"Marvel Comics - The Untold Story," by Sean Howe - NYTimes.com Even if you didn't grow up making a beeline for the local emporium on New Comic Book Day - also known as Wednesday in most places - odds are Marvel Comics has entered your consciousness recently. This year alone, a film about one Marvel superhero team, "The Avengers," smashed a box-office record and made more than $207 million on its opening weekend. The glossy August issue of Marvel's "Astonishing X-Men" showcased the same-sex wedding of the hero Northstar and his boyfriend. And soon a free-to-play online video game, Marvel Heroes, will allow players to virtually stomp the bad guys as Spider-Man, Iron Man, Wolverine, Captain America and scores of other classic characters. That's the modern Marvel. But for those who remember the smudgy days of bright ink on cheap paper, of Captain America belting Hitler right in the chops and Spider-Man spouting the sentiments of Ayn Rand, Sean Howe has collected the history with a fanboy's dedication to continuity and detail. As with every two-bit, four-color superhuman donning tights to fight crime, there's an origin tale, and "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" lays it out. Howe, a former editor at Entertainment Weekly, draws on interviews with more than 150 people who worked at or were associated with Marvel over the past 73 years to chronicle a scrappy company whose artists and writers waged battles against supervillains, social ills and (perhaps most insidious of all) corporate marketing departments. Howe begins the book with Marvel's best-known employees: the writer and editor Stan Lee, and the artist Jack Kirby. Both enter the story around 1940 - back when Marvel was still known as Timely Comics - with Lee promoted from office boy to snappy editor, and Kirby cranking out his trademark brawny characters and dynamic page layouts. Kirby, who died in 1994, had a profound effect on many young comics fans, including Michael Chabon, who acknowledged a "deep debt I owe in this and everything else I've ever written to the work of the late Jack Kirby, the King of Comics" in the author's note in his 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." It's after World War II - and a 1954 Senate subcommittee hearing on comic books and juvenile delinquency - that Marvel's story really takes off. In 1961, Lee and ­Kirby collaborated on the first issue of "The Fantastic Four," which introduced a squabbling team of superheroes (Mister Fantastic, Invisible Girl, the Human Torch and the Thing) who combated internal dysfunction while fighting the Mole Man, a partly blind supervillain with a penchant for sinking cities and blowing up power plants. Compared with the earnest Justice League of America, the DC Comics team that included Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman among others, the Fantastic Four were deeply relatable. They were imperfect co-workers who skipped the masks, crabbed at one another and got the job done. After years of pulpy plots and three-headed monsters, Lee and ­Kirby had pulled off the comics equivalent of the literary shift from Victorian melodrama to Chekhovian realism. "For the first time in years, it looked like Marvel had something special on its hands," Howe writes. Besides, the noble but boring Superman was no match in charisma for the Thing, an animated pile of orange rocks known to holler, "It's clobberin" time!" before battle. Once Marvel found its mojo in the early 1960s, Spider-Man, the X-Men and its other familiar characters begin popping up in Howe's timeline, all products of the Marvel "Bullpen" of writers and artists. Its close rival DC had more money and better-known characters, but Marvel, the gutsy underdog, was the first "to evoke, even metaphorically, the Real World," The Village Voice observed. J. D. Biersdorfer is the production editor of the Book Review.