An extremely belated review of All of The Marvels

All of The Marvels (Penguin Press; 2021) Despite practically vibrating with excitement as I read it and eager to talk to somebody about it as soon as I finished, I wasn't entirely sure if I should write about Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels or not. 

As readers of this blog know, I generally write about everything I read or experience, especially if it's a comic book or somehow comics-related, something that, at this point, is less a vocation or a hobby and more of a habit—and, perhaps, not even necessarily a good habit.

This book, despite my initial understanding of it, turns out to be a work of literary criticism that attempts to reckon with the half-million page, 60-year mega-saga of Marvel's inter-connected comic book stories that, in Wolk's framing, are telling a single story, the biggest one ever told. As I read, I quickly realized that Wolk's book wasn't an argument for that way of looking at Marvel Comics, nor a detailing of the mad experience of reading their comics in a way that no one was ever meant to read them, nor a history of any kind (although various chapters address all of those things).

Rather, this was Wolk writing about the comics themselves (at least thousands of the tens of thousands he read), which, of course, meant that writing about All of the Marvels would mean that I would be writing about someone writing about people writing comics (And by "writing comics," I guess I actually mean creating them). 

Obviously, the book should and has been reviewed in various places, but I felt a little weird about doing so myself, as criticism of criticism seemed like a weird, more academic sort of ouroboros writing than any I've ever really engaged in before. 

Still, be it a bad habit or not, I'm going to proceed, urged on by, if nothing else, a desire to let any of my readers who haven't already read All of the Marvels know exactly what it is, and to recommend that they take the time to read it. 

Instead of a more formally organized piece, I'm just going to share a few random things about the book below, and I'll try my hardest to be brief (Which isn't easy for me, given the limitless space of the Internet and my lack of an editor). 

•So what took me so long to read this particular book, aside from the usual forces of procrastination, too many comics competing for my attention and my tendency to prioritize reading stuff I can get paid to write about versus reading stuff for fun...?

Well, two things. 

First, as you can tell by scanning any month or so of EDILW, I'm a DC Comics partisan (Though I read a handful of Marvel comics earlier and a stack of trades later, my time as a Marvel reader was basically 2000-2015 or so, and my familiarity with the publisher's 20th century comics limited to what I was drawn to in the Essential collections, which tended to be the 1970s monstrous superhero stuff, as opposed to the more straightforward superhero stuff). 

This book's claim that the stories of the Marvel Universe shared setting represented the biggest story ever told felt immediately, obviously wrong to me. Because, obviously, the DC Universe is far, far older, however one wishes to date the creation of the two settings. (By the debut of the character or feature these settings would grow out of? Superman debuted in 1938, the Fantastic Four in 1961...and, if one would prefer to start the Marvel Universe back to the debut of the original Human Torch, that's still a year after Superman. By the point at which the characters began crossing over on a regular basis? DC's Justice League of America debuted in in 1960...not only is that about a year earlier than the FF, but Stan Lee has repeatedly explained that he creation of the FF was in direct response to the success of DC's JLoA...I just recently read a version of his telling of this story in his introduction to the 2008 trade paperback collection of JLA/Avengers).  

I've heard the argument made (not by Wolk, but by others), that the DC mega-saga doesn't really "count" in the way that the Marvel mega-saga does because of DC's occasional attempts to reboot their own story, most dramatically in what we call the post-Crisis period of 1986 or so and the New 52 publishing initiative of 2011 (and probably a good half a dozen other times as well). But of course, those reboots are themselves part of the story, as each follows some big cosmic event where god-like entities meddle with the fabric of time and space, rewriting the fictional reality. There's never been a hard DC reboot that wasn't the result of a story; in those examples I just mentioned, these were Crisis on Infinite Earths (there had to be a crisis for there to be a post-Crisis, naturally) and Flashpoint, respectively. 

That said, Wolk addresses the existence of the DC Universe almost immediately in his book:

That sense of shared experience, of seeing dozens of historical threads and dozens of creators' separate contributions being woven together, is a particular joy of following the Marvel Universe (with a capital U), as both the company and the readers like to call it. The Marvel story is not the first or only one that works like that—DC Comics, Marvel's largest competitor, and other comics publishers have adopted the "universe" template too—but it's the largest of its kind.

A footnote then explains that DC was "slow to integrate" their comics into a coherent fictional world, and mentions the reboots. I am not necessarily convinced by this argument, and there are better ones to be made, like the fact that, since 1961, Marvel has been more deliberate about their shared setting, or that it's smaller, tighter-knit group of creators gave it a more distinct vision, or that Marvel's current pop culture cache makes it the more important universe at this point. That said, Wolk's book isn't really written for people like me, and I think that paragraph and attached footnote does the job of explaining why he wrote a book about Marvel's super-story rather than DC's. 

Also, I confess that, when I first heard about the book, I kind of assumed it was one of what I usually think of as "stunt memoirs," where a writer does something rather crazy for a year or so and then writes about the experience. Think A.J. Jacobs' 2007 The Year of Living Biblically and its ilk. 

I thought this, of course, because reading all of Marvel's comics is insane...maybe even more so than trying to follow the various laws of the Bible literally in the modern world. Wolk notes that, when he would talk about the project with others, more than one person brought up Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot character, whose origin involved reading 5,000 comics in a single sitting to win a bet and going crazy in the process.

•So if it's not what I assumed, what is All of the Marvels? Well, after a few chapters explaining what makes Marvel Comics such an unusual and worthy epic, the particulars of Wolk's methodology and pre-answering questions readers not already steeped in the comics medium and superhero genre might have, the book takes shape.

Wolk breaks out various threads of the overarching Marvel story and devotes a chapter to each. Within  those chapters he details their salient aspects, major themes, cultural significance, impact on the publisher and industry and medium. He does so with a keen eye and imaginative (but convincing, even compelling) readings that make a sort of sense of these improvised mega-stories that were never intended to make sense.

So, for example, in his chapter on Spider-Man, he defines its particular literary mode ("It's a bildungsroman, the story of how a youth becomes an adult"), and makes sense of it as a repeating cycle, in which Spider-Man Peter Parker achieves a form of adulthood or resolution to his lifelong conflicts, only to be knocked down again and have to start all over (And yes, Wolk does reference the Itsy-Bitsy Spider here). 

One might think of the real, true story of Spider-Man ending with, say Steve Ditko's departure from Amazing Spider-Man, or perhaps Stan Lee's, but Wolk manages to make it all make sense as a cohesive story, up until where he left off reading it (I should note that the Spider-Man story did reboot itself in the manner of any post-Crisis DC comic in the "Brand New Day" period, discarding a swathe of its own continuity). 

In addition to Spider-Man, which is the second such chapter of the book, Wolk tackles, in order, The Fantastic Four, Master of Kung Fu, The X-Men, Thor, Black Panther, the "Dark Reign" period, Jonathan Hickman's Avengers/New Avengers/Secret Wars storyline and, finally, Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. 

Why those particular threads of the Marvel story? It seems to be a mixture of their importance to the overall narrative and what Wolk liked the best or thought the best-made. (He admits as much in the chapter on Master of Kung Fu). Pop cultural significance doesn't seem to have had much to do with it. (You'll note the lack of Marvel Cinematic Universe important comics and characters like Iron Man, Captain America or The Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, or Deadpool or, most notably, The Avengers, who are only represented in that one specific writer's particular iteration of them.) 

The Hulk is perhaps the most conspicuous in his absence, given how long the character has been around and how relatively popular he has been at various points. One supposes that, had Wolk a bigger page count, we might have seen chapters on The Hulk or Daredevil.

In between those chapters are shorter interludes, devoted to such things as Lee, Kirby and Ditko and their working relationships or timelines of monsters, U.S. presidents and pop music in Marvel Comics. One particularly interesting such interlude temporarily reorients the entire Marvel saga around a single character, Linda Carter, who first appeared in 1961's Linda Carter, Student Nurse by Stan Lee and Al Hartley, and would go on to star in 1972's Night Nurse and, later, appear as a superhero ally in the 21st century. 

The book ends with a 23-page appendix entitled "Marvel Comics: A Summary," which essentially summarizes the entirety of the Marvel mega-saga. It's basically a smart comics critic's all-prose version of the old Marvel Saga, or, perhaps, Mark Waid and Javier Rodriguez's 2019 History of the Marvel Universe. It's great. 

•One extremely useful term Wolk uses throughout, which I have been struggling not to use myself as I wrote about his book until I could get to this point, is "sequence." He uses it instead of "title" or "series" or "story" or "run," words we might see and use much more often when discussing superhero comics, all words which tend to fall short when taking a very long view of a narrative like Wolk does throughout the book.

For example, Brian Michael Bendis' work on Spider-Man in the Ultimate line (which would eventually become the Ultimate Universe). It spanned multiple titles and series, and, though one could look at it as a single story, it is, obviously, composed of hundreds of individual stories. The term "sequence" is a more precise one than any of those others to describe that unit of a long Bendis-directed Spider-Man narrative.

It's especially useful when talking about, say, long-lived characters like The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man or narratives that are otherwise hard to define (like Hickman's multi-book Avengers/New Avengers/Secret Wars, or the not-really-even-a-story-per se "Dark Reign" status quo). 

•Wolk is very, very nice to the creators he writes about. Given the date of publication, he was writing before a few of those mentioned were revealed to be bad people (Warren Ellis) or actual monsters (Neil Gaiman), but, even beyond that, I was impressed with how kind he was to the work of many creators, never referring to anyone as a hack (at least, not anyone he names).

Some examples? During the "Dark Reign" chapter, he mentions Alex Maleev's use of photo reference to create Secret Invasion: Dark Reign #1. He writes in a footnote that, "He apparently uses photographic models for most of his characters, which is why Namor, whose facial features are usually drawn as not exactly human, looks really wrong for most of this issue."

That instead of, say, pointing out that Namor looks like Phil Collins doing very poor Namor cosplay, or comparing and contrasting "good" use of models, like that of Alex Ross, to Maleev's use of them. (Looking at those panels again, I think I see more Robert DeNiro than Phil Collins in at least one of them...)

In that same chapter, he talks about the virtues of Mike Deodato's art, and even reprints a four-panel sequence of his Norman Osborn, who looks like Tommy Lee Jones with some sort of weird virtual reality hairstyle super-imposed onto his head (That is because, of course, Deodato was giving Osborn the hair style Ditko originally designed him with, a hair style that no one has anymore and, in fact, no one under the age of 70 is likely to have seen in real life). He talks no shit about Deodato there at all!

Or, in discussing "One More Day", the controversial storyline in which Spider-Man sold his marriage to the devil in exchange for a continuity reboot, a footnote simply reads, "As far as I can tell, nobody, including the creators, likes 'One More Day.' [J. Michael] Straczynski briefly intended to have his name removed from it." 

He didn't even use the words "dumb" or "stupid" when talking about that story...!

•As I often do when reading prose, I thought in the back of my mind a bit about my own writing while reading this. I suppose I did so more than usual, given this was writing about comics.

One thing that struck me is the fact that I, and, I think, most of the people who write about comics regularly online, tend to concentrate on comics as single units (either single issues or, in my case now, trade paperback collections), and to write about them as they're coming out.

This makes sense, of course. Timeliness has always been an important factor in what gets written about, and at least part of the point of a review is to help guide a work's potential audience, to either encourage them to read or watch or play something (if it's good), or to warn them away from doing so (if it's bad).

Certainly, my focus on EDILW has long been on covering new comics (even if, in some cases, they are just new to me), something I imagine comes from the fact that I started writing for newspapers, with film reviews accounting for much of my writing. 

Wolk's book, though, offers a pretty strong argument for waiting a few years (or decades) before writing about monthly comics, as such a long-view allows one to see things in them that one can't if they're occupied with covering them as they whiz by every week or month or year. 

I know some folks do cover comics in this way, of course (Tegan O'Neil comes to mind, for example), but it seems a relative rarity.

Of course, the vast majority of comics criticism takes place on the Internet (I think there's still a little in magazines and newspapers, at least those few magazines and newspapers that still exist), which certainly lends it to dealing with what's most timely, rather than, say, what was coming out in 1965. 

Perhaps the best way to look at 20 or 30 or 40 or 50-year-old comics are in books like Wolk's (Um, are there other books like Wolk's...?), but it certainly gave me something to think about in terms of comics criticism.

On the creation of superheroes as gradual development versus instantaneous inspiration

I've been thinking a lot about where exactly new superheroes come from over the course of the last few months, thanks largely to some of the books I've been reading: Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin's picture book biographies of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Douglas Wolk's All Of The Marvels and the late Lou Mougin's Secondary Superheroes of Golden Age Comics. I've also been thinking about the subject because of what I've been blogging about lately, like the Thunderbolts* movie, with its cast of characters created by almost 25 writers and artists over the course of some seven decades, and, of course, the related issue of who, exactly, created The Sentry and how.

Mougin's book, an exhaustive survey of Golden Age super-comics, rounds up the scores of characters created by over a dozen different publishers in the years following the first appearances of Joel Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman comics (and some of the more distinct characters to follow in his immediate wake, like Batman, Wonder Woman, The Human Torch and Captain America).

Given the pace at which this army of superheroes appeared and then disappeared from the pages of the comic books of the time, one imagines that most were created on-the-fly by the guys who wrote and/or drew them. 

When a modern reader thinks of how someone might have got the idea for a Cat-Man or a Crimebuster, a Wizard or a Boy King, a Daredevil or a Black Hood, a Mother Hubbard or The Face, it's easy to imagine that sort of out-of-the-blue, lightning bolt-style of inspiration, a deadline-driven act of creation that rushed from an image in someone's head to the drawing board to the printed page (For the more unique characters, anyway; a lot of these heroes seemed to come from artists doing their own riffs on a Superman, or trying a different animal theme for a Batman, or rearranging the stars and stripes on a costume to get their own Captain America).

As for the heroes of later generations, though? 

Well, they had these Golden Agers (and their peers from the pulps and radio and film serials and comic strips) as a vast reservoir of inspiration. Not only could later creators find various templates among the biggest  successes of those early years who are still starring in their own comic books today (Superman, Batman, Captain America, etc), but also the heroes I would consider the true second stringers (the characters who ended up on the JSA, for example, and those of publishers Fawcett, Quality and maybe MLJ). And then the more random-sounding also-rans that fill Mougin's book, like White Streak or The Conqueror or The Blue Bolt or Magno or the guys named The Reckoner, of whom there was more than one. 

Many of the later heroes of the late 1950s and 1960s created for DC and Marvel and Charlton and others could be traced back to Golden Age ancestors, and contemplating such second-generation heroes now, it's actually kind of hard to think of a character whose name, power or gimmick doesn't have Golden Age antecedents of some sort. (Seriously, try it!) 

But still, there are some. Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's The Thing, for example, seems to be born more of monster comics than old superhero comics, and wow, where did the idea for the Silver Surfer come from exactly, you know? 

Anyway, some bits of Wolk's book that I found particularly interesting were the examples he gives when discussing the creation of certain characters. 

In the weeks since I read All of the Marvels, these examples seemed to only become more resonant, as I thought about Lee's work with Kirby and Ditko on the first wave of Marvel heroes while reading those picture books and then later reading of the avalanche of superheroes of the 1940s in Mougin's book. 

Very early in Wolk's book—page 5, actually—he mentions that the "Marvel's narrative," the focus of his book, "has a peculiar relationship with his authorship": 

Legally, it's "maker" is a corporation, one that's gotten bigger over time as its body of intellectual property has changed hands. In practice, it was made by a specific group of people whose names we (mostly) know, and whose particular hands are (usually) unmistakable on any given page. But it's also almost always been created collaboratively: if you think any one person is the sole creator of a particular image or plot point, you're probably wrong, which is why it's a mistake to think of any one person who's worked on a Marvel comic book as it's "author."

This passage then leads to an extensive footnote, during which he notes the difficulties involved in untangling who created what.

This can obviously be a contentious subject that fans and sometimes the creators themselves have argued about over the decades, be it how much (or even if) Stan Lee might have contributed to those early Marvel heroes with his collaborators Kirby and Ditko, or the later disagreements regarding the creation of Wolverine and Ghost Rider (the latter of which went to court), or the current issues with The Sentry. 

Wolk writes:

Even the question of who created Marvel's best-known characters is also often more complicated than it looks. It's easy enough to assess who came up with Marvel's first superheroes of the 1960s, the Fantastic Four: Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. (Except that the Human Torch's name and basic design had been created by Carl Burgos back in 1939).

He goes on to cite a few other relatively easier ones, like Captain America (Kirby and Joe Simon) and Doctor Strange (Ditko), before showing how quickly it can get rather convoluted.

Iron Man? That's a little trickier. Lee plotted his first story, but Larry Lieber wrote its dialogue; Kirby drew the first cover and designed the character's initial costume (which barely resembles the familiar rend-and-gold one, designed by Ditko a bit later); Don Heck drew the initial story and invented what its protagonists Tony Stark and Pepper Potts look like.

So the Marvel Universe hadn't even been around a year yet, and there was already a character who seemed to have at least four primary creators, whom Wikipedia lists under "created by" in its article on Iron Man. (As for Ditko, who Wikipedia does not cite as a creator of the character, where does he fit in? Is a redesign considered an act of creation? If it comes some time after a character's debut, is it seen as somehow less important? Does it matter if that redesign becomes the primary, default one?)

The next example is more complicated still. Writes Wolk;

Daredevil? Well, now you're running into trouble. Lee wrote the first story, and Bill Everett drew it, but the cover was drawn by Kirby, who might have designed Daredevil's original costume, too, although the much more familiar red costume was first drawn by Wally Wood starting in the seventh issue. When you talk about the now-familir look and feel and mythology of "Daredevil," though—the tormented Catholic romantic who leaps around the shadows of Hell's Kitchen and fights ninjas and Wilson Fisk—you're mostly talking about what Frank Miller added to the character in the '80s, along with his artistic collaborators Klaus Janson and David Mazzucchelli. (Except that Wilson Fisk had been created by Lee and John Romita Sr. fifteen years earlier.) And so on. 

Wolk doesn't mention it at all here (this is just a footnote, long as it is, of course, and this is outside the purview of his book), but it's worth noting that Marvel's Daredevil, who debuted in 1964, was preceded by another comic book hero named Daredevil from an entirely different publisher. 

The two-toned, boomerang-wielding Daredevil of Lev Gleason Publications, whose creation is credited to Jack Binder and Don Rico, debuted in a 1941 issue of Silver Streak and his own title ran 134 issues, not being canceled until 1956. (This is the character who, long since lapsed into the public domain, one might have seen more recently in the pages of Savage Dragon as "The Dynamic Daredevil" or in various Dynamite Comics as "The Death-Defying 'Devil".)

Mougin does mention the possible relationship between Lev Gleason's Daredevil and Marvel's Daredevil in his book:

The legend goes that publisher Martin Goodman wanted Stan Lee to do a comic based on [longtime Daredevil writer Charles] Biro's hero, in 1964. Since Lee admired Biro's work, that may not be unfounded. But, instead, Lee, Bill Everett, and Steve Ditko created a new Daredevil, switching the original DD's muteness for blindness and subbing a billy club for a boomerang. 

Does that not sound plausible to you? If not, well, Mougin did say "legend", didn't he? (I am curious about his mention of Ditko here, as Wolk doesn't mention Ditko at all when he discusses the creation of Marvel's Daredevil.)

The sense I got while reading this very early bit of Wolk's book was that rather than being created by a single artist or a single writer or even a single writer/artists team, sometimes it's more of a group effort, a creation by committee. That certainly seems to been the case with Iron Man, for example.

As for the Daredevil example, it shows not only that sometimes it's a team or a staff (or, in Marvel's case, a bullpen) that might create a superhero character, but sometimes it can take multiple creative teams and multiple years—hell, here some 20 years!—before a corporate character like Marvel's Daredevil reaches what will ultimately be considered his essential, perfected form.

Far later in the book, in a chapter entitled "Good is a Thing You Do" that is devoted to the debut and early issues of the current Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan and to Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Derek Charm and company's Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (the latter of which was built around a 1991 character designed and originally drawn by Ditko), Wolk gives an even better example of a character being developed into creation, I think. He does so while also illustrating how newer Marvel characters are dependent on older ones, and how even their earliest antecedents can be traced back to still earlier, pre-Marvel ancestors.

"Kamala Khan is yet another of Marvel's collective creations, her real-world origin too complicated to be attributed to a single originator," Wolk writes.

She emerged from conversations between editors Sana Amanat and Stephen Wacker about Amanat's experience growing up as a South Asian Muslim in New Jersey, as well as writer G. Willow Wilson's interest in creating a teenage Muslim superhero ("Sana and I initially had very modest expectations for this book," Wilson wrote five years later. "Our goal was to get to ten issues.") Artist Adrian Alphona came up with the images of Kamala and her supporting cast, although her costume was designed by Jamie McKelvie. 

Wolk also cites the particular creative choices made by colorist Ian Herring and letterer Joe Carmagna as distinct and important, each further defining and differentiating the initial Ms. Marvel comic book series from others in Marvel's line.

We could also note that while McKelvie designed Kamala's costume, a significant component of it, the lightning bolt-shaped symbol, was taken from Dave Cockrum's redesigned costume for the previous Ms. Marvel Carol Danvers dating back to the '70s.

And, of course, the superhero codename "Ms. Marvel" also came from Danvers, who was created, as Danvers, by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan in 1968, but made into the superhero Ms. Marvel by Gerry Conway and John Buscema in 1977.

And, just to make this into a game of superhero telephone, the original Ms. Marvel was a distaff version of the male hero Captain Marvel (created by Stan Lee and Gene Colan in 1967). He took his name from the Golden Age Fawcett Comics character Captain Marvel (created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck in 1942), and that Captain Marvel was based on Siegel and Shuster's Superman...or at least, the company then known as Detective Comics was sure enough that he was that they took Fawcett to court, accusing them of copyright infringement (The case was eventually settled in 1953, in large part because, in Fawcett's estimation, superhero comics had by then ceased being profitable enough to fight over).

And thus we get from 2014's Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan all the way back to the very first superhero in 1938. 

Anyway, both Wolk and Mougin's books are very interesting reads, and ones that should be of interest to anyone who reads superhero comics. I'll be formally reviewing them in the future, but I wanted to touch on this idea of superhero creation as a process of development in a post of its own.