All of the Marvels

Description

The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics interconnected, half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the epic of epicsand to the past sixty years of American culturefrom a beloved authority on the subject who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the taleThe superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are, as Douglas Wolk notes, the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and still growing. The Marvel story is a gigantic mountain smack in the middle of contemporary culture. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Everyone recognizes its protagonists: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men. Eighteen of the hundred highest-grossing movies of all time are based on parts of it. Yet not even the people telling the story have read the whole thingnobodys supposed to. So, of course, thats what Wolk did: he read all 27,000+ comics that make up the Marvel Universe thus far, from Alpha Flight to Omega the Unknown.And then he made sense of itseeing into the ever-expanding story, in its parts and as a whole, and seeing through it, as a prism through which to view the landscape of American culture. In Wolks hands, the mammoth Marvel narrative becomes a fun-house-mirror history of the past sixty years, from the atomic night terrors of the Cold War to the technocracy and political division of the present daya boisterous, tragicomic, magnificently filigreed epic about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders.As a work of cultural exegesis, this is sneakily significant, even a landmark; its also ludicrously fun. Wolk sees fascinating patternsthe rise and fall of particular cultural aspirations, and of the storytelling modes that conveyed them. He observes the Marvel storys progressive visions and its painful stereotypes, its patches of woeful hackwork and stretches of luminous creativity, and the way it all feeds into a potent cosmology that echoes our deepest hopes and fears. This is a huge treat for Marvel fans, but its also a revelation for readers who dont know Doctor Strange from Doctor Doom. Here, truly, are all of the marvels.