I’m already mad: the Kim O’Connor story

Kirby’s likability immediate, palpable

The founding of Marvel has a certain energy

I just don’t know how you look at quotes from Jack Kirby and wonder who the storyteller was

These Silver Age comic descriptions are all like “the artist took care of style, verve, pacing, and characterization...and then Stan Lee came in with his magic cornball powers...the final brilliant touch”

I know it’s a point of controversy but seems like the truth is right there

Stan Lee’s most important characters

Yeah, it’s endlessly interesting to me that this is a thing people argue about. Like this is a book that’s sympathetic to Lee and still his lack of authorship feels like the plain text https://twitter.com/deppey/status/1274159567379677184

Ditko

This book is so sad. I didnt know the orginal Superman creator spent his late career as a proofreader at Marvel

Earlier in the chapter Marvel fucked over some guy so bad that he burned all his comics in his yard. It’s almost too much

Marvel set the tone for its deep commitment to diversity in 1972, hiring a bunch of random wives with no writing experience for its feminist empowerment line

Wally Wood was not on board

Also this just happened...they tried to change T’Challa’s name to Black Leopard to distance the character from real-world politics https://twitter.com/munemoji/status/1274407741159690241

Struck by how, by the early 1970s, Stan Lee wasn’t really making any editorial decisions. The fans were fully in charge

Not only was plotting directly impacted by fan feedback, Stan Lee began shifting editorial direction based on conversations he overheard in the elevator

Real interesting how Marvel/DC has gone down in history as a rivalry

Some of these old plot points are so good

Wait, is this just a colorful way of speaking? Or did this guy for real have a heart attack?

I knew that Kirby had been exploited, but I was not aware that Marvel editors were also just really mean to him. Unreal

Yeah. Not to be judgmental but the fact that comics workers still haven't unionized now, today, blows my mind https://twitter.com/stopjoenow/status/1274497164358500354

I’d like to read a full history of “spite comics”

Some real psychology going on at Marvel circa 1983

“Quibbles”...?

Tell you what, this sounds better than that LOGAN (2017), of which I watched exactly five minutes

skeptical of all these assessments of the 1980s, I guess

Dead fascinated by how Marvel editors have been constitutionally mad for at least 40 years

In the late 1980s, Marvel workers literally burned an effigy of their Editor in Chief at a bbq

A thing I really love about this book is how everyone’s always “chomping” on cigars

Introducing Todd MacFarlane, creator of Spawn

Chris Claremont, having written Marvel’s #1 title for more than a decade, explains his own unceremonious axing to a journalist as “a corporate disagreement between an employee and his supervisor”

Enormously intrigued that the dumbest people in creation were the ones who finally stood up to Marvel for artists’ rights. I guess they were really more alpha bro business guys than artists, though

That last line. Wow. WOW

Frank Miller on the decision to reanimate Elektra a decade after he’d killed her off: “Marvel can drag that corpse around the block all they want”

1990s Marvel: paying Scott Lobdell $85,000 a month but won’t fire Herb Trimpe to his face

Could not have guessed how often Howard the Duck would keep coming up in this narrative. Tom Brevoort just got into some sort of gnostic blood feud over it. Not following what happened at all, yet somehow...? explains a lot

This book has a body count

Losing my actual mind over Todd McFarlane today

This guy!!

Marvel laid off most of its workforce following a big crash in the 90s. Personnel plucked the comics these guys had worked on out of their hands as they left the building

Meanwhile Stan Lee, who hadn’t touched a comic in decades, renegotiated his contract wayyyy up