All of the Marvels by Douglas Wolk

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Comics historian and all-around ultra-nerd Douglas Wolk opens his new book, All of the Marvels with the bare bones of his central, audacious claim: “The twenty-seven thousand or so superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and growing.”  In this immensely enjoyable book, he seeks to approach the bewildering profusion of Marvel comic books as one single body of work, a body of work that goes on at mind-boggling length - “an epic among epics,” as he puts it, “Marcel Proust times Doris Lessing times Robert Altman to the power of the Mahabharata.” 

Wolk, author of Reading Comics, has done an absolutely ghastly amount of legwork for this new book. He begins his inquiry at the most natural spot: 1961’s Fantastic Four #1, and he sets a cut-off point at 2017’s Marvel Legacy #1. That time span still translates into tens of thousands of back issues, some of them sublime, most of them decidedly not. It’s a huge amount of labor, and the fact that Wolk so clearly enjoyed doing it only adds to the Stockholm Syndrome charm of his book:

Read half a dozen of Marvel’s better comics, and you might get the buzz of a good adventure story, see some striking artwork, and be introduced to a few memorable characters. Read a hundred, and you start to get a sense of what their devotees find special: that they add up to a collaborative story, built for delight, whose various tellers’ specific visions are its most important aspect. Read a thousand, and every little detail of them becomes charged with meaning …

Marvel Comics fans will be near-delirious with happiness over not only the scope of Wolk’s book but also its refreshingly pin-point opinions on just about every detail large and small: quibbles about particular colorists, geek-digressions on the shapes of sound effects, argument-starting pronouncements on much-vexed trivia … there’s a very easy and very marketable way to write this kind of book, a way that will guarantee sales but challenge nothing, and Wolk has deliberately spurned that way. Instead, he’s written a personal account that’s so wide-ranging and so deeply passionate that at one point he compares verbose X-Men writer Chris Claremont with Maria Callas. Only one of Stan Lee’s “True Believers” could write a book this committed (not to say certifiable), this passionate, and this unflagging.

He traces monarchs through the ages of Marvel comics, traces the portrayals of US Presidents, attempts to demystify the comics’ shifting, elastic timeline, watches all the ways popular culture is reflected over the decades, and assesses the collaborations (writers, artists, editors, colorists, inkers, letterers, readers) that change the characters from decade to decade. The book is curiously sporadically illustrated and only in black-and-white, but Wolk’s enthusiasm more than compensates.

Watchers (the human kind, not Uatu) of the embattled state of Marvel Comics in the last five or six years will naturally want to know where Wolk stands on the controversies that have rippled through the industry. A large and noisy contingent of long-time Marvel fans, informally known as Comicsgate (a term Wolk studiously avoids), has taken to blogs and especially to YouTube in order to complain that their favorite old titles have been infiltrated by leftist political ideologues who don’t care much (or know much) about those old titles and have nothing but contempt for those long-time fans. Comicsgate noted, as Wolk puts it, that “Marvel was publishing Spider-Man without Peter Parker, Thor without Odin’s son, Iron Man without Tony Stark, Captain America without Steve Rogers, Wolverine without Logan, X-Men without the “real” Wolverine or Cyclops or Professor X, Hulk without Bruce Banner, Hawkeye without Clint Barton, and no Fantastic Four at all.” Comicsgate members also noticed that the writers and artists on these new versions of their old favorites felt perfectly free to respond by - in public, on social media - calling these critics racists, sexists, homophobes, white supremacists, and Nazis. And since Wolk makes certain to note that Comicsgate was “generally older, whiter, and male-er than otherwise,” he doesn’t leave much doubt where he stands on the issue. In his version of these controversies, the complaints of Comicsgate almost always read as “code” for personal bigotries, not legitimate criticism.

It’s the book’s only major shortcoming. The behavior of Comicsgate might often have been deplorable, but a great many of their criticisms were (and are) valid. The only possible way to overlook that point is to likewise overlook the boorish stupidity of many Marvel creators, and this is the route Wolk takes (two of those creators, Kelly Sue DeConnick and G. Willow Wilson, have adoring blurbs on his book). But since the inauguration of Donald Trump turbo-charged Comicsgate and Wolk’s own chosen ending-point for his study is 2017, it’s not a deal-breaker of a shortcoming (I surely won’t be the only reader who finishes the book hoping Wolk - or somebody - writes the definitive history of Comicsgate). 

In any case, the book’s main narrative is utterly masterful, a feast of wonkiness like nothing Marvel’s history has ever evoked. With a text this knowledgeable and absorbing, an oversized edition crammed with full-color illustrations would be a thing to behold. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.