Marvel superhero movies have been dominating the box office for over a decade, which seems like a minor miracle considering that the cinematic universe has ballooned into over two dozen interconnected films and television shows. For someone who might be thinking about just now getting into the Marvel movies, but are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of content to consume, imagine if they tried to read the comic books that they are based on.
Author and journalist Douglas Wolk may have been reading comic books his entire life — he even penned an Eisner Award-winning book on how to read them — but even he only recently attempted the Herculean task of reading ALL of the Marvel Comics books.
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Wolk’s latest book, “All of the Marvels,” was inspired by reading comic books with his son. Wolk’s son, in his innocence, thought it might be a good idea to read every Marvel comic book ever written — that’s every issue of Spider-Man, The Avengers, Captain America, Thor, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Doctor Strange, Moon Knight, Hulk, Black Panther, Master of Kung-Fu, etc, etc, as well as all the countless weird and wonderful ones in-between like Moon Boy and Devil Dinosaur, and Squirrel Girl.
“What would it actually be like to read all of those comics,” asked Wolk. “Read that whole half million page, sixty year long story, as a story and what would that look like?”
To Wolk it sounded like a good idea for a book. By Wolk’s estimation, Marvel Comics, beginning in 1963, is the longest continuous work of fiction in the history of literature, which makes it worth examining.
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“My kid and I read some stuff at the beginning chronologically, and then we both realized it’s so much more fun to jump around,” said Wolk. “I grazed. I read whatever I felt like on whatever given day. I had a spreadsheet downloaded from mikesamazingworld.com.
“Near the end of the process I realized that there were some chunks on the spreadsheet that I had been avoiding which is how I ended up locking myself in an apartment for eleven days with a case of protein drinks and 30 years worth of ‘The Punisher.’”
As popular as American superhero comic books are, there is no denying the explosion of Japanese manga in the U.S. Go into any Barnes & Noble and you will notice that the manga shelves are larger than most other sections in the store.
Wolk’s son is currently reading manga like “One Piece” and “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure,” when he’s not diving into superhero books.
“Manga series tend to be real linear,” explained Wolk. “There is this one, and it’s the one thing, and you read it in sequence and people try to map that onto the Marvel story, which doesn’t work that way. It is a grid, you can come in at any point, you can find your way, you can go backwards, forwards, sideways, whatever. It’s not like there’s a single, specific order to read. It just works differently which is one of its strengths and also one for the things that, honestly, scares people off from it sometimes.”
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After reading 27,000 issues, Wolk struggled to assemble his ideas into a book. It took him scrapping 85% of his first draft to find the right voice. “It was me talking to the inside my head,” said Wolk. “It was not entertaining. It did not communicate.
“What I realized I really wanted to be was a tour guide. To be somebody who could show, not really what I thought was closest to my heart, but how to find the stuff that is closest to their heart. That was when it all clicked for me.”
Wolk takes readers on a guided tour of the Marvel Universe, pointing out interesting story arcs, historical or political context, an artist’s stylistic evolution, or even in the case of “Master of Kung-Fu” in the seventies, the importance of the letters section in addressing woeful stereotypes.
For Wolk, every issue, good or bad, holds some creative value.
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“This is Stockholm Syndrome talking, but after a little while I really started to enjoy the bad comics, too,” said Wolk. “Things where the craft failed, or where there was something that didn’t work on a creative level or a craft level, it was bad in a way that said so much about its historical moment that was an absolute blast. Or there might be a particular detail of what an artist would do or what a writer would do, even what a letterer or colorist would do, or one particular character would do that is totally them. That is cool to see. That’s cool to recognize. I had so much fun. Maybe it’s the particular weird way my brain works. The good stuff I could enjoy on the level of “Wow, that’s cool’ and the bad stuff I could go, ‘This is awful, but it is really interesting!’.”
Any comic fan will tell you that you eventually develop an art historian’s ability to identify a comic artist from just the weight of a line or the shape of a face. Part of enjoying the Marvel story is appreciating the many creative voices (beyond Jack Kirby and Stan Lee) that went into shaping it.
“I am a writer, I am a word person, I often think in terms of narrative and story and language, but I also think that is a reductive way of looking at comics,” said Wolk. “I trained myself to think of them more visually and that’s been really rewarding. I think in the book I maybe err on the side of being too much about narrative, too much about what is happening in the story rather than how it is happening and how it is shown. The beauty of comics specifically, the thing they do that movies and television don’t is that images come from a particular person’s eye and hand. You are seeing an artist’s sensibility in every line and that’s amazing.”
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One of the most interesting revelations in Wolk’s book is the idea that the Marvel story does not begin with Fantastic Four #1 in 1963, but with the popular nurse comics written by Stan Lee a few months prior, like Linda Carter: Student Nurse.
“She just keeps showing up,” said Wolk. “I thought that was super interesting. The thing about ‘Linda Carter: Student Nurse’ is that it’s not actually good. It is not actually good comic. It’s this weird little thing that misfired, and it also started right before Fantastic Four and Marvel as we know it, and it was part of the first multiple title crossover. It was something that was happening in the young professional girl comics before it happened in the super hero comics. I love that she keeps turning up and that there is this fondness for this normal person who just keeps turning up in every context.”
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Nurse characters from the comics even turn up in the Marvel films and television shows like “Daredevil” and “Doctor Strange.” Wolk wrote a separate chap book imagining a world where nurse and professional young women comic books surpassed super hero comics in popularity.
“What if that was the genre that caught on?” Wolk wondered.
IF YOU GO
What: Savannah Book Festival: Douglas Wolk
When: Saturday at 11:30 a.m.
Where: The Savannah Theatre, 222 Bull Street
Cost: Free
Info: savannahbookfestival.org
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