There are many daunting reading goals. For example, you can read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy within a day or War and Peace in one weekend. Then there's the mountaineering expedition, which makes reading all of Marvel's superhero comics seem like a quick jog up a hill.
This is because Marvel's story, and unlike DC Comics, has interwoven nearly all of its series into one continuous story. There have been no reboots. This is roughly 500 Bibles in length. The Marvel story is shorter than the Bible, but the average amount of smiting may still be the same. Even so, it's hard to imagine anyone reading the entire, scale-tilting, record breaking Marvel opus in five years.
Douglas Wolk was the one to do it. According to his new book All the Marvels, Wolk (who also wrote the award-winning Reading Comics), set out on this adventure when his son Sterling began reading his father's old Marvel comics. Instead of going through them chronologically, they took Sterling's favorite characters on a journey of story arcs across time.
"I was goingrging myself on something that wasn't meant to be eaten"
Wolk wondered: What if Wolk continued reading them all? Imagine if you could view the Marvel story as a whole. The spreadsheet included 27,000 comics. This excluded all Marvel comics published before Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created Fantastic Four #1 in 1961. It also excluded any Marvel publication that did not tie into the larger Marvel story, sorry Star Wars. Over five years of hard work, Wolk began to chip away at it, one arc at a time.
Wolk described the dopamine-rich experience as "Gorging on something that wasn't meant to be eaten." After all, comics were created in a disposable age. Most Marvel comics were discarded before their potential as art was fully understood. Many stories were adapted to suit the storylines.
Wolk says that he enjoyed the experience of eating the visual candy equivalent. It was a great time. Even with all the bad comics, there was a certain Stockholm Syndrome.
There were comics that were both funny and sad. Master of Kung Fu was the 1970s series that birthed Shang-Chi, the MCU's new hero. Wolk didn't know a movie was being made and devotes a chapter to this "hidden jewel" partly because of its flaws. Shang-Chi's father was the infamous racist cartoonist Fu Manchu. It is also a way to honor Bill Wu, a fan who loved the series and urged its creators for better. They promised they would and often did.
Topical since the beginning
This is, in the end, the most interesting aspect of reading as much Marvel as Wolk. This is not a story about a person, but a meta-narrative of society. Marvel wasn't just a reflection of recent history. It was also history as it played out in real-time. America can be seen making sense, both in dialogue and in art and letters pages, as well as in its choices of subject.
Wolk states that "What surprised me most about this project was the way the [Marvel] stories have been, from the very beginning." He cites Bruce Banner, who was transformed into the Hulk by an atomic test in 1962 while a U.S. Soviet moratorium on nuclear testing expired. The Cold War metaphor was very specific. Another interesting coincidence is that Black Panther, the character, arrived in 1966 almost at the exact same time as Black Panther Party. Neither of them are named after each other.
Topicality can be even more frightening when it arrives before the time. Wolk discusses a 2009 series called Dark Reign in which Norman Osborn, a.k.a. The Green Goblin rises to power through media manipulation. Wolk describes the 2009 series Dark Reign, in which Norman Osborn (a.k.a. It arrived just as the Obama administration was beginning. Marvel was able to see the pulse of a far more frightening future, even as hope and change were in the air.
Marvel Multiverse of Madness
You will have to work hard to make sense of the bigger story. Credit: UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Strangely, the Marvel story goes out of its ways to ignore history, despite all its cultural relevance. Marvel readers may have lived for sixty years, but the comics only have 14 years. This is partly why characters like Franklin Richards, a Fantastic Four child seem to be growing up so slowly. The "sliding timeline" is an extremely bizarre principle. If you read a Marvel comic in 2021 from 1961, it's supposed to be as if it was written 14 years ago in 2007. The artists simply added references to the 1960s so that people from the 1960s could understand them.
Are you having headaches? At some point you will, depending on how deep you go into the Marvel universe. The 14-year timeline is not very neat. It's full of flashbacks, flashforwards and side stories that appear to have occurred between panels from a story years ago. Even though the promise of resurrection is not explicitly removed, characters are constantly dying and being resurrected. There are many alternate universe versions and clones of our heroes, as well as robot doubles and robot clones. Although the Earth/universe has been changed, repaired, and/or destroyed numerous times, most people don't know what happened. It's a feeling I feel.
SEE ALSO: List of all Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, ranked from worst to best
Wolk states that he had to rewrite approximately 90 percent of the book. Wolk started thinking that a summary of Marvel's entire story would be the most interesting, broken down into four phases each of approximately 15 years each. It became the appendix. It was the appendix. Wolk offers this by focusing his attention on a strange character: Night nurse Linda Carter, the hero of one the earliest Marvel comics and contemporary of the Fantastic Four. She has been returning to the Marvel story ever since.
Wolk ultimately decided that he preferred to be a tour guide rather than a Marvel historian. The final version of All the Marvels is a personal tour through a large theme park on a small planet. There are many reading suggestions. I will be looking at the mid-1980s Black Panther and Thor runs after this, but Wolk focuses on story arcs that contrast in interesting ways. For example, the Spider-Man chapter is the most tragic story of a series which tried too hard to repeat the highs of its first ten year run, but then backed itself into a corner by telling a strange tale about a Peter Parker clone.
Even though All the Marvels doesn't explicitly focus on the MCU, it does include a short chapter that details every time Stan Lee hyped up a Marvel movie. You will be able to get a better understanding of why the series has been so successful. Every element was derived from comics that were successful. Each element was reworked without much respect for the original. The MCU is the second draft of the longest and most wild story in human history, which has been much easier to manage.
Now available: All the Marvels: The Journey to the Ends Of the Greatest Story Ever Told.
