Marvel Chronicle: A Year by Year History by Dorling-Kindersley Books

Marvel Comics is one of the longest-running superhero-publishing businesses in the country, perhaps even in the world. The only company that comes anywhere near them is DC in terms of long-lasting companies, strength of characters owned by the company and sales, but Marvel holds the crown when it comes in terms of the changes to comics that came out of books, titles and artists who worked for them.

People like Jack Kirby and Joe Schuster made Marvel great, and Marvel repaid them with more and greater opportunities for work. Also a part of Marvel, Stan Lee, who came to represent the company in many of its titles, both in print form and on Television and video, got their start at Marvel. This book is the story of the growth of that company from its original start as Timely publications in 1938 until 2007, when the book went to press.

Each year starts with an overview of the year and what went on. A separate section describes the groundbreaking or interesting comics published that year, along with a smaller section reiterating some of the important events happening in the world at large. At the beginning of a new Decade, there is a splash page filled with art from a comic of that decade, and a brief overview of the events in that Decade at Marvel. For example, the 50's were the Golden Age of Comics, when Stan Lee literally rewrote and remade Superhero comics, basing them around characters. Some characters were new (such as the Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Daredevil, and so on, while some dated back to as early as 1938, such as The Sub-Mariner and The (android) Human Torch.

This is a great book, but it does tend to come off a bit boring. It's more like an encyclopedia than anything else, but it's an encyclopedia of the company that became Marvel Comics. Now, don't get me wrong- there's plenty of fascinating stuff in here, such as why Marvel now eschews the Comics Code Authority in its books, and why Marvel was only publishing 16 titles during the 50's (as a large comics distributor, they were limited to 8 titles a month so as not to flood the market and establish a monopoly. The 16 titles were bi-monthly so only 8 came out in any one month), but reading straight through for long periods of time gets kind of boring and monotonous. This is a book best enjoyed in small doses, as the amount of information within is overwhelming.

The best thing is the month by month reports of the comics that were in some way ground-breaking, enabling fans of a comic to mark its high and low points. People can read when the Gray Hulk became Green, and why, and when overarching plots from multiple books and storylines changed (the end of the Kree-Skrull Wars, for instance). Some plotlines worked, and others were incredible failures (the first re-write of Spider-Man's origin failed, but the Ultimate Spider-Man rewrite worked, and to great acclaim, at that.)

This is a large and heavy book, but lots of reading, unless you take scrupulous care with the book, may end up warping it to the point that you'll feel unhappy at a book you paid so much for looks ugly and uncared-for. I'd get this one from a library rather than pay for it myself. Marvel fans will find a lot to enjoy in this book, and many Marvel legends contributed forewords and afterwords. But it's big, heavy and expensive. So heavy, in fact, that the book almost seems to deteriorate as you hold it. Save your money and read it through a library, or decide if you want to pay the expense to own it. Either way, it's a fasinating, informative ride through Marvel History that will holds its value in the many times you want to re-read it.