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Book recommendation and free blog post for you

Scott:

I highly recommend to your blog readers that they grab a copy of "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" by Sean Howe. http://www.amazon.com/Marvel-Comics-The-Untold-Story/dp/0061992100/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1351701610&sr=8-1&keywords=marvel+comics

The longer I read it, the more it sounded exactly like working for Marvel was like being on the WWE Creative Team: artists/writers at Marvel would lay out long storylines that got changed at the last second by the editor-in-chief or VP of Marketing or someone much higher up which created storyline snafus, continuity problems, etc.. In the Corporate Marvel Era, higher-ups lived by the monthly sales tallies, and then demanded that the writers do the same, initially successful things over and over again (like killing off characters for the "cheap pop" of the sales boost) to goose next months' sales/next quarter's balance sheet, and the writers complained that using the same gimmicks over and over turned off the audience. All of which sounds a lot like WWE living and dying on their Monday night ratings.

And there's other parallels between the old WWF as a family-owned company vs. WWE being a publicly-traded corporate behemoth and Marvel's independent age vs when they were owned by various giant companies in terms of creative and artists freedom (or lack thereof), and, as noted above, the demand for more product, more characters, more, more, more, regardless of how diluted it made the product or how badly it burned out the writers (and in a few cases with Marvel, sadly, led to their early deaths).

And don't get me started on the incredible similarities between artists/writers coming up with comic book characters and turning them into giant Marvel successes only to find that Marvel owned them outright if the artist/writer left the company and the WWE's control over every aspect of its trademarked characters' outfits and personalities.

I'm sure that comic book fans will find this book interesting, but pro-wrestling fans who also like comic books will find it utterly fascinating because the parallels between the two worlds are AMAZING.

As they say in the blogs, "Highly Recommended."

mj

I'm dying to read that book, actually.  I shall be picking it up on Kindle forthwith.  

Comments

  1. I read that book! It is utterly fascinating. I read up on a lot of old comic history, so the book was right up my alley. It's a very engaging read due to the book being written more like a novel than a dry summation of facts. It's a bit in the vein of Erik Larson's excellent books like Devil in the White City. Good stuff!

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  2. Great post! :-)

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  3. Sounds interesting. I've gone from reading mostly all Marvel titles to dropping them all.

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