Book Review: All of The Marvels By Douglas Wolk

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A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told

I came across a mini-review of this book in the New Yorker, and immediately set about getting myself a copy. To write this book, author Douglas Wolk read every comic published by Marvel Comics from its beginning in 1961 through to Marvel Legacy #1 in 2017, although it’s clear his reading continued past that point. Wolk views the entirety of Marvel’s output as a single massive and sprawling story (and really, if you view Jonathan Hickman’s Secret Wars as an endpoint, you could kind of make that argument).

Wolk is most interested in identifying through-lines that cut across different eras of that story, and it’s an interesting way to think about this stuff. At times he focuses on the creators of the Marvel Universe, especially the early trinity of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Stan Lee, but for most of the book, he’s more interested in looking at the stories themselves.

I thought that reading this book would be an exercise in nostalgia, and give me opportunities to revisit favourite storylines. That is definitely present here, but there’s a lot more going on besides that.

After establishing his methodology for working his way through this literal mountain of comics, Wolk explores the early days of Marvel, when Stan Lee wrote just about everything through collaboration with his artists, and they created the tightly-knit continuity that Marvel was known for. After that, his chapters tend to focus on particular characters or archetypes that appear again and again (like when he talks about Black Panther’s role as a king).

Throughout, Wolk is very aware of how the comics reflect the social and political winds of the times in which they are created. We see how things like the Vietnam War, Nixon’s Presidency, and the Civil Rights Movement inform and affect the comics. (Even though a lot of space is given to the rise of Norman Osborn in the Dark Reign era, he doesn’t dwell on the obvious link between this and the rise of Trumpism that followed it).

There are some odd choices in where Wolk chose to shine his spotlight. Shang-Chi, the Master of Kung Fu gets more space than ever-present characters like the Hulk or Iron Man, and he returns again and again to Linda Carter, who is mostly known as the Night Nurse. She started out as a recurring character in Marvel’s romance comics, when she was a student nurse, and then disappeared for ages before being brought back as a health care worker who looks after the powered community. We all have our favourite characters, though, and it’s cool that she has turned up in so many ways over the years.

I love books with long chatty footnotes, so this book made me happy. I did wonder who this book is written for though. At the beginning, I felt like Wolk was preaching to the choir, just reminding me of things that I already knew, but as the book progressed, I did start to see some of his more subtle points and started to get more out of it. If you are not a Marvel fan, or a lapsed one, I’m not sure that this book is going to work for you. It doesn’t serve as a sourcebook to help understand everything, but might give people reason to track down some older stories. Personally, I came away from this wanting to read all of the classic Shang-Chi comics (including the magazine format comics), which I’ve never read.

This was an enjoyable read, and while there are of course things I’d wished Wolk spent more time on, I think this was a very cool project to undertake (although I do feel for anyone who had to absorb everything that Marvel put out in the 90s – a period that didn’t get a lot of time here). It’s cool to think of all Marvel comics as part of a continuous story that has required the work of thousands of creators. Of course we know that there is not any sort of multi-decade intentionality behind this story, with the exception of the legendary long runs of people like Chris Claremont or Jonathan Hickman (I’m not including Brian Michael Bendis here because I feel like he stumbles across intentionality more than displays it). I know I’ve become accustomed to viewing each title as its own kingdom, and not always as part of a larger whole.

It’s definitely worth checking this book out if you care about these stories or want to know more about them.

Get in touch and share your thoughts on what I've written: jfulton@insidepulse.com