I actually put down another book I was a third of the way through to read this and yet it left me feeling even more negative about an industry that I'd grown up with and worked in for many years...
As a (former) fan and 'blessed' with having earned a reasonable living from comics - some of it from Marvel - I approached this book pretty much knowing the bulk of it. What I wasn't aware of was some of the anecdotal stories passing back and forth about creators, nor the specifics of Marvel Comics as a publishing entity.
Generally though, despite its brevity it is something of an interminably boring study. Once the main protagonists had been reduced to bit part players (Lee, Kirby & Ditko), it was simply a cycle of wash, rinse, repeat over and over again. One thing overrides everything else in this account, there were very few periods in the company's history where it was anything like the pictures vividly described by Stan Lee in his soapboxes or in letter columns.
The book also sits squarely on the fence about copyright and ownership rights issues - returning to it regularly but treating it like magnolia paint. Yet Howe had two of the three chief protagonists still alive when he wrote this; maybe he asked them, maybe he didn't bother? Now, if someone wanted to approach this subject again, they'd probably end up with the same largely dull story with no one really able to add any insight - with Lee's death last year, there are only a few people left - all from the periphery - to consult and, of course, those consultations would be only anecdotal and difficult to verify.
What the book does do is show Marvel as an Arsehole Magnet and not just any common or garden arseholes, but extremely rich, powerful arseholes, who are painted in such a way as to confuse the reader into wondering how these massive vile human sphincters ever managed to make fortunes in the first place. Marvel has been owned, since Martin Goodman sold it off, by a list of people you wouldn't piss on if they were on fire and rarely was it run by the right people.
It also brings into clarity periods of Marvel's history that were often rumoured about, especially when I was writing my comics gossip column throughout the 1990s, and confirmed some stories that my former employer cut because he didn't want to upset an already precarious apple cart. In fact, Howe's exploration of the 1990s left me wondering why Comics International (the magazine I had been news editor of for nearly a decade) never did anything more than product promotion, especially given the ignorant treatment we got from Marvel (after Lou Bank left). I know the magazine's 'brief' was for brevity, lack of controversy and to act as a promotional tool for the comics industry (which, incidentally never afforded the magazine much more than a cursory nod, let alone buying adverts or offering anything to repay us for essentially doing their respective PR department's job for 10 years+), but it was ignoring real comics news to promote spandex.
Probably the most interesting section of the book was during Jim Shooter's reign, because it was essentially one of the few times when the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel was more of an arsehole than the executives holding the purse strings. That's not to say the owners of Marvel at the time weren't cut from the same cloth as those who preceded or succeeded them, but Shooter went from child prodigy who everyone looked up to into some horrible monster with scant regard for those who were under him. Perhaps he felt he needed to be as much of a cunt as his bosses, or perhaps with great power comes greater capacity to be a twat? Who can say? I met Shooter in 1993; he was offensive, aloof and very much a pompous arsehole - history taught him nothing.
The biggest problem with the book is that it's simply just a tad repetitive, a little like the medium it's covering. However, while Howe doesn't exactly write with any dynamism, it might be because his subject material followed similar cycles throughout its existence. He could possibly have avoided falling into this trap with some more interesting asides, maybe some editorialising in the margins, or perhaps covering the entire story rather than just the bits he relished in repeating. This book has the briefest of brief mentions to Marvel UK (or any of the other countries that took Marvel Comics on for their own markets). Marvel UK from Stan Lee's infamous appearance on Pebble Mill @ One through its Pet Shop Boys connection, my former employer's period there, how it spawned a number of big stars and then how it boomed in the wake of the comics boom of the 1990s - all completely overlooked and I kind of find that unforgivable...
Or its failure to mention the many dodgy business practices employed by (both) Marvel (and DC) throughout the '80s and '90s, nor how Marvel essentially spent their time, once the Direct Market was established, treating retailers like they were there to exploit, with scant regard to anyone's future. There was a brief mention from my old pal Lou Bank about Marvel's lack of support for the people paying their wages and then it was back to who's stabbing who in the back stories.
90% of the book covers up to the late 1990s; presumably it was written between 2010 and 2012 (for the cursory mentions of the Iron Man and Hulk films); the period after 1998 is almost breezed over - almost a decade and a half condensed into the last few fleeting chapters. It was like Howe avoided that period because he might write about people who still worked there or had aspirations to work there; the only people he concentrated on were former-employees many with grudges. No one with any - at the time - current connections (or gripes) were spoken to or made the final cut.
I always thought biographers, good ones, at least, were not frightened to burn some bridges to get the best story and I felt there were some good stories Howe simply didn't pursue. It might be because he's a biographer rather than someone who lived and worked in comics during that period; maybe it's because he's not a journalist and that was what was needed.
The whole thing needed to have a feel that the author was an expert about the subject he was writing about and that simply didn't come through at all. It was simply perfunctory. Comics is a weird and nuanced genre and doesn't conform to the real world of business in the same way as any other 'entertainment' industry, this probably needed to be reflected in the book, it wasn't.
While it has interesting moments and was an enjoyable read, it does feel like it was marketed as some wild and sexy expose of the company and yet reads like all the wild and sexy has been omitted.
Ultimately, it will leave comics historians, fans and those interested slightly empty and doesn't really offer enough to tempt non-comics fans from delving into its pages. There's too much Machiavellian shit in it and not enough informal general interest shit - it manages to take four colour brilliance and transform it into dull and boring monochrome.
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