ADVANCE REVIEW: Marvel: The First 80 Years: The True Story of a Pop-Culture Phenomenon

Review by ‘The Professor’ Bud Young, Host of No-Prize Podcast

Visually stunning.  This is the first thing that comes to mind when turning the 160 pages of this beautiful hardcover edition of Titan Magazines Marvel The First 80 Years The True Story of a Pop-Culture Phenomenon. Comics/Creators/Culture/Merchandise.  Those are the topics this book promises to cover in what amounts to a celebration of Marvel Comics.

Every page in this time is thick with full-color, glossy art reproductions of covers, interior pages, rarely and not-so-rarely seen photographs of Lee, Kirby and the Marvel bullpen that most hardcore fans are familiar with.

The text I was not so happy with, with several instances of shrinking font size, the bottoms of some sentences disappearing into the page and a spelling error here and there.  I’m not sure if it was my copy that had a production flaw or if this is a uniform thing.

The book is separated into 8 chapters, each covering a full decade of Marvel Comics history, beginning in the 1940s with Marvel Comics #1 and continuing through the Timely and Atlas years. Also eye-catching is a time-line that follows throughout, highlighting the arguably biggest moments in Marvel’s history.

The comics are covered in depth in each of the chapters, and as mentioned before, the art is beautifully reproduced.  Major characters origins are re-told along with several well-known stories of behind-the-scenes creations of Captain America, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four.

The creators get some love here too.  Lee and Kirby are of course spotlighted, as well as Ditko, Romita Sr., and Roy Thomas.  Each chapter highlights the most important creators of the decade, however, post-60s there is less of a focus on the creators, most getting merely a mention.

The culture is focused as a reflection of the times the comics were produced in.  Light is shined mainly on Marvel’s progressive and inclusive attitudes, beginning in 1964 with the debut of Black Panther, Marvel’s first black superhero in the pages of Fantastic Four #52.  Focus is also given to Amazing Spider-Man’s drug storyline in 1971’s #96-98, the coming out of Northstar in the pages of Alpha Flight, and the debuts of Miles Morales and Kamala Khan, among others.

Merchandise is merely touched on, mentioning video games, apparel and action figures.

If you are any kind of a Marvel Comics fan, you are going to want to pick up this book.  The landscape in the comics world changes noticeably in each decade, and the focus on characters specifically in the creative genius of Lee, Kirby, Ditko and Heck in 1963 and following through the 70s with the explosion of new titles and characters and a generation of creators that grew up on Marvel.  Englehart, Gerber, Conway, Wein, Friedrich and Claremont expanded the fabric of the Marvel Universe.  The X-Men on center stage in the 80s along with Jim Shooter and Secret Wars.  The focus on artists in the 90s with Liefeld, Jim Lee and others ending in the formation of Image, quickly shifting to the writers in the new millennium with Hollywood jumping in with Stracynski and Kevin Smith.  I won’t go into all of the details here, but there sure are alot of them, and it’s worth the read.

The major drawback to this book is that, at the end of the day, it’s produced by Disney Worldwide Publishing so there’s not alot of objectivity here and some important details get swept under the rug.  While Marvel’s tenure under Ron Perelman is touched on here, as well as their entrance into the stock market and acquiring Fleer, nothing is mentioned about Marvel’s self-distribution strategy, their buying of Toy Biz and their bankruptcy in the early 90s.  A bit of white-washing here, but hey, it’s a celebration, who wants to be a party pooper.

As I moved my way to the later pages, my big takeaway was how creative and relevant Marvel was in the 60s and 70s and how, in later decades they at first struggled to keep up with themselves and then seemed to lose their way a bit and have constantly shifted direction in an attempt to keep old readers while cultivating new ones.  It’s a delicate balancing act that has failed more often than it has succeeded.

Overall, this is a book that should be in your collection. A beautifully presented conversation starter.  A fairly one-sided interpretation of Marvel’s history, but when you’re writing your own story, you get to leave out the bad stuff.

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