Operating out of a tiny office on Madison Avenue in the early
1960s, a struggling company called Marvel Comics presented a cast
of brightly costumed characters distinguished by smart banter and
compellingly human flaws. Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Captain
America, the Incredible Hulk, the Avengers, Iron Man, Thor, the
X-Men, Daredevil - these superheroes quickly won children's hearts
and sparked the imaginations of pop artists, public intellectuals,
and campus radicals. Over the course of a half century, Marvel's
epic universe would become the most elaborate fictional narrative
in history and serve as a modern American mythology for millions of
readers. Throughout this decades-long journey to becoming a
multibillion-dollar enterprise, Marvel's identity has continually
shifted, careening between scrappy underdog and corporate behemoth.
As the company has weathered Wall Street machinations, Hollywood
failures, and the collapse of the comic book market, its characters
have been passed along among generations of editors, artists, and
writers-also known as the celebrated Marvel Bullpen. Entrusted to
carry on tradition, Marvel's contributors-impoverished child
prodigies, hallucinating peaceniks, and mercenary careerists among
them-struggled with commercial mandates, a fickle audience, and,
over matters of credit and control, one another. For the first
time, Marvel Comics reveals the outsized personalities behind the
scenes, including Martin Goodman, the self-made publisher who
forayed into comics after a get-rich-quick tip in 1939; Stan Lee,
the energetic editor who would shepherd the company through thick
and thin for decades; and Jack Kirby, the World War II veteran
who'd co-created Captain America in 1940 and, twenty years later,
developed with Lee the bulk of the company's marquee characters in
a three-year frenzy of creativity that would be the grounds for
future legal battles and endless debates. Drawing on more than one
hundred original interviews with Marvel insiders then and now,
Marvel Comics is a story of fertile imaginations, lifelong
friendships, action-packed fistfights, reformed criminals, unlikely
alliances, and third-act betrayals - a narrative of one of the most
extraordinary, beloved, and beleaguered pop cultural entities in
America's history.
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