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.
Comic books, admittedly, don’t have a great history when itcomes to video game adaptations.
have this mighty gem.
So we’re more than half-way through Secret Invasion, the event that’s supposed to be the biggest thing to rock the Marvel Universe since Civil War, where the question was “whose side are you on?” Secret Invasion’s question is “who do you trust?”, which is almost the same question as Civil War’s but not as grammatically correct ( it’s "whom", people!) and concerns the revelation that several Skrulls (shape-shifting aliens who’ve had their asses kicked many times) have secretly been living among us for a while. This story is the brain-child of Brian Michael Bendis, who has been praised for his series Powers and his run on Ultimate Spider-Man and who has been writing New Avengers and Mighty Avengers since both titles were created.
I never talked to either Jack Kirby or Stan Lee about politics, so I don’t really have any idea where they stood on the subject. My guess would be that following their political spoor wouldn’t take you very far west and that they didn’t have much sympathy for the hippie-rebels of the 60s (and here allow me to blush and hide my face). After all, they and their parents (and my parents) fought for a place in the American mainstream because, finally, acceptance meant an increased chance of survival and for those outside the tribe, who suffered the Great Depression, not surviving seemed to be a real possibility. Then here came the snotty kids with their tie-dye and their girly haircuts and their wiseass slogans saying that a place in the tribe was not worth struggling for – in fact, the tribe itself was stinking of corruption.
Europe was gone. 
Consider it the worst kept secret since Spider-Man’s secret identity. (Well, before One More Day.) Through stock reports and other PR events, Activision had pretty much said that a sequel to 
Sunday afternoon. Two hundred and four days left before he gallops on back to Texas and that consarn brush that always seems to need clearing.
