Ebook The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire, by Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall
The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall. The industrialized innovation, nowadays assist everything the human needs. It includes the everyday activities, works, workplace, entertainment, and also much more. One of them is the wonderful net link and computer system. This problem will certainly alleviate you to support one of your hobbies, reading routine. So, do you have prepared to review this e-book The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall now?
The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire, by Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall
Ebook The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire, by Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall
Tips in picking the best book The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall to read this day can be gotten by reading this page. You can discover the best book The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall that is sold in this globe. Not only had actually the books published from this nation, but additionally the various other nations. As well as now, we mean you to review The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall as one of the reading materials. This is only one of the best publications to accumulate in this website. Consider the page and also search the books The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall You could find lots of titles of the books provided.
Why need to be this e-book The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall to review? You will never ever obtain the knowledge as well as encounter without obtaining by on your own there or attempting on your own to do it. Hence, reading this publication The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall is needed. You could be fine and also correct adequate to obtain just how essential is reviewing this The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall Also you always read by obligation, you can support yourself to have reading book practice. It will be so beneficial and fun after that.
But, exactly how is the means to obtain this e-book The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall Still confused? It does not matter. You could appreciate reading this publication The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall by online or soft file. Simply download and install guide The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall in the link offered to visit. You will certainly get this The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall by online. After downloading, you can save the soft documents in your computer system or device. So, it will certainly ease you to read this e-book The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall in specific time or place. It could be unsure to enjoy reviewing this book The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall, considering that you have whole lots of task. However, with this soft documents, you could enjoy checking out in the extra time also in the spaces of your jobs in workplace.
When more, reading routine will always offer beneficial perks for you. You could not require to invest numerous times to review guide The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall Merely reserved several times in our spare or leisure times while having dish or in your office to review. This The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall will show you brand-new point that you can do now. It will certainly aid you to boost the top quality of your life. Occasion it is just an enjoyable book The Secret History Of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby And The Moonlighting Artists At Martin Goodman's Empire, By Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall, you can be happier and also much more fun to enjoy reading.
The untold story of the House of Ideas.
Marvel Comics is home to such legendary super-heroes as Spider-Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man, all of whom have spun box office gold in the 21st century. But Marvel Comics has a secret history hidden in the shadows of these well-known franchises.
The Secret History of Marvel Comics digs back to the 1930s when Marvel Comics wasn't just a comic-book producing company. Marvel Comics owner Martin Goodman had tentacles into a publishing world that might have made that era’s conservative American parents lynch him on his front porch. Marvel was but a small part of Goodman’s publishing empire, which had begun years before he published his first comic book. Goodman mostly published lurid and sensationalistic story books (known as “pulps”) and magazines, featuring sexually-charged detective and romance short fiction, and celebrity gossip scandal sheets. And artists like Jack Kirby, who was producing Captain America for eight-year-olds, were simultaneously dipping their toes in both ponds.
The Secret History of Marvel Comics tells this parallel story of 1930s/40s Marvel Comics sharing offices with those Goodman publications not quite fit for children. The book also features a comprehensive display of the artwork produced for Goodman’s other enterprises by Marvel Comics artists such as Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, Alex Schomburg, Bill Everett, Al Jaffee, and Dan DeCarlo, plus the very best pulp artists in the field, including Norman Saunders, John Walter Scott, Hans Wesso, L.F. Bjorklund, and Marvel Comics #1 cover artist Frank R. Paul. Goodman’s magazines also featured cover stories on celebrities such as Jackie Gleason, Elizabeth Taylor, Liberace, and Sophia Loren, as well as contributions from famous literary and social figures such as Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, and L. Ron Hubbard.
These rare pieces of comic art, pulp and magazine history will open the door to Marvel Comics’ unseen history.
Black & white with some color
- Sales Rank: #955150 in Books
- Published on: 2013-11-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 10.30" h x 1.10" w x 7.60" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 304 pages
Review
Winner: "Favorite Comics Related Book 2014" - U.K. True Believers Comic Awards
...The Secret History of Marvel Comics is part archeology, part luxurious art book and something else besides: a history of dodgy publishing practices in the 20th century. (Daniel Kalder - Publishing Perspectives)
About the Author
Blake Bell is the author of Strange & Stranger (a retrospective of Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko); The Secret History of Marvel Comics, Fire & Water: Bill Everett, The Sub-Mariner, and the Birth of Marvel Comics; Amazing Mysteries: The Bill Everett Archives; and Strange Suspense and Unexplored Worlds (two volumes in The Steve Ditko Archives). He lives in Toronto, Ontario, with his son.
Dr. Michael J. Vassallo is a noted historian on Marvel's early pulp, Timely and Atlas periods. A Manhattan dentist, he spends his free time attempting to bring recognition to artistic creators of the 1940's and 1950's. He has also written introductions to 20 Timely and Atlas Masterworks volumes, dissecting the credits for posterity and providing historical context, as well as writing the detailed captions to the first 210 pages of Taschen's "75 Years of Marvel" coffee table book. He lives in Westchester County, New York.
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
A Good Read About Pulps, But Not Really A "History of Marvel Comics"
By ConclusionsDrawn
I enjoyed this book, but it isn’t really a “History of Marvel Comics,” secret or otherwise. Rather, it details how the original owner of what became Marvel Comics in the 1960s, Martin Goodman, got his start publishing pulps in the 1930s, and later magazines. By all accounts comic books were a very small part of Goodman’s publishing business, one in which he took little or no interest until Spider-Man became a hit in the mid-1960s. He sold the business in 1968.
Goodman is portrayed as a cheap and unethical publisher of shlock (and frequently reprints) who sought unapologetically to capitalize on evolving popular trends in pulp and magazine publishing. Martin Goodman published his periodicals through a dizzying array of ever-changing shell companies, a not uncommon business practice in the industry at the time apparently, and yet another way for bottom-of-the-barrel publishers to avoid paying creators.
The book’s authors chronicle in almost scholarly detail the ever changing roster of titles, the convoluted issue number sequencing, and the seemingly endless array of fly-by-night publishing companies with various business addresses in Manhattan in Martin Goodman’s little publishing business, with a heavy emphasis on the pulps he published in the 1930s and 1940s.
The conceit is that Goodman’s unethical business practices, and lack of regard for the creators whose work he published as well as the readers who bought his periodicals, carried over into Marvel Comics in the 1960s. But that aspect of the narrative is barely touched on, and only in the final pages of the 100 page history of Goodman’s publishing business that starts this 300 page book. (The remaining 200 pages of this 300 page book detail, artist-by-artist, the many famous comic book artists who got their start in the 1940s doing work for Goodman’s pulps. Most of those 200 pages reprint this long lost artwork.)
I found myself asking rhetorically many times while reading this book “why” various things happened they way they did. The various titles and issue numbers of Goodman’s various pulps are laid out in the almost fetishistic detail characteristic of a devoted collector. But the human reasons “why” events occurred in the narrative are rarely addressed and when they are, only in passing. As one example, the book touts that it explains the little-known ‘real’ reason why Ditko and Kirby left Marvel Comics in the 1960s, and ascribes that to Martin Goodman’s unethical business dealings with them, as opposed to disputes with Stan Lee. But the book never explains why, if that were true, Kirby came back to Goodman’s comic book company in the late 1950s (and did work for him for another decade, co-creating the Marvel Universe in the 1960s with Stan Lee) despite having had a bitter falling out with Goodman in 1941 over royalty payments for “Captain America Comics.” And it never explains why, if that were so, Ditko would go on to do work for Goodman’s short-lived Atlas Comics in the mid-1970s.
As a book about a comparatively minor, ethically challenged publisher of pulps in the 1930s and 1940s, with an intriguing link to Marvel Comics, this book makes fascinating reading. But it’s not really a “History of Marvel Comics.”
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Not much about comics, but interesting anyway
By William Henley
The title of this book is somewhat misleading. It's not really a history (secret or otherwise) of Marvel Comics, though it is of interest to readers who are already familiar with Marvel history. You won't learn much that's new here about the origins of charactrs like Captain America (though he's on the cover), Spider-Man or the X-Men. What this is, is a history of the non-comics publishing enterprises of Martin Goodman, the man who between 1939 and 1968 owned and published the comics line that came to be known as Marvel. Goodman got started in the publishing business in 1933 with a pulp magazine, not a comic book, and continued publishing pulps alongside comics through the 1940's and 50's. (That first pulp was a Western, and the book suggests Goodman had a lifelong affection for that genre. Though it's not specifically said in the book, this might help explain why Marvel continued publishing Western comics through the 1960's and early 70's after Westerns mostly fell out of fashion.) And he later branched out into other types of down-scale magazines, such as girlie photo magazines, true-confessions mags, and many others. Some of the same people who worked on Goodman's comics also did work for the pulps, and the fortunes of the non-comics publications had side effects on the comics. The biggest example, probably, was in 1957-58 when Goodman lost his distribution company and signed with Independent News. owned by National-DC Comics, to distribute his magazines. Though Independent agreed to distribute a shrunken line of comic books for Goodman, they were mainly interested in making money distributing his other publications. If Goodman had been a comics-only publisher, DC might have refused to distribute a rival and the "Marvel Age" would have been strangled in its cradle. (I've often wondered if DC management later rued the day when they made that deal with Goodman and threw a lifeline to their future arch-rival.)
This book does not present a flattering picture of Martin Goodman in terms of his professional practices and ethics or as a creative mind. Goodman's general practice with his pulps and other magazines, as with his comics, was not to blaze new trails, but to find out what was selling well for other publishers and to flood the market with imitations. (Though the book suggests that Goodman's company did originate one major magazine category-- the "men's sweat" adventure magazine.) The authors suggest Goodman had little concern for creating a quality product, or for treating his staffers, writers and artists fairly (though he could be generous when an impulse took him). When Goodman's line of comics became Marvel and revolutionized comics for the future, it was thanks to Stan Lee and the artists, mainly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and in spite of Goodman rather than because of him. And the authors suggest that when Ditko and then Kirby quit Marvel, it was not primarily because of disputes with Stan Lee's editorial policy, as is sometimes suggested, but because of their resentment of Goodman's publishing policies and refusal to pay them adequately for their wildly successful creations.
Speaking of Goodman's ethics as a publisher, perhaps his low point was his involvement with a genre of pulp magazine now known as the "shudder pulps". We sometimes hear that the present day is a uniquely degenerate era of popular culture with excesses of sex and violence that would never have been tolerated in an earlier era, but the sidelight in this book about Goodman's " shudder pulps" of the late 1930's suggests it isn't necessarily so. These magazines didn't contain just garden-variety horror stories, but "frankly sadistic" blends of sex and violence, as with a story and illustration in which half-naked women are thrown onto beds of spikes to bleed to death for the entertainment of a jaded nightclub audience. I'm opposed to virtually all censorship, but if I saw something like this in a present-day publication, it would strain my principles. (The book SECRET IDENTITY by Craig Yoe reveals that Joe Shuster, during his impoverished post-Superman days, was involved in doing art for a similar series of bondage-fetish publicatios. But those seem to have been semi-underground publicatios sold under the counter. These "shudder pulps" seem to have been sold on the regular stands alongside other pulps, at least until a crackdown by the New York City government.)
Over half of this book is devoted to a gallery of pulp-magazine illustrations drawn by "the moonlighting artists of Marvel Comics" -- most extensively Jack Kirby and Joe Simon during the early days of their careers, but also Alex Schomburg (best known in comics for his incredibly crowded covers, but he was also responsible for many of those grotesque "shudder" illustrations), Bill Everett, Carl Burgos, Joe Maneely and many others. This makes the book a unique resource for art aficionados who can see here artwork by Kirby and the others that would otherwise be vanished and inaccessible except for a few pulp collectors. This, and the detailed look at an earlier era of magazine publishing, makes this book a fascinating read even if it isn't really very much about Marvel Comics.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Never 'Nuff said!
By Ronault D. Trowbridge
I've read several books about the triumphant rise of Marvel comics, but the most interesting part of the company history, is the way the artists who helped create the iconic characters were mistreated. This book delves deep into the shady business practices of Martin Goodman & others of his ilk. Not to mention the struggling artists, who only wanted to provide for families & maybe make a name for themselves. Plenty of pictures of great art & informative bios on the men who created the characters many love.
See all 15 customer reviews...
The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire, by Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall PDF
The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire, by Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall EPub
The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire, by Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall Doc
The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire, by Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall iBooks
The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire, by Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall rtf
The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire, by Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall Mobipocket
The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire, by Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall Kindle
[V462.Ebook] Ebook The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire, by Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall Doc
[V462.Ebook] Ebook The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire, by Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall Doc
[V462.Ebook] Ebook The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire, by Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall Doc
[V462.Ebook] Ebook The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman's Empire, by Blake Bell, Michael J. Vassall Doc
