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Marvels: The Novelization
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Expected 19 May 26368 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication May 19, 2026
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Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
First They Gawk, Then They Monetize
Steve Darnall’s “Marvels: The Novelization” knows that a city can turn terror into branding almost as fast as it turns it into fear
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 3rd, 2026
Cities tell on themselves when the impossible arrives. Steve Darnall’s “Marvels: The Novelization” knows that from page one. Superhero stories usually ask who will save the city. This one asks what the city does to itself while waiting. It gawks, jeers, applauds, buys souvenirs, reaches for a pitchfork, and eventually perfects the deadening trick of calling the impossible routine. Power, in this book, stays mostly overhead. Its consequences hit the sidewalk.
That was already the audacity of Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s “Marvels,” but Darnall’s prose version finds a real use for itself by leaning harder on witness. The novel comes to us as the unfinished memoir of photojournalist Phil Sheldon, later pieced together from taped conversations with journalist Marcia Hardesty after illness leaves him unable to finish it cleanly. The frame blocks the book from pretending memory comes whole. We are reading not a definitive record, but a late effort to say what it felt like to stand there when the world changed and then, with indecent speed, got used to it. Beth, Phil’s daughter, provides the spark. Looking at his old photographs, she sees costumes, names, stories already filed away as history. Phil remembers something rawer: the light, the heat, the color, the feel of being there. History keeps the facts. Feeling leaks out first. Darnall’s task is to smuggle some of that feeling back into the archive before it goes flat.
He begins where the room changes size. Phil is young in 1939, ambitious, in love with Doris Jacquet, and convinced that real history is happening elsewhere – in Europe, in war, in the foreign bureau he wants badly enough to narrate his life toward it. Then Phineas Horton unveils the Human Torch. The press corps smells a crank. Phil keeps looking. He sees the figure move. He sees it look back. Snickering curdles into alarm. Then the sorting starts: man, machine, menace, mistake. No one knows, so the room does what rooms do when certainty leaks away. It gets louder. Then it gets righteous. Later, when the Torch escapes and leaves flaming footprints cooling on the pavement, witnesses hurry to explain him away. Darnall catches that civic sequence beat by beat: awe, then naming panic, then the scramble to explain the whole thing away. Disbelief, he knows, is not always stupidity. Sometimes it is self-protection in a necktie.
Namor gets the same treatment, only with more water and no more sense. Doris tells the truth about what she has seen and meets the smug condescension reserved for anyone whose testimony would force a room to rethink itself. Darnall catches the next turn too: awe curdles into panic, panic settles into routine, and routine picks up headline reflexes. Phil slowly realizes that the Marvels are not just curiosities. They alter human measure. Europe once looked like the center of history. Now New York has its own war, one flaming footprint and one shattered assumption at a time.
From there the novel widens into a civic record of accommodation. The Fantastic Four arrive not only as heroes but as household wallpaper: press-conference sensations, magazine bait, party talk, civic mascots. Reed Richards can dazzle a room. Sue Storm can draw applause. Johnny Storm grins like youth with a flame problem. Ben Grimm removes a helmet and reminds everyone that marvel and monstrosity are often separated by one thin layer of public sympathy. New York wastes no time turning the Fantastic Four into licensed kitsch. That is funny. It is also diagnostic. Once terror can be sold back as charm, the public sleeps easier.
But “Monsters,” the second chapter, earns its title by asking who gets folded into the culture and who gets shoved outside it. The Fantastic Four become civic wallpaper. Mutants get graffiti, neighborhood panic, and Bolivar Trask on television presenting giant robots as the sensible answer to public fear. The asymmetry is the point. One kind of difference becomes décor. Another becomes danger. Fear does not remain a feeling. It gets a policy brief, a demonstration model, and metal legs. Darnall never has to hang a relevance sign over the material. He is writing about older habits: the appetite for a scapegoat, the pleasure of preemptive control, the speed with which a public decides one form of otherness is chic and another intolerable. Here the novel stops feeling like franchise upkeep and starts reading like a study of a city living on nerves.
Phil’s voice is plainspoken, dry-eyed, faintly amused. Darnall is smart enough not to challenge Alex Ross at Ross’s own game. There are no desperate bursts of purple smoke meant to replace painted grandeur. Instead the prose shifts weight onto background faces, newsroom silences, frightened neighbors, and the tiny tonal changes by which a crowd gives itself away. The language almost never loses its bearings. It surprises less often. That trade is deliberate. Phil is a reporter with a camera, not an oracle, and the sentences know the difference.
The structure is doing argument, not filing. The four chapter titles – “A Time of Marvels,” “Monsters,” “Judgment Day,” and “The Day She Died” – do not merely divide the material. They bend the reader’s sense of it: first astonishment, then sorting, then humiliation, then blunt loss. The memoir-and-interview frame deepens that motion by turning the whole book into a late act of explanation, incomplete by circumstance and by design. Alex Ross’s afterword confirms the aim: not to outmuscle the source, but to inhabit Phil Sheldon more fully and give the historical debris around him room to breathe. The instinct is sound, and the scenes make good on it. This version is strongest not when it restages a famous event for recognition’s sake, but when it shows what that event does to the people who still have to file copy, catch the train, eat dinner, and pretend the walls of the world have not moved.
Nowhere is that plainer than “Judgment Day.” Galactus arrives, and every earlier argument about heroes, monsters, popularity, and menace suddenly looks local. The Fantastic Four rush in. The crowd cheers. For a moment the old rescue script still looks usable. The heroes will sort it out. Then Galactus brushes that script aside. He defeats them almost at once. One of the book’s best moments is brutally simple. A voice in the newsroom says what nobody has prepared to hear: they lost.
Darnall handles the scene with nerve. He does not try to make the combat larger than it already is. He lets the shock register where the novel has always been strongest – in ordinary systems trying to go on. Telephones ring. Deadlines persist. People move because movement is easier than terror. Phil goes outside. It is something to do. That is the actual size of human usefulness in the presence of a god.
Then he pulls the lens in at exactly the right moment. After cosmic threat comes Gwen Stacy’s death. The shift could have felt anticlimactic. It does the opposite. It tells you what the novel was after all along. Phil watches Spider-Man and the Green Goblin above the bridge and, for an instant, still believes in the old grammar of rescue. The web catches her. Everything should be fine. Then it is not. The world may survive Galactus. Gwen still dies.
There the novel stops circling and says what it means. After giant machines, cosmic emissaries, mobs, headlines, and years of altered weather, it returns to one dead woman and lets the whole heroic machinery look insufficient beside her. The scale contracts. The meaning sharpens. What mattered was never only what these figures could do in the sky. It was what their presence did to the people below it.
What emerges is not a tidier digest of Marvel history, but a sharper record of how a society absorbs what it cannot bear all at once: first as marvel, then as monster, then as fad, then as policy, then as grief. The caped figures may command the skyline. The deepest attention goes elsewhere – to the people below it, shading their eyes, buying the souvenir, filing the story, and living with the aftertaste.
That discipline has a price. Because the novel stays so firmly with Phil’s witness-position, it sometimes skims where it should linger. Some of the middle historical sweep feels joined neatly rather than lived in. You can sense Darnall choosing the right nodes in the mythology without always giving each one enough dramatic air. And while the prose is intelligent and controlled, it rarely reaches the sentence-by-sentence vividness that would make the book feel as verbally alive as it is conceptually acute. It rarely bowls you over. It convinces you. Those are different pleasures.
Because the novel never pauses to advertise its relevance, the relevance arrives without fanfare. It knows how quickly a crowd wants a story that will make fear feel organized. It knows how easily astonishment becomes branding for some and enforcement for others. It knows how a city learns to fold catastrophe into daily weather. Darnall never borrows panic from the latest panic. He notices older, meaner reflexes – denial, scapegoating, managed fear – and lets them look uncomfortably durable.
I landed at 85/100, which for me is 4 stars: a strong, thoughtful novel that thinks harder than it startles, but does so honestly and without borrowed urgency. “Marvels: The Novelization” understands that superhero stories are usually claimed by the figures in the sky. This one belongs to the people below it – the ones craning their necks, filing the copy, buying the souvenir, going home to dinner, and discovering that seeing the larger picture is still not the same thing as saving anyone.
Steve Darnall’s “Marvels: The Novelization” knows that a city can turn terror into branding almost as fast as it turns it into fear
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 3rd, 2026
Cities tell on themselves when the impossible arrives. Steve Darnall’s “Marvels: The Novelization” knows that from page one. Superhero stories usually ask who will save the city. This one asks what the city does to itself while waiting. It gawks, jeers, applauds, buys souvenirs, reaches for a pitchfork, and eventually perfects the deadening trick of calling the impossible routine. Power, in this book, stays mostly overhead. Its consequences hit the sidewalk.
That was already the audacity of Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s “Marvels,” but Darnall’s prose version finds a real use for itself by leaning harder on witness. The novel comes to us as the unfinished memoir of photojournalist Phil Sheldon, later pieced together from taped conversations with journalist Marcia Hardesty after illness leaves him unable to finish it cleanly. The frame blocks the book from pretending memory comes whole. We are reading not a definitive record, but a late effort to say what it felt like to stand there when the world changed and then, with indecent speed, got used to it. Beth, Phil’s daughter, provides the spark. Looking at his old photographs, she sees costumes, names, stories already filed away as history. Phil remembers something rawer: the light, the heat, the color, the feel of being there. History keeps the facts. Feeling leaks out first. Darnall’s task is to smuggle some of that feeling back into the archive before it goes flat.
He begins where the room changes size. Phil is young in 1939, ambitious, in love with Doris Jacquet, and convinced that real history is happening elsewhere – in Europe, in war, in the foreign bureau he wants badly enough to narrate his life toward it. Then Phineas Horton unveils the Human Torch. The press corps smells a crank. Phil keeps looking. He sees the figure move. He sees it look back. Snickering curdles into alarm. Then the sorting starts: man, machine, menace, mistake. No one knows, so the room does what rooms do when certainty leaks away. It gets louder. Then it gets righteous. Later, when the Torch escapes and leaves flaming footprints cooling on the pavement, witnesses hurry to explain him away. Darnall catches that civic sequence beat by beat: awe, then naming panic, then the scramble to explain the whole thing away. Disbelief, he knows, is not always stupidity. Sometimes it is self-protection in a necktie.
Namor gets the same treatment, only with more water and no more sense. Doris tells the truth about what she has seen and meets the smug condescension reserved for anyone whose testimony would force a room to rethink itself. Darnall catches the next turn too: awe curdles into panic, panic settles into routine, and routine picks up headline reflexes. Phil slowly realizes that the Marvels are not just curiosities. They alter human measure. Europe once looked like the center of history. Now New York has its own war, one flaming footprint and one shattered assumption at a time.
From there the novel widens into a civic record of accommodation. The Fantastic Four arrive not only as heroes but as household wallpaper: press-conference sensations, magazine bait, party talk, civic mascots. Reed Richards can dazzle a room. Sue Storm can draw applause. Johnny Storm grins like youth with a flame problem. Ben Grimm removes a helmet and reminds everyone that marvel and monstrosity are often separated by one thin layer of public sympathy. New York wastes no time turning the Fantastic Four into licensed kitsch. That is funny. It is also diagnostic. Once terror can be sold back as charm, the public sleeps easier.
But “Monsters,” the second chapter, earns its title by asking who gets folded into the culture and who gets shoved outside it. The Fantastic Four become civic wallpaper. Mutants get graffiti, neighborhood panic, and Bolivar Trask on television presenting giant robots as the sensible answer to public fear. The asymmetry is the point. One kind of difference becomes décor. Another becomes danger. Fear does not remain a feeling. It gets a policy brief, a demonstration model, and metal legs. Darnall never has to hang a relevance sign over the material. He is writing about older habits: the appetite for a scapegoat, the pleasure of preemptive control, the speed with which a public decides one form of otherness is chic and another intolerable. Here the novel stops feeling like franchise upkeep and starts reading like a study of a city living on nerves.
Phil’s voice is plainspoken, dry-eyed, faintly amused. Darnall is smart enough not to challenge Alex Ross at Ross’s own game. There are no desperate bursts of purple smoke meant to replace painted grandeur. Instead the prose shifts weight onto background faces, newsroom silences, frightened neighbors, and the tiny tonal changes by which a crowd gives itself away. The language almost never loses its bearings. It surprises less often. That trade is deliberate. Phil is a reporter with a camera, not an oracle, and the sentences know the difference.
The structure is doing argument, not filing. The four chapter titles – “A Time of Marvels,” “Monsters,” “Judgment Day,” and “The Day She Died” – do not merely divide the material. They bend the reader’s sense of it: first astonishment, then sorting, then humiliation, then blunt loss. The memoir-and-interview frame deepens that motion by turning the whole book into a late act of explanation, incomplete by circumstance and by design. Alex Ross’s afterword confirms the aim: not to outmuscle the source, but to inhabit Phil Sheldon more fully and give the historical debris around him room to breathe. The instinct is sound, and the scenes make good on it. This version is strongest not when it restages a famous event for recognition’s sake, but when it shows what that event does to the people who still have to file copy, catch the train, eat dinner, and pretend the walls of the world have not moved.
Nowhere is that plainer than “Judgment Day.” Galactus arrives, and every earlier argument about heroes, monsters, popularity, and menace suddenly looks local. The Fantastic Four rush in. The crowd cheers. For a moment the old rescue script still looks usable. The heroes will sort it out. Then Galactus brushes that script aside. He defeats them almost at once. One of the book’s best moments is brutally simple. A voice in the newsroom says what nobody has prepared to hear: they lost.
Darnall handles the scene with nerve. He does not try to make the combat larger than it already is. He lets the shock register where the novel has always been strongest – in ordinary systems trying to go on. Telephones ring. Deadlines persist. People move because movement is easier than terror. Phil goes outside. It is something to do. That is the actual size of human usefulness in the presence of a god.
Then he pulls the lens in at exactly the right moment. After cosmic threat comes Gwen Stacy’s death. The shift could have felt anticlimactic. It does the opposite. It tells you what the novel was after all along. Phil watches Spider-Man and the Green Goblin above the bridge and, for an instant, still believes in the old grammar of rescue. The web catches her. Everything should be fine. Then it is not. The world may survive Galactus. Gwen still dies.
There the novel stops circling and says what it means. After giant machines, cosmic emissaries, mobs, headlines, and years of altered weather, it returns to one dead woman and lets the whole heroic machinery look insufficient beside her. The scale contracts. The meaning sharpens. What mattered was never only what these figures could do in the sky. It was what their presence did to the people below it.
What emerges is not a tidier digest of Marvel history, but a sharper record of how a society absorbs what it cannot bear all at once: first as marvel, then as monster, then as fad, then as policy, then as grief. The caped figures may command the skyline. The deepest attention goes elsewhere – to the people below it, shading their eyes, buying the souvenir, filing the story, and living with the aftertaste.
That discipline has a price. Because the novel stays so firmly with Phil’s witness-position, it sometimes skims where it should linger. Some of the middle historical sweep feels joined neatly rather than lived in. You can sense Darnall choosing the right nodes in the mythology without always giving each one enough dramatic air. And while the prose is intelligent and controlled, it rarely reaches the sentence-by-sentence vividness that would make the book feel as verbally alive as it is conceptually acute. It rarely bowls you over. It convinces you. Those are different pleasures.
Because the novel never pauses to advertise its relevance, the relevance arrives without fanfare. It knows how quickly a crowd wants a story that will make fear feel organized. It knows how easily astonishment becomes branding for some and enforcement for others. It knows how a city learns to fold catastrophe into daily weather. Darnall never borrows panic from the latest panic. He notices older, meaner reflexes – denial, scapegoating, managed fear – and lets them look uncomfortably durable.
I landed at 85/100, which for me is 4 stars: a strong, thoughtful novel that thinks harder than it startles, but does so honestly and without borrowed urgency. “Marvels: The Novelization” understands that superhero stories are usually claimed by the figures in the sky. This one belongs to the people below it – the ones craning their necks, filing the copy, buying the souvenir, going home to dinner, and discovering that seeing the larger picture is still not the same thing as saving anyone.
March 16, 2026
There have been some pretty iconic series over at Marvel Comics over the years, but nothing really has struck me like
Marvels
from the mid-90s. A masterpiece in comic storytelling that felt unique and poignant, while also striking visually. Now, Steve Darnall gives us a thrilling all-new interpretation of the original comic series in
Marvels: The Novelization
, which adds to the already outstanding story while keeping the source material intact.
Welcome to New York. Here, burning figures roam the streets, men in brightly colored costumes scale the glass and concrete walls, creatures from space threaten to devour our world . . . and everyone else is going about their lives.
Marvels was first released in 1994 as a single issue comic miniseries by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross and has since been published in various formats and collected editions. The landmark series pulls back the curtain on Marvel's history with the unique perspective of an everyman character in news photographer Phil Sheldon. The photographer chronicles a world ever-growing with costumed superhumans, providing a view we don't normally see in the world of comics as the Marvel Universe expands into what we see now.
What some may not know is that while Busiek was the writer on the series the author of Marvels: The Novelization, Darnall, was the Ross' original writing partner back in the 1990s as they pitched the idea to the higher-ups at Marvel. So Darnall comes to this book with a deep passion for this story and knowledge on what is going on in the world of Marvel at the time.
With Marvel Comics spanning many decades, some people can forget how it all began (well in the fictional world). The introduction of the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, then Captain America, Iron Man, and the X-Men. We might take advantage that all these characters just exist in universe we all love, but they have origins as well. Even more important is how those on the ground, the everyday people, react and feel about these new superhumans. Phil Sheldon helps us all see what it was like as the Marvel Universe was introduced.
Those on the ground were frightened, they were confused, they were unsure what to make of it all. Are these superpowered beings good or evil, were they here to help or hinder. Giving us this perspective makes you think a bit deeper than you might in a modern day storytelling. Even when things feel like these Marvels are here to help, the feeling of lost protection when Galactus appears would be utterly devastating and frightening.
I could continue spending the rest of this review discussion how important and fantastic the Marvels story is overall. However, it's Darnall's adaptation into novel that is the focus. What is a beautiful and stunningly visual feast in the original series, is just as good in the novel format as Darnall adds to the story with vivid descriptions and expands on what we already know while keeping the heart of the story the same.
Marvels: The Novelization is such an important story in comics, a must-read for those who have a deep passion and love for the Marvel Universe. The huge benefit to having the single issues, trade collections, and now this novelization, is it is now in a format that everyone can enjoy. Whether you want to see more of Ross' outstanding paintings or would rather curl up with a good book, Marvels is a must-read story.
Marvels: The Novelization hits bookstores everywhere on May 19, 2026 from Abrams ComicArts.
NOTE: We received an advance copy of Marvels: The Novelization from the publisher. Opinions are our own.
Welcome to New York. Here, burning figures roam the streets, men in brightly colored costumes scale the glass and concrete walls, creatures from space threaten to devour our world . . . and everyone else is going about their lives.
Marvels was first released in 1994 as a single issue comic miniseries by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross and has since been published in various formats and collected editions. The landmark series pulls back the curtain on Marvel's history with the unique perspective of an everyman character in news photographer Phil Sheldon. The photographer chronicles a world ever-growing with costumed superhumans, providing a view we don't normally see in the world of comics as the Marvel Universe expands into what we see now.
What some may not know is that while Busiek was the writer on the series the author of Marvels: The Novelization, Darnall, was the Ross' original writing partner back in the 1990s as they pitched the idea to the higher-ups at Marvel. So Darnall comes to this book with a deep passion for this story and knowledge on what is going on in the world of Marvel at the time.
With Marvel Comics spanning many decades, some people can forget how it all began (well in the fictional world). The introduction of the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, then Captain America, Iron Man, and the X-Men. We might take advantage that all these characters just exist in universe we all love, but they have origins as well. Even more important is how those on the ground, the everyday people, react and feel about these new superhumans. Phil Sheldon helps us all see what it was like as the Marvel Universe was introduced.
Those on the ground were frightened, they were confused, they were unsure what to make of it all. Are these superpowered beings good or evil, were they here to help or hinder. Giving us this perspective makes you think a bit deeper than you might in a modern day storytelling. Even when things feel like these Marvels are here to help, the feeling of lost protection when Galactus appears would be utterly devastating and frightening.
I could continue spending the rest of this review discussion how important and fantastic the Marvels story is overall. However, it's Darnall's adaptation into novel that is the focus. What is a beautiful and stunningly visual feast in the original series, is just as good in the novel format as Darnall adds to the story with vivid descriptions and expands on what we already know while keeping the heart of the story the same.
Marvels: The Novelization is such an important story in comics, a must-read for those who have a deep passion and love for the Marvel Universe. The huge benefit to having the single issues, trade collections, and now this novelization, is it is now in a format that everyone can enjoy. Whether you want to see more of Ross' outstanding paintings or would rather curl up with a good book, Marvels is a must-read story.
Marvels: The Novelization hits bookstores everywhere on May 19, 2026 from Abrams ComicArts.
NOTE: We received an advance copy of Marvels: The Novelization from the publisher. Opinions are our own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Over the years, I have read quite a few superhero prose novels, and Marvels: The Novelization by Steve Darnall with illustrations by Alex Ross is without a doubt my favorite and the best written one I have read. Simply put, this book is great! This is no surprise, given the strength of the source material, but Marvels doesn't just copy the well-loved comic series but uses it as a platform to grow from.
The premise of the book is simple: it chronicles four decades of the life of Phil Sheldon, a freelance photographer in New York, as he witnesses the actions of superheroes beginning with Namor and the original Human Torch, to the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men, with appearances by a host of other notable Marvel characters along the way. Plenty of time is also spent with Sheldon's family, co-workers, and general life in New York City during the time period covered.
The writing in Marvels is straightforward, simple, but for a smart audience. It helps to have a knowledge of the characters and prominent stories from Marvel's Golden and Silver Ages as they are referenced continually throughout. Sometimes they are casual references, but other times they are pages long and integral to the story and the plot.
Given the presence of these superheroes, the book is not about them but rather about the lives of ordinary New York citizens whose lives intersect with those of people with powers at random. Some are fascinated, others scared; the same individual who adores the Fantastic Four can get caught up in anti-mutant hysteria while a college student named Gwen Stacy can have mixed feelings about Spider-Man. This book shows the lives of humans themselves, and Darnall is excellent at capturing this. There are also several new illustrations by Alex Ross which are as great as to be expected.
What Works: Great writing with an engrossing story, strong character work, and several amazing illustrations.
What Doesn’t: No complaints!
Final Thoughts: The best superhero prose novel I have ever read!
Rating: 10 out of 10 photographers
An advance copy was provided by NetGalley and Abrams Comic Arts, but my opinions are my own.
The premise of the book is simple: it chronicles four decades of the life of Phil Sheldon, a freelance photographer in New York, as he witnesses the actions of superheroes beginning with Namor and the original Human Torch, to the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men, with appearances by a host of other notable Marvel characters along the way. Plenty of time is also spent with Sheldon's family, co-workers, and general life in New York City during the time period covered.
The writing in Marvels is straightforward, simple, but for a smart audience. It helps to have a knowledge of the characters and prominent stories from Marvel's Golden and Silver Ages as they are referenced continually throughout. Sometimes they are casual references, but other times they are pages long and integral to the story and the plot.
Given the presence of these superheroes, the book is not about them but rather about the lives of ordinary New York citizens whose lives intersect with those of people with powers at random. Some are fascinated, others scared; the same individual who adores the Fantastic Four can get caught up in anti-mutant hysteria while a college student named Gwen Stacy can have mixed feelings about Spider-Man. This book shows the lives of humans themselves, and Darnall is excellent at capturing this. There are also several new illustrations by Alex Ross which are as great as to be expected.
What Works: Great writing with an engrossing story, strong character work, and several amazing illustrations.
What Doesn’t: No complaints!
Final Thoughts: The best superhero prose novel I have ever read!
Rating: 10 out of 10 photographers
An advance copy was provided by NetGalley and Abrams Comic Arts, but my opinions are my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
From limited-edition comic series to an audio drama and now to a novel, Marvels is a story that hits hard, right in the feelings.
Phil Sheldon is Old School. A man who has Seen Some Stuff. With just the right touch of hard-boiled vocabulary, Darnall uses words to pain the pictures of a simpler time when a young and hungry journalist witnesses world-changing events. Phil got his start in the 1930s, and was a colleague of J. Jonah Jameson--who even then was an ambitious SOB, but this story isn't about him.
It's about how someone with no powers, someone on the street, has lived through the history of what he calls Marvels, and it goes back further than one might think. Phil meets the love of his life, builds a family, goes overseas during WW2, witnesses the Fantastic Four lose a cosmic-level fight and Darnall executes a fabulous balance between the gritty realism of what Phil lives through and the optimism and hope he manages to maintain through most of the story. He's not one-dimensional, there is definitely character growth, but it's so subtle, the reader is growing right along with it. Phil is also driven (and this drive causes conflict in multiple scenes) by that one trait that makes me admire certain comic book journalists over real ones: a need to get to the unvarnished truth. Even as Phil makes some hard choices that will bit him back hard, I rooted for him all the way.
Marvels isn't a superhero story. It's Phil's story. It's also the story of Marvel's New York, and how it came to be. Highly recommended.
Thank you to NetGalley and Abrams Comic Arts for the opportunity to read and review this ARC
Phil Sheldon is Old School. A man who has Seen Some Stuff. With just the right touch of hard-boiled vocabulary, Darnall uses words to pain the pictures of a simpler time when a young and hungry journalist witnesses world-changing events. Phil got his start in the 1930s, and was a colleague of J. Jonah Jameson--who even then was an ambitious SOB, but this story isn't about him.
It's about how someone with no powers, someone on the street, has lived through the history of what he calls Marvels, and it goes back further than one might think. Phil meets the love of his life, builds a family, goes overseas during WW2, witnesses the Fantastic Four lose a cosmic-level fight and Darnall executes a fabulous balance between the gritty realism of what Phil lives through and the optimism and hope he manages to maintain through most of the story. He's not one-dimensional, there is definitely character growth, but it's so subtle, the reader is growing right along with it. Phil is also driven (and this drive causes conflict in multiple scenes) by that one trait that makes me admire certain comic book journalists over real ones: a need to get to the unvarnished truth. Even as Phil makes some hard choices that will bit him back hard, I rooted for him all the way.
Marvels isn't a superhero story. It's Phil's story. It's also the story of Marvel's New York, and how it came to be. Highly recommended.
Thank you to NetGalley and Abrams Comic Arts for the opportunity to read and review this ARC
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Abrams ComicArts provided an early galley for review.
When the 1994 mini-series came out, I was all-in thanks to the buzz. So, having a chance to visit the story again via a prose novel was something I was eager to check out.
Like the original mini-series, this novel is broken up into four chapters , each covering approximately the same events as those issues and taking their titles from those comics. The story follows the career of Sheldon as it becomes intertwined with the appearance of super-beings in New York City. Like the mini, we get a feeling for what it is like for the people of the Marvel world as they are impacted by the battles of the heroes and their oppositions.
As a seasoned comic reader, it was a fun exercise to remember the various comics from the Golden, Silver and Bronze ages as references are made to them throughout the novel. Whether any layman readers not familiar with these will derive the same pleasure from the descriptions is questionable.
When the 1994 mini-series came out, I was all-in thanks to the buzz. So, having a chance to visit the story again via a prose novel was something I was eager to check out.
Like the original mini-series, this novel is broken up into four chapters , each covering approximately the same events as those issues and taking their titles from those comics. The story follows the career of Sheldon as it becomes intertwined with the appearance of super-beings in New York City. Like the mini, we get a feeling for what it is like for the people of the Marvel world as they are impacted by the battles of the heroes and their oppositions.
As a seasoned comic reader, it was a fun exercise to remember the various comics from the Golden, Silver and Bronze ages as references are made to them throughout the novel. Whether any layman readers not familiar with these will derive the same pleasure from the descriptions is questionable.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Marvels is one of my favourite comic book stories of all time, mostly due to the impressive art by Alex Ross. The story was also very good, and when a story is highly praised in comic books, it's nice to see it expanded. That's what this story is, a more thorough telling of events from the graphic novel. When Superman died in the 90's, they released a book called The Death and Life of Superman, and I bought it and ate it up. The difference here, is that this book is many years after the original, so it'll be harder to capitalize on the original. That being said, I really enjoyed it, and I could still picture the events details in my head as I read it. So if you enjoyed that original comic, you will undoubtedly enjoy this book. as a companion piece. If you haven't read the original, go do it now, you'll thank me!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
News photographer, Phil Sheldon, is in awe. He doesn’t just see the majesty of day-to-day living in New York; there are super powered beings popping up everywhere. Phil gets to not only witness them, but he also gets paid to document their exploits through the lens of his camera.
I’m not really sure what I expected from this novelization. It is well written, but it lacks the beauty of Alex Ross’ artwork. This story is so much better being seen than read. As a novel, Mr. Darnall did a great job and keeps it interesting most of the novel. It just fell short of the original material.
I received this ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review.
I’m not really sure what I expected from this novelization. It is well written, but it lacks the beauty of Alex Ross’ artwork. This story is so much better being seen than read. As a novel, Mr. Darnall did a great job and keeps it interesting most of the novel. It just fell short of the original material.
I received this ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review.
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