Nuff Said

Just a quick take on Sean Howe's Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

The book goes pretty far into all the personalities and ups and downs at Marvel--perhaps more in-depth than non-geeks would care about.  Still, it's a fascinating story not that widely known, even though I suppose Marvel was, and is, the most significant comic book publisher of the past fifty years.

The book has two major problems, one that may be personal to me, the other that almost anyone can agree upon.

First, while there's a lot to the Marvel story, the part I care most about is the Golden Age of the 60s.  The years when Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and others were creating or updating titles like Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Hulk, Captain America, Thor and others.  They changed the style, the look, the vocabulary of the moribund genre of superhero comics, and we're still feeling that seismic shock today.

But all this is told in the first quarter of the book (after a quick survey of the decades before the early 60s).  Everything after was an anticlimax, and the book became tougher to get through as it went along.

Second, the book has no photos or illustrations.  I assume this was a business decision, but some subjects scream out for pictures, and none more than comic books.  I'd like to see the drawings so often referred to, and even more--since I already know what Silver Surfer looks like--the faces of the people behind them.

Would it be possible to have a new, but not tremendously more expensive, edition that takes care of this problem?