The formula worked. Children and young adults made Marvel the dominant publisher of the time. Overall sales never reached what they had been in the '50s, but comics' influence remained strong, particularly among college students. One 1965 survey even found that college radicals ranked Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk alongside Bob Dylan and Che Guevara as their favorite revolutionary icons.

The love affair lasted into the early '70s, but once the '80s came around, comics were forced to shift gears once again. With Republicans in office, a new form of conservatism ushered in comics like the X-Men. The angry vigilantism of Wolverine and the other mutants -- an outgrowth of their frustration with an inept government's ability to deal with crime -- fit perfectly with Reagan-era America.

By this time, though, comics had already started sliding toward the fringe. Wright spends a good deal of time explaining how fan culture took over the comics industry in the '80s, spawning convoluted narratives, tiny cult audiences and comics-specific stores. He reveals that there were advantages to direct distribution -- publishers could raise prices more quickly, for example -- but he also shows how the industry quickly shrunk. Licensing deals started bringing in more cash than the books themselves did, the number of titles dwindled and comics' influence became minimal at best. The long, lustrous era of comic books, Wright concludes, started to fade. Two deaths signaled the finale: Superman, who was killed off (briefly) in 1992, and Marvel, which went public in 1991 but filed for bankruptcy in 1996.

Are comics doomed, then? Probably not. Wright seems to suffer from a cultural blind spot -- he's unable to register that comic books were not created in an entertainment vacuum. In praising Marvel's originality, for example, he throws in a passing reference to "The Twilight Zone," acknowledging that Lee's story lines resembled the TV show's "twisted tales about the moral and emotional fragility of human beings." But he never digs deeper. Did Lee watch "The Twilight Zone"? What about other shows, movies, music and books? Did they fertilize his thinking or the thinking of any comics creators?

Wright also doesn't seem to have noticed the growing mass of comics and animation activity on the Web, and the wild success of movies like "X-Men" and "The Matrix," which reveal that superhero tendencies are still alive and well. And he misses the chance to address how the comics backlash relates to others like it, to everything from Tipper Gore's anti-rap crusade to the correlation many commentators assumed between video games and the Columbine killings. This may be intentional: "I believe that there are intellectual pitfalls in analyzing something like comic books too deeply," he writes in his introduction. But it does the book a disservice. If the history of comics, as he argues, "helps to trace the emergence, challenge and triumph of adolescence as both a market and a cultural obsession," one would expect to see Wright glean a few larger lessons. Instead, he comes across as someone whose head is too far buried in comic books to notice that comics culture extends beyond the page.

Still, these flaws are not fatal. Wright deserves credit for tackling the breadth of comics history, and he succeeds commendably in creating a testament to the genre's power. "For anyone who has ever read comics or wanted to leap a building in a single bound, "Comic Book Nation" is worth a look.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"