The rise of a peculiarly American enterprise -- comic book publishing -- described

MARVEL: FIVE FABULOUS DECADES OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST COMICS.

Les Daniels.

Abrams.

287 pages. $45.

Comic books, Les Daniels writes, have "always attracted the most intelligent kids: the introverted readers and dreamers who have fantasies of acquiring brawn to match their brains."

Knew it all along, didn't you?

Mr. Daniels, a Rhode Island-based film reviewer, fiction writer and historian of popular culture, offers readers more than just such scholarly sounding balm for their long-guilty consciences. In his sumptuously illustrated, comprehensive history of Marvel Comics, he provides a lively, detailed account of the rise of a peculiarly American enterprise that entertains fans in 40 countries and 17 languages.

Marvel's products are not the cuddly comics of Donald Duck's miserly Uncle Scrooge. Marvel's super heroes make mischief of the catastrophic sort, such as wiping New York City off the map with a gigantic tidal wave (as the half-man, half-fish, part-villian, part-hero Sub-Mariner did in a 1941 adventure); or they save the world, as Captain America, the Human Torch and Marvel's all-time great, Spider-Man, routinely do.

Stan Lee, Marvel's major-domo and the creator of Spider-Man, says that "no matter how somber a story might be" in a Marvel "comic," readers "usually find an element of humor lurking in the background."

More important, Marvel's super heroes are flawed. Spider-Man has dandruff, money troubles, domestic problems, self-doubts and unexpected defeats, Mr. Lee notes. Spidey is, as Daniels observes, "the super hero who could be you."

Comic books were the offspring of the now-extinct pulp magazine industry and newspaper comic strips. The pulp magazine was invented by Frank Munsey, a thoroughly un

pleasant publishing magnate whose empire once included an outpost in Baltimore (and left behind the Munsey Building downtown).

Munsey's magazine The Argosy, launched in 1896, was printed on the cheapest wood-pulp paper, hence the name given to the genre. His most famous writer was Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, the prototype of the pulp hero. Even H. L. Mencken edited a pulp, Black Mask, which published early works by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Pulps printed everything from romance to baseball to westerns to science fiction, and many "featured the outlandish, fantastic, aggressive heroes that helped inspire comic books," Mr. Daniels writes.