and starts reading. Scans chapter headings. Flicks through pages.)

Wait. Scratch that. This book isn't about that at all! In fact, it's a book about... umm... a bunch of stuff mostly related to Martin Goodman's many publishing businesses.

Story Details

First, the basics. Hardback, 7½" x 10¼" with no dust jacket. 304 pages with many illustrations in full-color.

Writer Blake Bell is an expert regarding Bill Everett and Steve Ditko. He has a friend Michael J. Vassallo and between them they own an extensive collection of the pre-Marvel pulp books and magazines published by the various companies of Martin Goodman, up to and including the golden age comics.

This book is a brain-dump of everything these guys could think to say about Martin Goodman's publishing empire — being quite a lot more than most people know, but not quite enough to fill a book. That's totally understandable since most of this stuff happened a long time ago, and it's not easy finding reliable and consistent sources. In the end, only the first third of the book is actually "history" — of which a good 50% of that is illustrations. So the entire book contains maybe 50 pages of original writing and the rest is reproductions of books and magazines.

Specifically, the last two thirds is 200 pages of artist-specific illustrations of magazine covers and interior pulp-magazine art pages for a selection of important early artists (plus some of Stan Lee's early prose for good measure.)

Within the hundred pages of "history" content, the underlying theme is Martin Goodman's convoluted pathway through the slimeball, scumbag pulp magazine industry, from his start in the later 1920's until his departure in the early 1970's. But that pathway runs far from smoothly. The narrative lurches backwards and forwards and from side-to-side in a disconcerting way. Even within a chapter, the thread of the discussion will suddenly halt, and transmogrify itself into (for example) a detailed breakdown and listing of Western magazines published by Red Star during a four year period including an analysis of how the numbering erroneously desynchronized from the title changes. Then we might jump back 20 years to review the early years of a competing publisher, in the process revisiting with new wording a theme or a quote that we already saw in a previous chapter.

Despite my best efforts to determine a structure to the book, I found myself unable to perceive any consistent chronological flow, nor any clear thematic focus to the chapters. After reading my way through the textual part of the book, I felt like I had just been through a particularly violent and poorly-designed roller coaster. Or indeed, that I had taken three trips on that roller-coaster — since the book seemed to frequently return to topics which I felt we had covered before.

General Comments

The two writers of this book clearly have a depth of knowledge, and have assembled a good stash of facts, quotes, and historical references. They have "done the research", that was never in doubt.

Unfortunately, "being an expert and doing the research" is necessary but absolutely not sufficient when it comes to writing and publishing a book. In a history book like this, the "what you say" is important, but the "how you say it" is just as vital. A good history book needs to be both readable at the time, and be a well-structured and accessible reference document for later. But this book is neither of those things.

Sure, I give Blake and Michael full marks for enthusiasm and access to source material. But somebody needed to sit them down and ask some basic questions like "What is the book called, and what is the theme. How are the chapters going to be structured so that the reader can understand a flow, a narrative?"

Because the story of the early days of Marvel is complex in many dimensions. It exists as a chronological story, but also as a set of themes, and as the product of many recurring personalities. For a reader to make any sense of this history, they need all the help they can get from the writers and editors.

That help isn't provided. Yes each chapter does make an attempt to focus on a topic, but each one soon get bogged down in some detailed listing of the individual titles of specific sub-genre (Western, Romance, Violence, Pop-Culture, Sci-Fi, etc), then jumps back to the 1930's, before getting distracted by some secondary character, and inevitably turning into what feels like a re-hash of the previous chapters.

The last 200 pages is a portfolio of "Artist Profile" illustrations from pulp magazines for a couple of dozen artists. They are described in the books sub-title as "The Moonlighting Artists", but most of the art works appear to be taken from Martin Goodman's titles, hence the content has no obvious connection with the "Moonlighting" episode.

Overall Rating

There is a good book buried deep inside the content that lies between the two covers. Unfortunately, editor J. Michael Catron didn't manage to find it and bring it to the surface.

Instead, we are offered this rambling, lurching, repetitive, unstructured scramble of a book where each individual paragraph is indisputably interesting and well-researched but the whole is very much less than the sum of the overlapping and confusing parts.

Two-and-a-half webs.

I'm glad I own this book. It contains much valuable historical information that isn't to be found elsewhere. But I absolutely did not enjoy reading it.