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Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview Marvel Comics: The Untold Story a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Marvel Comics by Sean Howe. An unvarnished, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, behind-the-scenes account of one of the most dominant pop cultural forces in contemporary America Operating out of a tiny office on Madison Avenue in the early s, 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 Fo An unvarnished, unauthorized, behind-the-scenes account of one of the most dominant pop cultural forces in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story America Operating out of a tiny office on Madison Avenue in the early s, 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 Marvel Comics: The Untold Story 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. 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 ; 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 and, twenty years later, developed with Lee the bulk of the company's marquee characters Marvel Comics: The Untold Story 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, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story third-act betrayals— a narrative of one of the most extraordinary, beloved, and beleaguered pop cultural entities in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story history. Get A Copy. Marvel Comics: The Untold Storypages. More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Marvel Comicsplease sign up. Jason Good question. But you need to find the answer within yourself. See 1 question about Marvel Comics…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Feb 10, Kemper rated it really Marvel Comics: The Untold Story it Shelves: bidnessnon-fictioncomicshistory Super-heroes have gotten darker and more violent over the years, but compared to some of the people in charge of Marvel during that time Wolverine and the Punisher seem about as threatening as a glass of non-fat milk. Killers with razor sharp unbreakable claws and large guns are no match for the carnage a corporate Marvel Comics: The Untold Story worried about the stock price can Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Sean Howe gives a comprehensive history of how the pulp publishing company founded by a Depression-era hobo named Martin Goodman eve Super-heroes have gotten darker and more violent over the years, but compared to some of the people in charge of Marvel during that time Wolverine and the Punisher seem about as threatening as a glass of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story milk. Then it details the many trials, tribulations and triumphs the company would have as its characters became iconic parts of pop culture. In reality during these early years, Lee worked with a small staff in cramped offices while Jack Kirby drew in the basement of his home, and things were never as merry as Stan portrayed them to the fans. After Goodman sold the company Marvel would be bought and sold to various corporations Marvel Comics: The Untold Story business people most of who had no interest in doing anything other than squeezing every dime possible out of the characters while denying any kind of ownership or royalties to the people who created them. The stories of how creators were screwed out of rights have become legendary, and the constant law suits and bickering over who actually created the characters have become so common place as to not even be newsworthy any more. A fun fact that Marvel Comics: The Untold Story learned in this is that at one time Marvel put a boilerplate waiver on the backs of paychecks so that signing it to get the money became a forfeiture of potential royalties. The battles over the rights between the company and the creative people would pale in comparison to the many financial and legal fiascos Marvel would get into over the years due to the many buy-outs and chronic mismanagement. Howe does a nice job of showing how all the behind the scenes turmoil impacted the stories being churned out. The Marvel Comics: The Untold Story Wars mini-series started out as a promotional tie-in for a new line of toys, but became the prototype for the crossovers that are all too frequent events today. With the sale to Disney and huge success of movies like The Avengersyou might think this story has a happy ending, but Marvel still faces challenges today. In the digital age, the idea of buying pricey paper comics that can be read in minutes is a tough sell, and many question whether the money made in movies and merchandising has made the comic book obsolete. Aging fan boys grumble over the constant character deaths and crossovers, yet those remain the top selling books. Balancing the continuity demanded by long-time fans while still being accessible to new readers has become a nearly impossible task. Dan and I have some great ideas on how to resolve this issue if anyone from DC or Marvel reads this and would like to pay us a consulting fee. Many of these individual stories have been told before, but Howe gives not only a history, but a detailed picture of the ways that all the creative, business and legal issues have had a profound impact on the characters and the industry. View all 13 comments. Feb 16, Dan Schwent rated it really liked it Shelves: comics-to-uploadbookscomics, confession-time. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is the story of Marvel Comics, from its beginnings in the late thirties until fairly recently, with all the highs and lows in between. Confession Time: For most of my life, I've been a comic book fan. I've got around of them in boxes in my nerd cave and have numerous super hero shirts. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story was a very gripping read for me. I read the sanitized version of some of the events in Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comi Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is the story of Marvel Comics, from its beginnings in the late thirties until fairly recently, with all the highs and lows in between. I read the sanitized version of some of the events in Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics but I wasn't completely prepared for some of the things I learned. The story starts with Martin Goodman cashing in on the comic book craze but really gets interesting when he hires his nephew, a kid named Stan Lee, to do some editing. Once Joe Simon and Jack Kirby create Captain America, things kick into high gear until the 50's, when Seduction of the Innocent nearly kills the industry. Things circle the drain until a fateful golf game with the head of DC comics prompts Goodman to order Lee to create a team of superheroes. The Fantastic Four is created and the Marvel Age of comics kicks into full swing. The book covers a lot of behind the scenes info, like creators getting fucked out of royalties and original art. Anyone who's into comics has probably heard about that. The things I didn't know about, like a bunch of guys being into drugs, DC and Marvel negotiating for Marvel to license some DC characters, and what a tyrant Jim Shooter was, were much more interesting. It must have been maddening to work with Shooter after Secret Wars. While it might be boring for some, I found the inner workings of Marvel when it was being bought and sold several times in rapid succession to be fascinating. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story could people be handed the golden ticket only to wipe their asses with it? Jim Shooter seemed like a dictator but I think Tom DeFalco's throw everything against the wall and see what sticks strategy played a bigger part to the near death experience the comics industry suffered in the 90's. Also, Stan Lee seems even more like a hack and a tool than he did before I read the book. I think we're all quite lucky Marvel survived Marvel Comics: The Untold Story black hole of the 's comic market. It's crazy to think how many half-brain dead tyrants Marvel had at the helm before Quesada and Palmiotti finally turned things around. For a lifelong comic nerd, this book was one hell of a read. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story all 10 comments. Aug 12, Sam Quixote rated it liked it. You definitely have Marvel Comics: The Untold Story be deeply invested in the subject of Marvel Comics to enjoy this book because, wow, is there a ton of detail here! Most of it is pretty boring too. It's very dull stuff and the minutiae of who worked on what book when has very esoteric appeal. People Marvel Comics: The Untold Story Though that said, gossipy stories in comics, as this book proves, are pretty dry in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. People not getting along, cheap product being pushed, etc. What comes across most strongly is how little the people at Marvel gave a shit about the comics themselves. Almost from day 1 the plan seemed to be to make the comics as a stepping stone to what the true goal was: movies and merchandise and money money money! Well, they got there, and the book ends with the success of the first Avengers movie conquering the box office. And really, his shit comics were the best he could do. He made terrible comics and dreamt dreams of better things like the rest of us. Lee would then go back and fill in the word balloons and captions depending on what was happening in the panel. Take those away and the artist then has to do that Marvel Comics: The Untold Story become the writer, as it were. Not back then. Ditko, Kirby, et al. What made it worse was that the PT Barnum-esque Stan Lee often claimed that he was the creator of characters like Spider-Man and the Hulk, frequently ignoring and downplaying the contributions of the artist co-creators entirely. Sure, there also wouldn't be a Marvel without Stan Lee's efforts. I understand why he chased movies and TV so hard - success there would help the ailing comics market and allow it to continue and prosper - and he put in countless hours into broadening the appeal of the brand, as well as writing so many comics. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story - Wikipedia

I n the early s, a decade after its initial bursts of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story cachet and mass popularity, Marvel Comics was, like the rest of the industry, a victim of flat sales. What did the company have to lose by letting them take a crack at turning around sales? It was, in a more modest way, a repeat of what Hollywood had been experiencing for a few years, after a conflation of big-budget disasters and the successes of Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde convinced the studios that they might as well throw money at scrappy film school graduates and hope for the best. The hard-core comic readers came from all over the country. S tan Lee came into the office a few days a week, and still looked at the covers. It was around that time that Albert Einstein Landau came on the scene. Landau invited Feinberg to his home for a game of tennis, listed his accomplishments, and proposed ways in which he could improve the business. Perhaps Feinberg saw his own reflection in the short, abrupt, and aggressive Landau. By the time Chip got the news that Stan Lee was stepping down as president, Feinberg had already hired Landau. It was a done deal, and Chip was one step further down the chain of command. A lthough he was no longer president, Lee remained publisher of Marvel Comics — and, once Chip was gone, publisher of the magazines, too. Increasingly, though, it fell to Roy Thomas to bridge the widening gap between business and editorial interests. Unfortunately, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story was none presently writing for Marvel, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story Thomas improvised. I could never get inside his thinking there. For Fite, a former Marvel secretary and the only one of the three with writing experience, the problems began with the name of the series she was writing. Like Luke Cage, the Cat was subjected to medical experiments that gave her super powers. Her costume was simply a bikini. By the last issue, it seemed that Gerber Marvel Comics: The Untold Story using the comic as a platform to question the point of its own existence. I came here to escape the city … its violence … its plastic landscape. So what do I do? Build a treehouse to rival the Plaza — foster a teen-age malt-shop relationship with Patrick! I should just walk away from it — try living out in the elements — test myself to the limits. Night Nurse was saddled with its own problems: At the end of October, upon returning from a weekend in Vermont, Jean Thomas told Roy that she was leaving him. The seeds of marital tensions had been sown early the previous year, when Jean was graduating from Hunter College and looking for work. Lee dangled the idea of a secretarial job and then quickly withdrew the offer. I guess, in her mind, I had failed the test by not standing up for her. The bloom was off the rose. His feelings about Marvel would never fully recover. W ithin nine months, all three of the distaff titles had gotten the ax. And it was even harder to get boys to buy comics about women. The final issues of Shanna the She-Devil introduced Nekra, a mutant albino daughter born to an African-American cleaning lady; her Marvel Comics: The Untold Story was, unsurprisingly, tied up with heavy identity issues. M cGregor had been at his proofreading job for a few months, waiting for a chance at writing a title. One that regularly landed on his desk made him wince. Jungle Action would now run new adventures of the Black Panther in his native African country of Wakanda — and McGregor would be the writer. Only two years earlier, in an issue of The Fantastic FourMarvel briefly tried to put distance between the Black Panther and his politically charged namesakes by renaming him Black Leopard. Now McGregor edged the character further into political territory than ever before, and tackled issues of masculinity and patriotism. But McGregor could also have fun: corralling generous volunteers from the Bullpen, he filled out the back of the book with maps, pinup galleries, and text pieces — otherwise, he knew, that space would be tainted Marvel Comics: The Untold Story reprints of the old jungle strips. So where were these white people supposed to come from? S teve Gerber gladly accepted the offer. He was happy not to be edited; he was virtually unable to work from a staid template. So when the title was assigned to Gerber, he was forced to look elsewhere for characterization. There was Wundarr, a send-up of Superman so dead-on that DC threatened to sue Lee, frustrated, nearly removed Gerber from the book. Amazingly, this was all conceived without the help of psychedelics. Louis, Gerber had been on the sidelines Marvel Comics: The Untold Story hippie culture, an observer. There seemed to be a certain shallowness of philosophy, somehow, and beyond that, even, there was a lot of violence associated with that culture. Filling in on an issue of Captain Americahe created the Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, a bad guy whose day job in advertising had left him bitter. Before long, he was trying his hand at Iron Man and the Sub-Marinerand Daredevilwhere one story line featured Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and an angry-hippie villain named Angar who blasted people with bad trips and primal screams. Still, Gerber was at his best when he was freed from the constraints of closely watched properties. When it became clear that Gerber would make a better full-time freelance writer than staffer — his sleep apnea led to restless nights, and so he regularly dozed off at his desk — McGregor welcomed a revolving door of proofreading partners: first Tony Isabella, and then Doug Moench, from Chicago, and then David Anthony Kraft, a seventeen-year-old from Georgia. Young creators, eager to refract the superhero world through a prism of boomer values, kept parading through. Those comics were going to stick to their formulas, professionally executed to the point of monotony — and there was no longer any doubt that that was exactly how Stan wanted it. Conway learned this the hard way. Casting for a way to shake up Amazing Spider-ManThomas and Conway had discussed the idea of killing off a member of the supporting cast. Conway thought it was a stroke of genius. It made no sense to me that Peter Parker would end up with a babe like that who had no Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Only a damaged person would end up with a damaged guy like Peter Parker. And Gwen Stacy was perfect! And I think Gwen was simply Stan replicating his wife, just like Sue Storm was a replication of his wife. The amazing thing was that he created a character like Mary Jane Watson, who was probably the most interesting female character in comics, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story he never used her to the extent that he could have. Which is so wrong, and Marvel Comics: The Untold Story stupid, and such a waste. So killing Gwen was a totally logical if not inevitable choice. Thomas then cleared the plans with Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Once he stopped writing a given comic he stopped thinking about it. He basically threw me to the wolves. This was the first time a beloved character had been killed off in comics. After toy company Azrak-Hamway offered Marvel a licensing deal for a Spider-Man car, Lee handed down a decree to create something called the Spider-Mobile. Conway thought the idea was ridiculous. Why have a hero who could swing through the city on webs get stuck in New York City traffic? In Amazing Spider-ManConway, annoyed, had a pair of sleazy suits approach Spider-Man and ask him to drive their prototype, for publicity. But Conway began sliding a patina of political content into his work. But where Marvel Comics: The Untold Story — lusty, unrepentantly vicious, and charmless — was cast as a hero, Conway framed the Punisher as a paranoid and dangerous, if somewhat sympathetic, antagonist. It was the vigilante adventure as cautionary tale. With Franklin, their mysteriously equipped son, she was in seclusion in the country. She would return only when Reed learned to understand the obligations of family, those paramount bonds that lay beneath the surface of his work. In his next appearance, Howard made a clumsy step off a rock and fell into oblivion. The fans reacted instantly. Stan was being asked about it every place he went on the college circuit. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story you can turn it in on time and can make it sell, you can keep doing it. In this sink-or-swim spirit, Jim Starlin was tapped to plot and draw an issue of Iron Mana comic that his roommate, Mike Friedrich, had been writing for six months. Figuring he might never get another shot, he convinced Friedrich that they should Marvel Comics: The Untold Story the issue with the characters Starlin had dreamed up while taking psych classes at a Detroit community college after his Navy stint. By the night before deadline, though, the fading duo had to recruit a third artist, who snuck in his own unsolicited suggestion to the narration: The Cat gets an ovarian cyst! After the pages came back to Linda Fite to add her dialogue, she went straight to Lee and complained. The next day, Starlin got an angry call from the office. But Thomas Marvel Comics: The Untold Story Starlin had promise. He offered him a chance to work on Captain Marvela faltering title that Thomas had written himself, before editorial duties pulled him away. The conveniently named Mar-Vell, a warrior of the alien Kree race, had defied his own people to protect Earth; now he worked in tandem with Marvel Comics: The Untold Story Jones, the former teenage sidekick to the Hulk, who had blossomed into an annoying wannabe rock star. The characters had agonizingly bland personalities — but that turned out to be just the blank slate Starlin needed. At first, as he found his footing, he larded the comic with guest stars and big fight scenes, just to make sure Marvel Comics: The Untold Story would sell enough to keep going. Then he got adventurous. He knows what must be done and does it, but does it with a great sorrow! For this man knows truth and peace! Of course, Star Wars never blew the hinges off the doors of perception. That which cannot die cannot be enslaved, for only with fear is servitude rendered! Captain Marvel had practically become a black-light poster with dialogue. Its sales kept increasing. Soon Starlin was opening his fan mail and finding complimentary joints sent by grateful, mind-blown readers. Englehart, meanwhile, was humming along on a slightly less psychedelic scale. These young, opinionated rabble-rousers were getting closer and closer to the marquee properties. It was during this ascendancy that Englehart met Frank Brunner, a Brooklyn artist with long blond hair, a buckskin jacket, and a library of Carlos Castaneda and H. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

Long before there was Marvel Comics, there was Martin Goodman. Born in Brooklyn in to Russian immigrants, the ninth of thirteen children, Goodman was such an avid reader as a youth that he would cut up pieces of old magazines and paste them into new creations. But a life of leisurely imagination was not an option: his father's construction jobs ended with a backbreaking rooftop fall and Isaac Goodman became a peddler. The fifteen members of the Goodman family constantly moved around Brooklyn, trying to stay one step ahead of their landlords. Martin was forced to drop out of school in the fifth grade and worked a series of jobs that failed to excite him. Finally, as he Marvel Comics: The Untold Story the end of his teen years, he resolved to make a bid for freedom: he set out to travel the country by train. By the time the Great Depression hit America, he'd already racked up journals detailing his coast to coast experiences on railroads and in hobo camps. It was his childhood love of magazines that eventually called him home. Returning to New York, he found work singing the praises of pulps as Marvel Comics: The Untold Story publisher's representative for Eastern Distributing. Eastern soon fell apart, but Goodman's fortune only rose: he and his coworker Louis Silberkleit joined forces to form Newsstand Publications. From a dingy Marvel Comics: The Untold Story in lower Manhattan, they turned out westerns, detective stories, and romance tales at fifteen cents an issue. Lone Ranger rip-offs may not have been high art, but, somewhat improbably, Martin Goodman had ascended from poor immigrant to rail hopper to magazine editor. Slight, quiet, his arched eyebrows overwhelming his wire- frame eyeglasses and a bow tie punctuating one of his many crisp pink shirts, Goodman even had prematurely whitened hair that neatly completed his transformation from street kid to businessman. InNewsstand Publications' distributor went under, costing Goodman and Silberkleit several thousand dollars in lost payments. Newstand was unable to meet payments to its printer; its assets were seized. Silberkleit abandoned the company, but an eager Goodman convinced the printer that it stood to make back its money if it allowed him to continue publishing some of the titles. Goodman's cunning instincts quickly carried the company back into profitability; within a couple years, he'd moved into the considerably more elegant RKO Building uptown. He'd devised a simple formula for success: "If you get a title that catches on, then add a few more," he told Literary Digest, "you're in for a nice profit. It was all about staying on top of trends, not providing anything more than disposable literature. Now he was in a financial position to set his parents up in a little house in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. He could also afford to relax. On a cruise ship to Bermuda, he approached two young women playing Ping Pong and asked to play the winner. Jean Davis - also a New Yorker, but from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story more cultured and sophisticated New York - soon became the apple of Goodman's eye. Back in America, Jean was on-again, off-again about having a serious relationship, but Goodman threw everything he could into the courtship. Once, scraping into his bank account, he flew her to Philadelphia for a dinner and a concert performance. Eventually, he won her over, and she became his bride. They honeymooned in Europe, with plans to return on the fashionable Hindenburg - but there were no two seats together, so they changed their plans at the last moment and caught a plane. Martin Goodman's luck just kept improving. The latter didn't sell especially well, but there was something Goodman liked about that word, Marvel. He'd remember that one. He moved his business into the fashionable McGraw-Hill Building on Forty Second Street, where he set about providing steady work for his brothers. Goodman's operation was, in the words of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story editor, a "little beehive of nepotism":. Even Jean's uncle Robbie got in on the action. Furthermore, the flood of company names that Goodman shuffled around - advantageous for tax purposes and for quick maneuvering in the event of legal trouble - were often derived from family members: there was the Margood Publishing Corp. The company name that stuck, though, was "Timely," taken from Goodman's Timely magazine. It was no longer racking up debt, but neither was it setting the world on fire. Pulp sales, crowded by the increased popularity of radio serials, were starting to go flat. Martin Goodman needed a hit. The American comic book, meanwhile, was beginning to take form. Inthe Eastern Color Printing Company used its idle Marvel Comics: The Untold Story at night time to publish Funnies on Parade, a book of reprints of Sunday newspaper strips. Other publishers gave it a shot. The biggest sellers were repackaged Sunday newspaper comic strips like Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Flash Gordon, and Popeye, but New Fun, a black and white, ten by fifteen inch anthology of unpublished strips, became the first comic book of all new material. Bya few enterprising men set up packaging services in which comic books were produced by efficient assembly lines, in the tradition of garment factories. A writer would hand his script off to an efficient assembly line of out of work veteran illustrators and young art school graduates armed with fourteen by twenty-one inch Bristol board. In turn, they would break the action down into a series of simply rendered panels, flesh out the drawings in pencil, add backgrounds, embellish the artwork with ink, letter the dialogue, and provide color guides for the printer. It wasn't a way to get rich, but in the throes of the Depression, it was steady work. The character was a mix of everything kids liked - pulp heroes, science fiction stories, classical myths - rolled up into one glorious, primary colored package. The "champion of the oppressed, the physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need" fought corporate greed and crooked politicians, and preached for social reform at every turn, a perfect fantasy for the New Deal era. But Superman was more than just a symbol; his secret identity as the mewling Clark Kent offered even the loneliest readers a fellow outsider with whom to identify. Premiering in the cover feature of Action Comics 1, Superman became a surprise runaway success, and by its seventh issue, Action was selling half a million copies per issue. National's sister company Detective Comics they'd soon merge and come to be known as DC Comics introduced Batman, another caped avenger, and gave Superman his Marvel Comics: The Untold Story title - Marvel Comics: The Untold Story as competitors rolled out a wave of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story costumed knockoffs. Legend claimed that the publisher of Wonder Man, one of the earliest and most blatant imitations, had been an accountant for the head of National until he saw the numbers on Action and quickly set up his own company. Lloyd Jacquet, a soft spoken, pipe smoking ex-colonel, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story from his position as art director of Centaur Comics and, following the leads of others, went into business as a comic book packager, churning out stories for trend hopping publishers. Chief among the artists Jacquet grabbed from Centaur and assigned to develop new superheroes for his new concern - Funnies, Inc. Both were twenty-one years old and restless. Burgos had quit the National Academy of Design, impatient with the speed at which he was being taught; Everett, a three pack a day smoker and already a decade into serious drinking, had bounced between Boston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Now they sat down at a Manhattan bar called the Webster and hammered out their plans for Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. They kept it simple: fire and water. Burgos came up with the idea of a brilliant but avaricious scientist, Professor Phineas T. Horton, who creates a synthetic man within a giant test tube, only to see him burst into flames upon contact with oxygen. The "Human Torch" needs no costume: his featureless face and vague anatomy, both reddened and obscured by wisps of fire, are surrounded by stray, tear shaped bursts that fly off him like nervous crimson sweat, and the flares at the top of his head suggest demonic intent. He is, in other words, a creature flickering with fear and anger. Upon his inevitable escape, he sets about shooting fireballs from his hands and scaring the bejeezus out of cops and criminals alike; Burgos's low budget primitivist style only increased the sense that the flimsy buildings, cars, and people the Torch encountered were hastily constructed only to be destroyed in short measure. By the end of his first adventure, the Human Torch learns to control his powers, but he's a man on the run. After an arctic expedition unknowingly causes destruction to the underwater settlement of an aquatic race, the amphibious emperor sends his daughter to spy on the humans. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story princess marries the expedition's commander, gathers intelligence for her homeland, and, before returning to the ocean, conceives a son. Nineteen years later, the pointy-eared, pointy-eyebrowed, widow-peaked Namor, clad only in swimming trunks and graced with winged feetis Marvel Comics: The Untold Story ultra- man of the deep Putting his powers to scary use, he murders two deep sea divers one via vicious stabbings, the other via head crushing and then shoves their ship into a reef. The faint horizontal lines, lonely bubbles, and levitating objects that Everett administered in ink wash to convey the sub-aquatic world gave the proceedings an eerie, theremin-ready ambiance, although such subtleties of mood were necessarily temporary. Pages later, the creepy languor of the saltwater battles gives way to pure action, as Namor hurls a pilot from a biplane and "dives into the ocean again - on his way to further adventures in his crusade against the white men! The Sub-Mariner strip was marked for inclusion in Motion Pictures Funnies Weekly, a giveaway comic that movie theaters would distribute to movie going kids, in hopes that they'd be hooked enough to show up for the following week. But Motion Pictures Funnies stalled out, never going to press except for a handful of sample copies that were handed out to theater owners. Luckily, the Funnies, Inc. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story grabbed copies of Superman and Amazing Man a title that Everett had recently done for Centaurwalked three blocks north from the shabby building that housed the Funnies, Inc. Comics, Torpey said, were easy money. They made a deal for Goodman to publish the Human Torch and Sub-Mariner strips in a new comic book anthology. Goodman already Marvel Comics: The Untold Story a perfect idea for a title. Marvel Comics 1, produced entirely by Jacquet's team, covered all the popular bases in its sixty-four pages: Paul Gustavson's mustachioed, Saint- like Angel, Ben Thompson's jungle adventurer — Ka-Zar a Tarzan knockoff, resurrected from one of Goodman's pulpsAl Anders's cowboy the Masked Raider, and gag cartoons to fill it out. Goodman commissioned a cover from veteran pulp illustrator Frank R. Paul and Timely's first comic book was published on August 31, Hours later, halfway around the world, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. World War II was in motion.