All of the Marvels, by Douglas Wolk

I've written a fair amount here about Marvel Unlimited and the sheer amount of Marvel stories that have been suddenly at my fingertips since I signed up for it in November. I'm still focusing mostly on X-Men books, but I've been considering what else I might go deep on when I finish with those books.

And then I discovered a copy of All of the Marvels, by Douglas Wolk, at my local bookstore. He read pretty much the whole corpus of Marvel books published between 1961 (the debut of the Fantastic Four) and 2019 or so, for a grand total of about 27,000 comic books. In the book he lists his criteria for including a book (e.g. whether it can reasonably feature an appearance from the "main timeline" version of Spider-Man), and having done so, considers the story that emerges from what he calls the longest-lasting continually evolving ongoing story in... well, ever.

As someone who adores going to the root of a thing and exploring it from start to finish, with as many weird and unexpected digressions as possible, this premise was absolute catnip to me. It didn't hurt that I was embarking on my own version of the project - when I said I was considering what else to read after the X-universe, my list consisted of, conservatively:

• Spider-Man and his other related books, but not necessarily the Spider-Woman, Spider-Girl, Spider-Gwen or Venom/Carnage stuff
• The Avengers, plus certain important individual members' books, specifically Captain America and the Armor Wars storyline of Iron Man
• The Fantastic Four
• Daredevil
• Important runs of books that I otherwise don't care about, like Walt Simonson's Thor and Peter David's Hulk

Wolk's book is a good guide for navigating this idea, even if he doesn't cover all of these. Hulk and Daredevil don't get the in-depth treatment, and his chapter on the Avengers focuses on the deconstruction job that Jonathan Hickman performed in 2014-15 or so. For the characters and books he does cover, he gives a survey of notable issues, but instead of just presenting them in order and without context, he places them squarely in the context of the story of their individual characters.

For example, Spider-Man's publishing history is examined in terms of great cycles in the character's life, with each main era representing a stage in his growth as a man. There are discussions of his search for a father-figure, with his rogue's gallery representing a succession of potential father figures who represent different ways for him to go astray (Doctor Octopus is one, but Kraven the Hunter represents a sort of inverse father, who's physical rather than brainy, like most Spider-baddies).

The X-Men, meanwhile, are examined through the lenses of their two greatest stories: The Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past. Wolk argues that every major X-event since then has been a response to or an inversion of one or both of those stories (which, it should be noted, took place very close to one another in publishing time, with Phoenix ending in issue #137 and Future Past coming in #141-142). Even Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men, which I considered to be the first significant step past Chris Claremont's legacy on the title, ends with a storyline that takes on both at once. And every big X-moment since then has also reckoned with them, to varying degrees of success.

The meat of the book is examining these books or runs for themes and how they play out throughout the life of a book or in subsequent creators' runs. Wolk then uses these insights to tease out what the Marvel books say about either the overall Marvel story or about real-world events. His chapter on Dark Reign says that story, where Norman Osborn (the former Green Goblin) effectively becomes the most important man in the world, is Marvel's reckoning with life under a very Trump-like regime, though interestingly it runs through 2009, long before Trump came anywhere near the presidency.

This is all interesting enough on its own, but the other thing I want to highlight in discussing this book is how it fits into the wider scene of cultural criticism that looks at American superhero comics. Wolk refers to The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, which argues that the visions of mutants and "others" and how Marvel invites us to treat difference form an important part of radical politics now. Wolk himself also fits into a constellation of commentators on comics who tackle the topic seriously and interestingly, such as Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men (a podcast I started listening to when I started my big X-read).

I find this fascinating, because when I started reading Marvel comics in 1991, there was no cultural discussion of them. Maybe there was in certain academic journals or circles that I didn't have access to as a 12-year-old middle schooler, but in my daily life the idea that you could pick out cultural themes or messages from superhero comics would have been laughable, and I was encouraged to keep my interest in the books to myself (and to a small group of friends who also cared about what these books had to tell us).

More than 30 years on, I have a better frame of reference to tell how much of what I was reading back then was immature crap and what was interesting or worthwhile. I also have access to the internet, so I can see what other people are saying about Marvel books (or DC's superhero books, though Wolk dismisses the idea of doing a similar version for their superhero universe). Some of them are kinda big deal people - on his old podcast, Wolk had as a guest none other than Jeet Heer, a literary critic and journalist who I'm only now learning has also spent a large part of his career discussing comics.

This maturing of the discourse around comics (I had the misfortune of discovering them right at the dawn of the speculative boom of the 90s) has come because a lot of serious people started writing them around the 1970s and 80s, to appeal to other serious people, many of whom in turn started writing comics themselves. Wolk also describes how Marvel, and comics in general, has reckoned with the fact of most of its early creators were white men, and how this reckoning has let the company cater to demographics beyond that very narrow one. That widening is a big part of why serious people can talk about comics seriously, even despite the backdrop of the Marvel Cinematic Universe effectively eating all of pop culture for the past decade and a half.

All of the Marvels is a fun tour through the story of the Marvel Universe, both in-universe and as a discussion of how it was created. I appreciate that it uses certain notable issues and storylines as entry points to consider what such a long-running single piece of fiction (as Wolk treats it) reveals about what our culture thinks is important. He doesn't uncritically enjoy it all - the Punisher is clearly not a favorite character of his - but he's able to tease out something interesting about a great many parts of it, including certain stories that I hadn't considered before, notably Master of Kung Fu and the Black Panther books that started with Christopher Priest's take in the late 90s.

It's a good book for making sense of the meta-story, and it makes me wish there was something similar for DC Comics, or even just parts of Marvel like the X-Men (I could have read a whole book-length treatment of them in this vein). It came out in 2021 but effectively ends in 2019, so certain aspects feel a tiny bit dated, just because publishing thousands of pages of content every year means the story evolves fast. But of course, that's the point, isn't it?