Reed Tucker

Another now-or-never read, as even though it came out only in 2017, there's already been a lot of water under the bridge in terms of the state of the industry. Several things future-proof this book. One is that Tucker has an appropriately irreverent attitude towards DC and Marvel as institutions, and this carries into his writing. Two, he's concentrating on their prime as publishers, not as reservoirs of intellectual property to be drained. Three, this is very much a story of the New York publishing industry, as the two firms were basically revolving doors, due to their close proximity. Finally, Tucker does write with the sense that peak "superhero" was probably happening on his watch, and once you've achieved preeminence you can only go down; at least for awhile. So, you can also file this book under "Still Worth Reading."… (meer)

Well, this one was just a whole bunch of fun! I'm one of those guys that firmly falls within the Marvel camp, but I honestly found myself rooting for DC throughout this book, as they're just a company who can't get out of their own damn way to succeed.

Literally, my only complaint with this book is, I wanted to read Tucker's observations on the three latest developments
- Stan Lee's death
- Disney buying Fox and getting Marvel the rights back to X-Men and Fantastic Four
- the (somewhat) unexpected success of the Aquaman movie for DC

Really good book.… (meer)

Prior to the 1960s, DC was the leading comic book producer. In the 60s, Marvel caught up with and passed DC both in creativity and volume. This at least is the assertion of author Reed Tucker. The volume numbers can be verified (at least is part). Creativity is certainly in the eye of the beholder.

Reed says that in the 60s you were either a Marvel guy or a DC guy (and it was mostly guys, notably young boys) reading comics in those days. And that partisanship continues today (although the readership is older, and more females are reading). When I was a young boy in the 60s, I was a DC guy and, when it comes to comic books (I still read the occasional trade hardback) I'm still a DC guy. But I've seen pretty much all the superhero movies and I'll watch Marvel or DC. The Marvel movie universe is clearly better than the DC movie universe (or murderverse as he calls it). Nothing exemplifies the up and down nature of the superhero business than the timing of this book. It came out after "Suicide Squad" which was a major disappointment for DC fans but before "Wonder Woman" which was an enormous success. Reed metnions the danger of 'superhero fatigue setting in and I'm starting to feel that myself, "Black Panther" was a wonderful movie in many ways but it failed to really engage me).

Reed is clearly a Marvel guy which is one reason why I'm only giving this book 3 stars. He constantly puts forth Marvel as the plucky underdog fighting the corporate suits at DC, even when Marvel became the clear winner, and eventually was dominated by its own corporate culture (and now it's part of Disney, a massive corporation).

The other reason I can't give the book a higher rating is the muddled timeline. The book is structured more or less in chronological order, but there is some attempt at an underlining structure on creative content. For example, the last chapters are largely about the movie and TV eras of superheroes, which fits chronologically, but those chapters harken back to earlier eras, like the Superman movies of the 1980s, which he covered earlier in the book.

The book would have been helped greatly by illustrations but I imagine trying to secure the rights to such illustrations would have been a nightmare.

As a history of the Marvel/DC rivalry, it was a good read. In some aspects, this history parallels the history of baseball card production, which as a big card collector I'm much more familiar with. Especially in the 1990s when card companies were producing more and more sets and discovered that you could sell multiple versions of the same card, the comic book companies learned that collectors would snap up variant covers for the same book. Marvel and DC also became much more 'event' focused (remember the death of Superman?), which doesn't have a parallel in the baseball card world.

If you're looking for a general history of comic books, this isn't it. If you're a big comic book collector, this book may not tell you anything new. If you're interested in pop culture in general, and have some interest in comics (like me) then you might like this book.… (meer)