I never had the pleasure of meeting Gruenwald, but he always struck me as the heart of 1980s and early '90s Marvel. When I was reading Marvel in the early '80s, it seemed like the company was driven by some very powerful creators making what would become iconic stories. John Byrne's Fantastic Four. Walt Simonson's Thor. Frank Miller's Daredevil. And then as the mid-80s started rolling around, there was a bit of a shift. While those types of stories were still being told, they were mostly contained to their own titles, but we started to see efforts to make sure it was easy to coalesce them all and make them easily understandable. George Olshevsky's indexes got "official" treatments published by Marvel. The Marvel Handbooks. Marvel Saga. Even Marvel Age, which was designed as a vehicle to promote upcoming books and storylines, started to "organize" the stories pre-emptively, telling readers how crossover events like "Inferno" or "Atlantis Attacks" tied together before they were even published.
Pretty much all of that was Mark's doing.
Before reading Paul V. Allen's biography on him, I knew that. Mark's name was on all of those projects. What I learned in reading the biography was how and why his name was on those projects.
Allen seems to have had good access to many of Mark's friends and relatives, including his sister and his widow. Which means that the book covers Mark's life in its entirety very well, and includes a number of family photos and any number of personal recollections. In fact, the level of detail on every part of his life included in the book from different sources almost suggests Allen could've easily have filled a book twice as large if he'd been allowed a longer page count. I know of at least a dozen anecdotes and stories about Mark that aren't even passingly referenced in the book. But I think that it not being longer is a plus. Allen offers plenty of detail to let the reader get to know who Mark was and how he approached everything, but without getting bogged down in minutia that could bore a casual reader.
I think that's where the real success of the book lies. It's not just a list of facts and dates like an extended Wikipedia entry; it really starts to capture who Mark was an individual, including some of his faults. (Which is, frankly, the first time I think I've seen anyone do that about him.) You do get a sense of Mark's passionate approach to life in general and comics in particular. And for me personally, it showcases just how much of my comics reading experiences as a teen were shaped both directly and indirectly by him. Even though I read almost none of his Captain America, Squadron Supreme, DP7, or Quasar until years after the fact.
I've long appreciated what Mark brough to Marvel Comics, and I'm glad that we now have a really good biography of him that fills in all the holes in my knowledge about him. Of the biographies I know are in the Biographix line, Mark's was the one that appealed to me the most, but if they're all written like this, I think the entire series would be worth filling out your bookshelves.
As I said, Paul V. Allen's Mark Gruenwald is due out from the University of Mississippi Press later this week and retails for $20 US for the paperback version. It should be available through your favorite bookstore.
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