I managed to finish two books the evening of New Year’s Eve (getting my total books read in 2021 up to twenty-three). This is the first of those two books.
All the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told by Douglas Wolk (2021). Wolk read over 27,000 Marvel comic books (the bulk of which were originally released between 1961 (Fantastic Four #1) and 2017 (Marvel Legacy #1), what by his criteria (explain in the first chapters of the book) represents the entire interconnected Marvel Comics/Universe “canon” (using 2017 as his end point; he does discuss some Marvel comics that came out prior to 1961 and others after 2017 but his “gotta read them all” only applied to 1961-2017).
This was a very enjoyable read for someone with my level of knowledge of Marvel Comics. Just about everything up to around 2006 I had either read or was already familiar with. As Wolk got into the twenty-teens (2010-2019) I started learning about story developments that I wasn’t familiar with.
Wolk is super knowledgeable about the entire length and breadth of Marvel’s publishing history (he’d kind of have to be after reading them all, but he went into the project with a deep history of reading comics as a child to draw upon).
His first few chapters are on why he decided to take in this massive reading project, how he worked it out (he strongly advised anyone who might be thinking of attempting it to fight the inclination to start at Fantastic Four #1 and then try to go entirely in the original publishing order as he says most will get bogged down in uninteresting and/or repetitive early stories and give up; his approach was to jump around the publishing timeline, first reading things that one find interesting and then, eventually, one will find connections to what to read next as he or she goes), and frequently asked questions by those not very familiar with Marvel’s comic books or the comic book industry in general.
He also goes into “what this book isn’t” (or specifically doesn’t include in its scope* or try seek out to accomplish**). (* Not included: most of the comics Marvel has published over the decades featuring characters they didn’t own, such as Star Wars, Conan, or G.I. Joe. Yes, Disney now owns both Marvel and Star Wars, which is why Marvel now published Star Wars comics again after decades of them being at Dark Horse Comics, but Marvel still has never made any real moves to tie the Marvel and Star Wars continuities together, thankfully. ** For instance, he says this book is not an argument that all of the comic books are good. He considers many of them bad. But, by the same token, he finds many of them to be very good.) He also emphasizes that he is not advocating anyone else to try to read everything, nor to seek to follow his specific reading “path”.
He speaks of “the three chronologies”: 1) the order in which the comics were created and published in, 2) the internal chronology (in which order stories and events take place in the flow of the overall story, including the stories released years later that retroactively add new material to the first chronology), and 3) the order in which the reader experiences events (every reader must choose to start somewhere along the line and by far most readers were not around to experience them from the very beginning; there is no “wrong” order or path to take in experiencing the Marvel Universe (a common refrain of his)).
He also emphasizes that it’s “okay to be confused” at times. Not to allow not knowing who all the characters are or what all has happened in the past to frustrate you but instead to embrace that momentary confusion of coming into a story part way through the narrative and that, in most cases, unknown events will eventually be explained or made clear (although not always).
He then leaps into a mini “tour” of the humongous sixty year long saga that is the Marvel Universe.
His chapters go: “Chapter 4: The Juncture to Everywhere” (a broad survey of the Fantastic Four comics), “Chapter 5: Interlude: Monsters” (the pre-Fantastic Four Marvel monster comics), “Chapter 6: Spinning in Circles” (Spider-Man), “Chapter 7: Interlude: Lee, Kirby, Ditko”, “Chapter 8: Rising and Advancing” (Shang-Chi/Master of Kung Fu),
“Chapter 9: Interlude: The Vietnam Years”, “Chapter 10: The Mutant Metaphor” (the X-Men), “Chapter 11: Interlude: Diamonds Made of Sound” (Dazzler and popular music in Marvel Comics), “Chapter 12: Thunder and Lies” (Thor and Loki), “Chapter 13: Interlude: Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe” (a timeline of movie attempts and released projects up to the release of the first Iron Man movie), “Chapter 14: What Kings Do” (Black Panther), “Chapter 15: Interlude: Presidents”, “Chapter 16: The Iron Patriot Acts” (how large cross title “events” like “House of M”, “Civil War”, etc. became to predominant driving force in overall Marvel narrative over the past fifteen plus years), “Chapter 17: Interlude, March 1965” (how that particular month seemed to trigger the oftentimes tightly interwoven connections between the various Marvel titles, with characters referencing things happening in other titles appearing on the stands at the same time), “Chapter 18: The Great Destroyer” (writer Jonathan Hickman’s massive 2012-2106 story arc that Wolk describes as “effectively the climax of everything Marvel had published up to that point and a gateway to everything after”), “Chapter 19: Interlude: Linda Carter” (an interesting jump back to the “working women” light romance comics of the early 1960–pre Fantastic Four #1–like “Linda Carter, Student Nurse”, “Patsy and Hedy”, and “Millie the Model”, and how their later integration into the overall Marvel superhero narrative can be said to make *them* the actual earliest stories in it), “Chapter 20: Good Is a Thing You Do” (the development of new young, female, and persons of color superheroes—often written and illustrated by creators of the same—like the Kamala Khan “Ms. Marvel” and “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl” and how they philosophically differ from the traditional (mostly) white, male superheroes that make up most of Marvel’s six decades, and “Chapter 21: Passing it Along” (bringing things back to a personal level for the author in which he details how he and his son came to share reading Marvel comics together).
There is also an Appendix in the back he titles “Marvel Comics: A Plot Summary”, in which he breaks down the entire narrative into six periods: 1) 1961-1968, 2) 1968-1980, 3) 1981-1989, 4) 1990-2004, 5) 2005-2015, and 6) 2015- . He gives broad summaries of key events and story points within each period and why he chooses to break them down in this manner. (He states that only the last period was an intentional shift made by Marvel in which they literally restarted all of their titles over again. However, unlike DC which has restarted/rebooted its continuity several times over the decades, everything that ever happens in Marvel comics still builds upon everything that has come before, one massively long (convoluted, confusing, at times contradictory, yes) single narrative told over sixty plus years and by hundreds of writers and artists.
This is a very engaging read, made even more so by the writer’s choices in what to cover and when.
I will say that he’s bound to tick off most people at least once or twice in this book, whether it be his put downs of some specific stories (he calls the Galactus trilogy story from Fantastic Four #48-50 “corny and overwrought, and its pacing bizarre”, although he does then admit that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby still manage to pull off “the feeling of plummeting toward the void and being miraculously spared”).
And entire broad swaths (long runs) of issues on some titles where he says they fall into “directionless”, repetitive (constantly repeating the established “template”), and “tediousness” between points along the way that he considers to be major shifts.
And at a few points his decision to get political. The “interlude” about how actual real world Presidents of the United States appeared in various Marvel comics over time is understandable.
I’ll just say, though, that any strong Donald Trump supporters might want to skip the first few pages of Chapter 16: The Iron Patriot Acts, in which he makes direct parallels (in his eyes) between the 2009 “Dark Reign” story arc (in which longtime Spider-Man villain Norman Osborn becomes President and the over arching villain of most Marvel comics that year) and the years of the Trump administration (despite “Dark Reign” actually coming out in the first year of the Barack Obama administration).
However, I encourage anyone interested in Marvel Comics (enough to want to learn more about the actual “source material” for the mega popular Marvel movies and television shows of today) to push past the occasional remark they might not agree with and appreciate the monumental task the author took on and accomplished. He not only read 27,000+ comic books in a relatively short amount of time (a bit over two years, I think he says), he found so many common threads from across that large body of work, tying stories told years and decades apart together (some intentionally and some most likely not), interesting call backs that most readers probably missed, and pivotal underlying themes that run through many of the characters long histories.
I highly recommend All the Marvels by Douglas Wolk. I gave this five out of five stars on GoodReads.
— David Young
All the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told by Douglas Wolk (2021). Wolk read over 27,000 Marvel comic books (the bulk of which were originally released between 1961 (Fantastic Four #1) and 2017 (Marvel Legacy #1), what by his criteria (explain in the first chapters of the book) represents the entire interconnected Marvel Comics/Universe “canon” (using 2017 as his end point; he does discuss some Marvel comics that came out prior to 1961 and others after 2017 but his “gotta read them all” only applied to 1961-2017).
This was a very enjoyable read for someone with my level of knowledge of Marvel Comics. Just about everything up to around 2006 I had either read or was already familiar with. As Wolk got into the twenty-teens (2010-2019) I started learning about story developments that I wasn’t familiar with.
Wolk is super knowledgeable about the entire length and breadth of Marvel’s publishing history (he’d kind of have to be after reading them all, but he went into the project with a deep history of reading comics as a child to draw upon).
His first few chapters are on why he decided to take in this massive reading project, how he worked it out (he strongly advised anyone who might be thinking of attempting it to fight the inclination to start at Fantastic Four #1 and then try to go entirely in the original publishing order as he says most will get bogged down in uninteresting and/or repetitive early stories and give up; his approach was to jump around the publishing timeline, first reading things that one find interesting and then, eventually, one will find connections to what to read next as he or she goes), and frequently asked questions by those not very familiar with Marvel’s comic books or the comic book industry in general.
He also goes into “what this book isn’t” (or specifically doesn’t include in its scope* or try seek out to accomplish**). (* Not included: most of the comics Marvel has published over the decades featuring characters they didn’t own, such as Star Wars, Conan, or G.I. Joe. Yes, Disney now owns both Marvel and Star Wars, which is why Marvel now published Star Wars comics again after decades of them being at Dark Horse Comics, but Marvel still has never made any real moves to tie the Marvel and Star Wars continuities together, thankfully. ** For instance, he says this book is not an argument that all of the comic books are good. He considers many of them bad. But, by the same token, he finds many of them to be very good.) He also emphasizes that he is not advocating anyone else to try to read everything, nor to seek to follow his specific reading “path”.
He speaks of “the three chronologies”: 1) the order in which the comics were created and published in, 2) the internal chronology (in which order stories and events take place in the flow of the overall story, including the stories released years later that retroactively add new material to the first chronology), and 3) the order in which the reader experiences events (every reader must choose to start somewhere along the line and by far most readers were not around to experience them from the very beginning; there is no “wrong” order or path to take in experiencing the Marvel Universe (a common refrain of his)).
He also emphasizes that it’s “okay to be confused” at times. Not to allow not knowing who all the characters are or what all has happened in the past to frustrate you but instead to embrace that momentary confusion of coming into a story part way through the narrative and that, in most cases, unknown events will eventually be explained or made clear (although not always).
He then leaps into a mini “tour” of the humongous sixty year long saga that is the Marvel Universe.
His chapters go: “Chapter 4: The Juncture to Everywhere” (a broad survey of the Fantastic Four comics), “Chapter 5: Interlude: Monsters” (the pre-Fantastic Four Marvel monster comics), “Chapter 6: Spinning in Circles” (Spider-Man), “Chapter 7: Interlude: Lee, Kirby, Ditko”, “Chapter 8: Rising and Advancing” (Shang-Chi/Master of Kung Fu),
“Chapter 9: Interlude: The Vietnam Years”, “Chapter 10: The Mutant Metaphor” (the X-Men), “Chapter 11: Interlude: Diamonds Made of Sound” (Dazzler and popular music in Marvel Comics), “Chapter 12: Thunder and Lies” (Thor and Loki), “Chapter 13: Interlude: Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe” (a timeline of movie attempts and released projects up to the release of the first Iron Man movie), “Chapter 14: What Kings Do” (Black Panther), “Chapter 15: Interlude: Presidents”, “Chapter 16: The Iron Patriot Acts” (how large cross title “events” like “House of M”, “Civil War”, etc. became to predominant driving force in overall Marvel narrative over the past fifteen plus years), “Chapter 17: Interlude, March 1965” (how that particular month seemed to trigger the oftentimes tightly interwoven connections between the various Marvel titles, with characters referencing things happening in other titles appearing on the stands at the same time), “Chapter 18: The Great Destroyer” (writer Jonathan Hickman’s massive 2012-2106 story arc that Wolk describes as “effectively the climax of everything Marvel had published up to that point and a gateway to everything after”), “Chapter 19: Interlude: Linda Carter” (an interesting jump back to the “working women” light romance comics of the early 1960–pre Fantastic Four #1–like “Linda Carter, Student Nurse”, “Patsy and Hedy”, and “Millie the Model”, and how their later integration into the overall Marvel superhero narrative can be said to make *them* the actual earliest stories in it), “Chapter 20: Good Is a Thing You Do” (the development of new young, female, and persons of color superheroes—often written and illustrated by creators of the same—like the Kamala Khan “Ms. Marvel” and “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl” and how they philosophically differ from the traditional (mostly) white, male superheroes that make up most of Marvel’s six decades, and “Chapter 21: Passing it Along” (bringing things back to a personal level for the author in which he details how he and his son came to share reading Marvel comics together).
There is also an Appendix in the back he titles “Marvel Comics: A Plot Summary”, in which he breaks down the entire narrative into six periods: 1) 1961-1968, 2) 1968-1980, 3) 1981-1989, 4) 1990-2004, 5) 2005-2015, and 6) 2015- . He gives broad summaries of key events and story points within each period and why he chooses to break them down in this manner. (He states that only the last period was an intentional shift made by Marvel in which they literally restarted all of their titles over again. However, unlike DC which has restarted/rebooted its continuity several times over the decades, everything that ever happens in Marvel comics still builds upon everything that has come before, one massively long (convoluted, confusing, at times contradictory, yes) single narrative told over sixty plus years and by hundreds of writers and artists.
This is a very engaging read, made even more so by the writer’s choices in what to cover and when.
I will say that he’s bound to tick off most people at least once or twice in this book, whether it be his put downs of some specific stories (he calls the Galactus trilogy story from Fantastic Four #48-50 “corny and overwrought, and its pacing bizarre”, although he does then admit that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby still manage to pull off “the feeling of plummeting toward the void and being miraculously spared”).
And entire broad swaths (long runs) of issues on some titles where he says they fall into “directionless”, repetitive (constantly repeating the established “template”), and “tediousness” between points along the way that he considers to be major shifts.
And at a few points his decision to get political. The “interlude” about how actual real world Presidents of the United States appeared in various Marvel comics over time is understandable.
I’ll just say, though, that any strong Donald Trump supporters might want to skip the first few pages of Chapter 16: The Iron Patriot Acts, in which he makes direct parallels (in his eyes) between the 2009 “Dark Reign” story arc (in which longtime Spider-Man villain Norman Osborn becomes President and the over arching villain of most Marvel comics that year) and the years of the Trump administration (despite “Dark Reign” actually coming out in the first year of the Barack Obama administration).
However, I encourage anyone interested in Marvel Comics (enough to want to learn more about the actual “source material” for the mega popular Marvel movies and television shows of today) to push past the occasional remark they might not agree with and appreciate the monumental task the author took on and accomplished. He not only read 27,000+ comic books in a relatively short amount of time (a bit over two years, I think he says), he found so many common threads from across that large body of work, tying stories told years and decades apart together (some intentionally and some most likely not), interesting call backs that most readers probably missed, and pivotal underlying themes that run through many of the characters long histories.
I highly recommend All the Marvels by Douglas Wolk. I gave this five out of five stars on GoodReads.
— David Young
