Opinion | Book review: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, by Sean Howe
It's hard to imagine, with superhero movies dominating the box office - comic book films topped the 2012 and 2013 global box offices - that Stan Lee, co-creator of many of Marvel's larger-than-life characters, had to sell Hollywood on the idea of making movies based on his characters.
by Sean Howe
Harper
4 stars
Ben Sin
It's hard to imagine, with superhero movies dominating the box office - comic book films topped the 2012 and 2013 global box offices - that Stan Lee, co-creator of many of Marvel's larger-than-life characters, had to sell Hollywood on the idea of making movies based on his characters. But that was indeed the case from the 1970s to the 1990s, when Lee spent much of his time unsuccessfully negotiating with Hollywood studios.
At the time, the concept of a movie about a man with spider-like powers or a muscle-bound green monster, weren't taken seriously by the studios; in fact the comic book medium was dismissed by the public as lowbrow entertainment. Still, undeterred by years of setbacks - projects would be agreed upon only to get stuck in Hollywood development hell - Lee kept chugging along.
Lee's three-decade hustle to take the likes of Spider-Man and Iron Man from script to cinema screen is only a small part of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, an exhaustive account of a company that went from a two-man operation - Lee and the company's founder, Martin Goodman - publishing pulp horror comics to a multibillion-dollar enterprise backed by Disney.
A former Entertainment Weekly editor and a lifelong comic fan, Sean Howe interviewed more than 150 people - including most of the important players who shaped the comic industry over the past seven decades - and the result is a book with myriad interesting anecdotes. (For example, Hugh Hefner came up with the name "Playboy" after Goodman, who published a magazine named Stag, refused to grant Hefner rights to name his magazine "Stag Party").
The book's highlights are the chapters detailing Marvel in the 1960s, when the company came to fame by offering America a flawed cast of heroes with everyday problems. Peter Parker's struggles with bills and girls when not fighting crime as Spider-Man, or Tony Stark's alcoholism and heart problems outside of his Iron Man armour, was a seminal change of pace from the original batch of heroes created by rival DC Comics, led by a god-like figure (Superman) and a man who could buy anything in the world (Batman).