The House of Ideas that Jack (and Steve) Built: Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story
Early on in Sean Howe’s book-length history Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, the reader’s imagination is spurred by a throwaway anecdote: in 1937, New York magazine publisher Martin Goodman and his wife planned to return from a trip to Europe aboard the Hindenburg — on what would turn out to be the final tragic flight of the German dirigible, which ended with a terrifying aerial explosion and fire that led to the deaths of 36 people. Goodman, as it happened, was too late to get tickets and took a plane instead. You can’t help but wonder, though. What if he’d died then, before he’d expanded his magazine line to include comics? Before he’d hired his nephew Stanley to work in the office and do fill-in bits of writing? What if Marvel Comics, the subject of Howe’s book, had been stillborn? What would have been different in the development of comics, of popular culture, of the North American imagination? Maybe everything. Maybe nothing.
Maybe nothing, because Goodman was not himself involved in any significant way in the creation of the books. The best days for his company came when he let his nephew, by then working under the pseudonym Stan Lee, edit the comics with a free hand — aside from the occasional directive, such as the alleged command ‘those guys across town are doing well with their super-hero team book; you do a super-hero team book too,’ which by one account gave rise in 1961 to The Fantastic Four and to Marvel Comics as we know them. But Goodman himself wrote nothing and drew nothing. If he’d died in 1937, Jack Kirby would have still gone on to a great career. Maybe not with Goodman’s company, but with somebody’s. Steve Ditko as well. You can’t help but think that comics veterans who came to Marvel in the 50s and 60s, Gil Kane and Gene Colan and John Buscema and John Romita and the like, would have found work somewhere. And the next wave of creators, artists like Barry Windsor-Smith and Jim Steranko and Neal Adams, writers like Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart and Steve Gerber, would have made careers in comics for themselves somehow.
The Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story was first given out in 2009. The category was a nice idea, especially given the increased prominence of comics in the media landscape, but I have to admit that up to this year, I’ve been underwhelmed by the choice of winners. Or, more precisely, winner, singular: Phil and Kaja Foglio’s webcomic Girl Genius took the award three times straight. I don’t dislike the comic, but from what I’ve read, I’d be hard-pressed to identify anything in it that makes it worth a major award ahead of any number of series — Hellboy or Mouse Guard or Wednesday Comics or RASL or All-Star Superman or you name it. After their third win, though, the Foglios announced they would decline to accept a nomination for the next year, in the interest of helping to establish the validity of the award. So the 2012 Hugo went to another title: 
