All of the Marvels
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Average rating4.3
Winner of the 2022 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics’ interconnected, half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the “epic of epics”—and to the past sixty years of American culture—from a beloved authority on the subject who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the tale “Brilliant, eccentric, moving and wholly wonderful. . . . Wolk proves to be the perfect guide for this type of adventure: nimble, learned, funny and sincere. . . . All of the Marvels is magnificently marvelous. Wolk’s work will invite many more alliterative superlatives. It deserves them all.” —Junot Díaz, New York Times Book Review The superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are, as Douglas Wolk notes, the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and still growing. The Marvel story is a gigantic mountain smack in the middle of contemporary culture. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Everyone recognizes its protagonists: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men. Eighteen of the hundred highest-grossing movies of all time are based on parts of it. Yet not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing—nobody’s supposed to. So, of course, that’s what Wolk did: he read all 27,000+ comics that make up the Marvel Universe thus far, from Alpha Flight to Omega the Unknown. And then he made sense of it—seeing into the ever-expanding story, in its parts and as a whole, and seeing through it, as a prism through which to view the landscape of American culture. In Wolk’s hands, the mammoth Marvel narrative becomes a fun-house-mirror history of the past sixty years, from the atomic night terrors of the Cold War to the technocracy and political division of the present day—a boisterous, tragicomic, magnificently filigreed epic about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders. As a work of cultural exegesis, this is sneakily significant, even a landmark; it’s also ludicrously fun. Wolk sees fascinating patterns—the rise and fall of particular cultural aspirations, and of the storytelling modes that conveyed them. He observes the Marvel story’s progressive visions and its painful stereotypes, its patches of woeful hackwork and stretches of luminous creativity, and the way it all feeds into a potent cosmology that echoes our deepest hopes and fears. This is a huge treat for Marvel fans, but it’s also a revelation for readers who don’t know Doctor Strange from Doctor Doom. Here, truly, are all of the marvels.
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I think that one of the most challenging claims to make in the modern day is to say that you aren't a fan of Marvel. Whether you're a boardroom executive or a Somali pirate everyone knows who Captain America is, what color the Hulk is, and which aisle of the hardware store Thor is liable to beeline towards. Ever since 2008's Iron Man, Marvel has dominated the box office, and their IP has transitioned from something niche and misunderstood to one of the central pillars of modern pop culture.
All of the Marvels is exactly what it says on the tin. In this book, we are taken from the early cape comics of the 1950s and early 60s to the modern crossover-event-driven era. After a thorough and disclaimer-ridden introduction, Douglas Wolk takes us character-by-character and event-by-event in a looping survey of the most beloved and relevant stories from within the canon. All of the Marvels tries to give the reader all the background required (and then some) to appreciate the nuances and allegory that are packed into the very best storylines and anthologies. I knew that Marvel was a self-referential body of work, but All of the Marvels opened my eyes to the depth with which the artists and writers have imbued their comics.
All of the Marvels is a great guide for new comic readers and gives an overview of major Marvel universe events. That said, it's too meandering and unorganized to get a gold star for readability. There is a lengthy (and much appreciated) introduction that aims to explain the objective and structure of the book but purposely omits a reading order. The body of the work mainly jumps between the popular Marvel characters and in each section tries its best to explain their individual stories chronologically. The appendix is a decade-by-decade encapsulation of the general trends of each Marvel era. As a casual fan, I found myself getting lost during the scenic tour of the Marvels. It would have been helpful if the appendix had been provided as a roadmap from the beginning.
Personally, I continue to find my interest in Marvel waning; I've read through some comics but I'm with the majority in saying that I primarily interact with the IP through their films. Maybe it's because I've aged out of the golden demographic and the movies aren't made for me anymore, or maybe my perception of declining quality is accurate. I hoped this book would rekindle my interest in Marvel or point me toward something better suited to my tastes. While my hopes were let down on that front, reading through Marvel at such a distant remove does highlight how the corpus has changed over the years and how I am just one of the latest set of fans to find the earth changing beneath my feet.
TL;DR: This book delivers on its promises to bridge something like 60 or 70 years of storylines across a single book. It does a passable job of filling modern readers in on the unappetizing bulk of Marvel's back catalog. It's also short! I didn't realize at the time of purchase but this book is actually 50% index.
