Spinning Their Web: Book review of ‘Marvel Comics: The Untold Story,’ by Sean Howe; New York Times, 11/16/12

J.D. Biersdorfer, New York Times; Spinning Their Web: Book review of ‘Marvel Comics: The Untold Story,’ by Sean Howe: "Marvel’s attempts at diversification in the late 1960s and early 1970s — both in its characters and its media formats — are where the book gets particularly ­intriguing... “The X-Men,” another Lee and Kirby invention that first appeared in 1963, eventually gave Marvel an excellent platform for exploring social issues and making its readership more inclusive. By 1981, Howe writes, “the shocking revelation that the X-Men’s silver-haired archenemy had been a child prisoner at ­Auschwitz ramped up the title’s long-present themes of bigotry and persecution and pointed to the direction that ‘The X-Men’ would take for the decades to come, in which discrimination toward mutant characters was put explicitly in the contexts of racism and homophobia.”"