Review: ‘Marvel Chronicle’
Marvel Comics kicks off their 70th Anniversary celebration with [[[Marvel Chronicle]]], a wonderful hardcover book, published by DK Publishing. The coffee table book comes in a hard box complete with color and black and white reproductions of Jim Cheung’s frenetic cover. (The diecut M for the front cover is a nice touch.) As is sadly too often the case these days Stan Lee’s introduction is full of bombast and enthusiasm but tells us nothing new.
The book is a year by year account of the company from its humble beginnings as an offshoot of Martin Goodman’s pulp magazine line to its place atop the comic book heap in 2008. The book nicely spans from 1939 through June 2008 (following cover date convention). Each decade has been handled by one of four writers – Tom DeFalco, Peter Sanderson, Tom Brevoort, and Matthew K. Manning – and provides month by month highlights with copious illustrations.
The chapters on the 1940s (Sanderson) and the 1950s (Brevoort) are the most interesting in how they show the company’s breadth, lack of depth, and ability to flood the market with titles on whatever is popular at the moment. While it’s fascinating to see the seldom seen funny animals and teen humor characters slowly replace the super-heroes, it’s also interesting to note that after [[[Captain America]]], Sub-Mariner, and the Human Torch, the company failed to score another major hit character for decades. The write ups also nicely tell us which characters, creators or innovations get revived in the future.
Marvel, of course, finally came into its own with [[[Fantastic Four #1]]] and the set-up is wonderfully handled by Brevoort, who notes that when the company was forced to cut its output to eight titles a month, Stan Lee took the opportunity to get better as a writer, and use only his best artists – Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Don Heck for the most part.