All of the Marvels

The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics’ half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the “epic of epics” from a beloved comic-books authority who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the tale

The 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 Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Everyone recognizes its protagonists. 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 thing—nobody’s supposed to. So, of course, that’s 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 it—seeing into the ever-expanding story and seeing through it, as a prism held up to American culture. In Wolk’s hands, the mammoth Marvel narrative becomes a fun-house-mirror history of the past sixty years—a boisterous, magnificently filigreed epic about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders.

About the Author

Douglas Wolk is the author of the Eisner Award–winning Reading Comics and the host of the podcast Voice of Latveria. A National Arts Journalism Program fellow, Wolk has written about comic books, graphic novels, pop music, and technology for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Believer, Slate, and Pitchfork. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Author Residence: Portland, OR

Author Hometown: East Lansing, MI