Reddit mentions of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

Stan Lee was the first editor that credited the penciler, colorist, inker as well as the letterer and writer on the cover. He insisted on that. u/myqhunt gets a lot of his facts wrong.

Source: https://www.amazon.com/Marvel-Comics-Untold-Sean-Howe/dp/0061992119

If anyone wants to delve into the crediting and creative side: http://comicsalliance.com/stan-lee-legacy-jack-kirby-steve-ditko-marvel-history/

Edit: looking at myqhunt other replies makes it worse. They're not only wrong on their facts, they are willfully and negligently wrong.

Before the direct market to comic shops, companies had to rely on distributors. DC Comics had their own distribution network and were pretty good at it. Well, DC was a distributor of comics for a lot of companies, along with other major distribution companies. At one point they damn near ended up being the only distributor of comics in the US. Marvel was beholden to DC's rules, one of which was that they wouldn't distribute more then 25 comics from Marvel. This is one of the major reasons that Marvel, back in the day, pushed the direct market really hard. Highly recommend reading Marvel Comics: The Untold Story for more information. It's a pretty good retelling of Marvel's history.

I was reading "Marvel Comics: The Untold History" and back in the day, writers and artists would swing back and forth between Marvel and DC all the time.

Marv Wolfman arrived at DC in the 80's after an argument with Marvel. At the time, DC was languishing behind Marvel and the popularity of Claremont's Uncanny X-Men run. So Wolfman remixed the classic Teen Titans (which mostly just focused on the sidekicks of popular superheros) into a title more like X-Men, with the conflicting team dynamics, relationships, and mythologies separate from the bigger titles.

He created Raven, Starfire, and Cyborg to introduce more diversity in the team and to have more women to create romantic tension.

Later in the decade, when DC was on top from on Wolfman's Teen Titans and Infinite Crisis (plus Miller's "Dark Knight Returns" and Moore's "Watchmen") Chris Claremont approached his old friend Marv and relayed to him that DC executives approached Claremont with an offer to take over the Teen Titans title.

Cyborg (and Firestorm) would also be worked into the "Superfriends" animated show back in the 80's to give the team a younger focus.

Untold Tales

Read it, Stan did some pretty shitty stuff.

Well, all-in-all this was an okay read. It wasn't a slog to get through, mostly. X-Factor was a lot faster-paced and actually exciting than New Mutants. New Mutants spent a lot of time talking about fighting a war, and very, very little time actually fighting anyone or anything. X-Factor was so action packed it started getting meta and cracking jokes about how much action there is.

Other than Bridge's random kneepads, I didn't mind any of the character designs. Some of the female outfits were skimpy, like the gymnist vault scene, but they also were a time of the 90s. The pouches, excessively big guns, big hair etc. didn't rub me the wrong way. It's just comic booky to me. I'm glad we've moved away from it, but it doesn't grate on my eyes like some artists I've seen. I definitely did groan looking at the mile-long legs, bizarre stances, and people standing on ballerina toes.

Things I wasn't a fan of would be the constant jumping around in story. It always felt very jarring cutting from one characters' dealings to another. I thought the word-bubble placement was too all over the place and with MU's smart-panel function already being pretty moot, this didn't help.

I didn't realize the X-Factor story arc also included Spider-Man #16, so sorry to those who try and read this reading assignment just as listed above. Makes sense to do a crossover as such, since Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld were good friends. I didn't have any desire to read a story about the destruction of the WTC though, so I skipped this issue.

Funny little note I read in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Cable almost had some awful names before they settled on Liefeld's "Cable". Liefeld's back-up name was "Cybrid" (cuz Cyborg Hybrid, get it?). Bob Harras wanted him named "Quentin" and Louise Simonson wanted him named "Commander X". So I'm surprisingly glad Liefeld got his way

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is great and a must-read for comic fans (obviously mostly focuses on Marvel Comics). I've also heard good things about The Ten-Cent Plague.

Marvel: The Untold Story is a great history of all of Marvel, and spends a good deal of time in the Golden Age.

Not a documentary, but I just finished reading Marvel Comics: The Untold Story and really enjoyed it. It covers the entire history of the company all the way back to the Timely days with a surprising amount of detail.

Stan Lee & Jack Kirby. After reading [Marvel Comics The Untold Story] (https://www.amazon.com/Marvel-Comics-Untold-Sean-Howe/dp/0061992119) and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I would love to see the Mad Men-esque story of those guys.

Comic Wars

Marvel: The Untold Story

Marvel Year by Year

Marvel Age of Comics 61-78

Slugfest: Inside the Epic, 50-year Battle between Marvel and DC

All the Fireside books (Origins..., Son of Origins..., etc.) for Stan Lee's very biased and anecdotal memories of the 1960s.

It evolved over time because Marvel books started to sell.

Before the '57 collapse, Marvel was one of the top three publishers in the business (behind only Western/Dell and possibly National). But that was mostly due to the astonishing number of titles. Lee and company cranked out 40-50 titles per month.

The 8 title limit stuck up until around 1964 when sales of Marvel comics were just too high and Independent News couldn't continue to hold them back. They went up by one or two titles every six months or so, until right before the contract ended, they were around 16.

As soon as Marvel went with Cadence, however, they started to split their two-story titles (Tales of Suspense becomes Captain America and Iron Man starts up with #1; Strange Tales becomes Dr. Strange and Nick Fury starts up with #1; etc.).

You also have to remember that DC still never thought that Marvel was a real competitor. In DC's eyes, Marvel books were ugly.

I would highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Marvel-Comics-The-Untold-Story/dp/0061992119

Sean Howe has a fascinating reading.
The Meryl Lynch deal mentioned below is key here, is a bet against all Marvel film rights if the first movies failed they would lose everything. According to Feige, he realized they could bring back some properties [from other studios] and start slowly building the Universe. Somewhere it is mentioned that a fan dropped a nerd question when these characters will meet well before they were on screen. They don't acknowledge this as the spark that initiated all of this, but I guess that frequent question plus the committee assembled for advising the MCU [which was recently dissolved] could came up with such route easily.

Comics in the sixties were very different from today. Read Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, or even do research (the whole Batman ownership thing is a good example).

Rights are a complicated thing when dealing with decades-old characters. But freshly-created and unique characters, the road of rights is much less complicated. It only gets as complicated as you want it to.

Marvel Comics: The Untold story by Sean Howe is a really good book that tells the stories of the comic industry and its growth and change objectively. I strongly suggest it for those interested in this sort of thing.

I'm not really into being a doomsayer when it comes to collecting records, but I read this book recently, and keep coming back to the end of Marvel Comics' (printed comic) glory days as a reference.

http://www.amazon.com/Marvel-Comics-The-Untold-Story/dp/0061992119

Basically, Rob Liefeld (the creator of Deadpool – and general idiot), took control of the company and was responsible for generating an over abundance of special editions, limited runs, cover variations for the same comic, etc. They knew they would cash in short term because collectors would feel inclined to buy everything they made, but they ignored the long term effects of this kind of strategy. It eventually burned out not only comic collectors but comic readers as well (because the characters and concepts just kept getting dumber). The same thing happened to baseball cards. And, slow but surely, it's happening with records right now too.

The 1960s Marvel bullpen would make a far more fascinating story. If any of you guys are interested in this stuff, I'd strongly recommend Sean Howe's Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. It's a fascinating portrait of how Marvel formed, the role it had on talent within the industry, and the pretty tragic ending a lot of those guys (especially Kirby) faced.

Sorry, that comment was incoherent, wasn't it?

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story
http://www.amazon.com/Marvel-Comics-The-Untold-Story/dp/0061992119/

The guy really hates Stan Lee (or his sources do). I'm sure Stan would tell the story differently, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. But it's an interesting book.