All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told
(Penguin, $28)
Marvel Comics has published 27,000 issues since 1961, and critic Douglas Wolk has now read all of them. But his completed undertaking is “more than just a stunt,” said Adam Rogers in Wired.com. In his new book, he treats Marvel’s massive output as a single collaborative work of art and shows that there’s more in it than even fans might expect. “Don’t get him wrong; Wolk’s not arguing that all of the Marvel comics are good.” But he begins from the fact that Spider-Man, the X-Men, Black Panther, and every other Marvel character since share the same fictional universe, and then teases out the ways that this influential creation rewards closer reading. For many fans, and Wolk is one of them, comics “don’t seem cliché or overwrought. They move us and embed in our personalities, like all great art should.”
“Wolk proves to be the perfect guide: nimble, learned, funny, and sincere,” said Junot Díaz in The New York Times. After a few sluggish opening chapters that explain his methodology, he makes the “breathtakingly smart” decision of launching his survey not in 1961 with the first issue of Fantastic Four but with 1966’s #51. To Wolk, this was when Marvel legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby arrived at the precise amount of human anguish a superhero must exhibit to make a story compelling. Once Lee and Kirby cracked the code, “Marvel never looked back.” From here on out, Wolk’s book “rips off its stuffed shirt, and soars.”
Or gets at least halfway to the clouds, said Noah Berlatsky in the Los Angeles Times. Wolk weakens his credibility from the moment he claims that Marvel’s oeuvre represents the “biggest story ever told.” What about rival DC Comics, home of Superman and Batman, which started decades before Marvel but gets dismissed in a footnote? And oddly, though Wolk admits that many Marvel comics are poorly written, “he insists that the entire edifice of Marvel publishing is a singular aesthetic triumph.” Superheroes so dominate the pop-cultural landscape that stiffer criticism would have been welcome. Wolk instead opts to “praise the mountain that buries us.”