MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY
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"A WILD-RIDE ACCOUNT" —The Hollywood Reporter
"EPIC" —The New York Times
"INDISPENSABLE" —Los Angeles Times
"DEFINITIVE" —The Wall Street Journal
"SCINTILLATING" —Publishers Weekly
“FASCINATING” —GQ
"AUTHORITATIVE" —Kirkus Reviews
"GRIPPING" —Rolling Stone
"PRICELESS" —Booklist
"A MUST FOR ANY SUPERHERO OR POP-CULTURE FAN" —NY Post
"ESSENTIAL" —The Daily Beast
"A SUPERPOWERED MUST-READ" —USA Today
"REVELATORY" —The Miami Herald
"AS FULL OF COLORFUL CHARACTERS, TRAGIC REVERSALS AND UNLIKELY PLOT TWISTS AS ANY BOOK IN THE MARVEL CANON" —Newsday
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Doctor Strange #9, August 1975. Art by Gene Colan and Frank Chiarmonte; Words by Steve Englehart.
“The grating voice becomes Mick Jagger’s!” The Sorcerer Supreme vs. Satan, from DOCTOR STRANGE #16, July 1976. Art by Gene Colan and Tom Palmer. Words by Steve Englehart.
Here’s a 9000-word excerpt from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story—enjoy!
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8433000/an-excerpt-sean-howe-marvel-comics-untold-story
Then there was the time Rick Jones dosed himself in the Negative Zone. Captain Marvel #37 (March 1975). Art by Al Milgrom. Words by Steve Englehart.
Captain Marvel’s struggling-musician sidekick Rick Jones was getting hip, too. In Englehart’s Captain Marvel #37, Jones’s tourmate Dandy hands him a capsule, which she coyly refers to as “Vitamin C”: “a present, in case your ‘personal thing’ gets boring!” Rick Jones’s ‘personal thing’ at this point was that he would switch places with Captain Marvel every time he banged together the metal “Nega-Bands” on his wrists; this meant he spent a lot of time biding time in the Negative Zone, where one of them had to remain at all times. The next time Jones is floating idly in the Negative Zone, he pops the pill and begins hallucinating about his childhood in the suburbs; meanwhile, Captain Marvel’s jaw starts tingling, his head pulses, and his surroundings take on the properties of an Escher drawing. When the Watcher shows up and attacks Captain Marvel, our hero breaks out in a cold sweat; fortunately, by the next issue, he and Rick both have their bearings. Captain Marvel lauds Rick for the growth of his mind.
Other disgruntled Marvel creators began working for Malibu, which, fearful of putting all its eggs in the Image basket, was putting together plans for a shared universe—an “Ultraverse”—of its own characters. At a Scottsdale, Arizona, resort hotel, seven creators—including Steve Gerber and Steve Englehart—brainstormed in conference rooms, by tennis courts, and next to the swimming pool. They wouldn’t own the characters they created for Malibu, but they’d get a bigger share of profits than they would from Marvel. Even more important, they could follow their imaginations to the limit, creating comics about, say, a superhero who needed alcohol to manifest his powers, or a corrupt cop who was reincarnated as a sentient mass of sewage. Gerber and Englehart had grown frustrated with the thirty years of backstory baggage involved in writing Marvel characters, with having to ask editors for permission every time they wrote a line of dialogue. Walking around the complex at the end of the weekend, Gerber turned to Englehart. “This is what Marvel used to be like.”
