Douglas Wolk Q&A: How Marvel Comics Are All One Big Story

March 16, 2023 Chris Well

Author photo by Lisa Gidley

“I think it’s something that’s really special about this kind of enormous enormous story.”

For the past several months, I’ve been researching the history of comic books. Please let me explain how much Douglas Wolk as a tour guide has impacted me.

The past few months, I have spent a lot of time studying the history of comic books. Not exclusively Marvel Comics—but mostly Marvel Comics. And a big part of that is thanks to the current book from Douglas Wolk, All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told. This is an impressive book that examines and explains and discusses and debates the enormous tale woven together by literally thousands of Marvel comic books that are interconnected.

Marvel Comics, if you need a reminder, is the company that launched the basic lineup of characters and world(s) seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (also called the MCU). So, some of the biggest blockbuster movies in history—including the Avengers movies, the Spider-Man movies, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Guardians of the Galaxy, and lots more—were all inspired by characters and stories that originally appeared in Marvel Comics.

Wolk apparently read all (well, mostly all) the issues of Marvel Comics that were created and published starting in 1961 and over the course of decades. The number quoted is something like 27,000 individual comic books. And then he wrote several chapters that point out the highlights of specific comic book series, characters, or themes that ran through multiple series.

What inspired this exploration is that Marvel Comics is really the only example of this kind of storytelling. Yes, there have been other comic book companies, and there have even been comic book crossovers with other companies and their characters. But nobody else—nobody—has matched Marvel Comics’ level of connecting and reconnecting and exploring and re-exploring the same stories and events and characters.

During my own time studying classic comics these past months, one part of that has been reading the Fantastic Four in its entire run. That book is generally considered to be the official launch of the Marvel Comics brand.

Although I have read several FF stories over the years, this was the first time I went back and started with Fantastic Four #1 (which was published in 1961) and have been reading the whole run in a single straight line. I’m now somewhere around issue #240 (from the 1980s), with a ways to go before I make it to their upcoming issue #700 (which comes out this May).

In All of the Marvels, Wolk does such a great job as a tour guide that he has literally told me lots of things that help me with my own exploration. And he shares so much that I am now reading his book for the third time and still being reminded of fun details that I had forgotten.

For example, Wolk reminded me of the first time Marvel had all its superhero stories interconnect. Yesterday, I was listening to Wolk’s podcast VOICE OF LATVERIA – a podcast about DOCTOR DOOM, which is a fun example of Wolk being the Marvel Comics tourguide. In the case of this podcast, he is narrowing the focus on the appearances of Doctor Doom over the decades. (Which is very much like how he writes the chapters in All of the Marvels.)

So, the episode of Voice of Latveria that I was listening to yesterday—which I believe is episode 13—Wolk talked about the time back in 1965 when several issues of Marvel Comics that were on shelves at the same time all referred to each other. In fact, an issue with Thor had a kid who needed to find a superhero, but everybody was busy with the thing going on in their own comic book that month.

And then this morning I’m reading All of the Marvels again and Wolk told me again about this event. And then he outlined in detailed how it all worked together! (So, yes, now I am creating a wish list to eventually get all the related comics issues so I can read them together.)

Wolk’s book has also inspired me to read some related books—including Sean Howe’s 2013 book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (which is a historical look inside the complicated Marvel Comics business) and Reed Tucker’s 2017 book Slugfest: Inside the Epic, 50-year Battle between Marvel and DC (sharing a historical view of the sometimes odd relationship and competitions between the “Coke and Pepsi” of comic book companies). It is especially interesting to read all three of these books, as they look at many of the same Marvel Comics historical events from different angles.

I’m so thrilled with the reading All of the Marvels this third time that I am sharing info below that includes more details about the book, as well as interviews with Wolk where he talks about the process of being the Marvel tour guide.

About the book

All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told
by Douglas Wolk
Penguin Press
Categories: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism, Comics & Graphic Novel History

Buy All of the Marvels from Amazon

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Winner of the 2022 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book

The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics’ interconnected, half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the “epic of epics”—and to the past sixty years of American culture—from a beloved authority on the subject who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the tale

“Brilliant, eccentric, moving and wholly wonderful. . . . Wolk proves to be the perfect guide for this type of adventure: nimble, learned, funny and sincere. . . . All of the Marvels is magnificently marvelous. Wolk’s work will invite many more alliterative superlatives. It deserves them all.” —Junot Díaz, New York Times Book Review

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: 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 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, in its parts and as a whole, and seeing through it, as a prism through which to view the landscape of American culture. In Wolk’s 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 day—a 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; it’s also ludicrously fun. Wolk sees fascinating patterns—the rise and fall of particular cultural aspirations, and of the storytelling modes that conveyed them. He observes the Marvel story’s 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 it’s also a revelation for readers who don’t know Doctor Strange from Doctor Doom. Here, truly, are all of the marvels.

Buy All of the Marvels from Amazon

Interviews with Douglas Wolk about Marvel Comics

Q: It’s quite an endeavor where you’re reading every Marvel comic ever written to date for it. How did it all come about?

It kind of got started thanks to my son. About six years ago, he and I were starting to read some comics together, and he was very interested in the big picture of how continuity works. His brain is very much into complicated systems. He loves those and I kind of do too, and as we were reading I was wondering ‘Huh, I wonder would it would be like to actually read all of this stuff?’, because it’s all one really big story, right? So, what would it actually mean to read it? How big would the scope of that be? And that sounds like it might be a book project, and I was looking for some book project to do. I might not have done this if I paid for it, but getting paid for it made for a great excuse to do it.

—Douglas Wolk Interview: All Of The Marvels (ScreenRant)

Q: What it is about superhero comics that lends itself to this kind of narrative archaeology, and love of obscure storytelling artifacts?

It’s hard to think of any other form where a whole bunch of different people become stewards of particular characters over time, add to the story in ways that belong to story canonically, and in a way that is relatively cheap and easy to do. They also leave documents of the earlier points around for people to find.

There are soap operas that have been running for 50, 60, 70 years, but there’s almost nobody who is watching them now who has access to parts of the story from 30, 40, 50 years ago. Maybe there are “best of” DVDs. But it keeps moving. It leaves its past behind. Superhero comics don’t. We hold on to that stuff and go back to that stuff. We look at previous generations of work and that sticks with us. But is always built on the bones of what people were hunting and pecking for in 1970 or 1980.

Callbacks are often someone saying, don’t you remember how much fun we used to have? Look, here’s a picture of how much fun we used to have!

—“Are You Glad You Did It?”: Interview with Douglas Wolk (Comics Journal)

Q: Who is the most important under-rated character in the Marvel Universe, and why is it Linda Carter, Night Nurse?

Ha! I have an ongoing obsession with Linda Carter, who first appeared as the star of Linda Carter, Student Nurse, a couple of months before Fantastic Four #1 in 1961 (and gets a little chapter devoted to her in the book), but I prefer thinking of her as Linda Carter, the night nurse, lower-case: it’s not her alter ego, it’s just a thing she does.

I love the idea that an ordinary, non-powered person has been part of the Marvel story since it began—sometimes where the audience can see her, mostly not—and has endured and prospered just by doing what good she can.

“Most important,” though: that’s tough, because there are lots of minor characters I like a lot.

Diamondback (Rachel Leighton) is an absolutely fantastic ensemble player—initially just part of the Serpent Society who were the “Greek chorus” in Mark Gruenwald’s Captain America, she was interesting enough that she ended up taking a more prominent role in that series.

Skreet, from Keith Giffen’s Lunatik stories, is weird and delightful.

The current Power Man (the one who’s not Luke Cage), Victor Álvarez, has a wonderfully clever premise.

In any case, sometimes minor characters get bigger: it took 25 years for anyone to figure out that Squirrel Girl was actually amazing.

—He Read All Of The Marvels So You Don’t Have To: An Interview With Douglas Wolk (ComicsXF)

Extended interview: Author Douglas Wolk on The Marvel Universe and more | CBS Sunday Morning

“Superhero comics are stories about our world made much bigger than life,” Wolk told CBS Sunday Morning, “and turned into this enormous endless ongoing soap opera.” During the interview, Wolk also shared a personal appearances of sorts inside one of the comics: “On the last page, we see Doctor Strange hanging out in his study at home and on his bookshelf is a copy of All of the Marvels. The book I wrote exists within the comic story. I could not be happier about this.”

One on One with Douglas Wolk, Author, All Of The Marvels | HEC Books

“If you’re used to reading conventional narrative prose—you start at the beginning, you go until you reach the end, then stop—that’s not how the Marvel story works,” Wolk told HEC Books. “The Marvel story extends in all kinds of dimensions, it is always adding events before the beginning, it is always adding things into things that you’ve already seen, you can go into the story at any point and there will be history that you’ve missed—and that’s fine. There’s a pleasure to not knowing and then finding out.

“And maybe at some point when you go back to read something was published 5 or 10 or 30 years earlier, you’ll see a moment that makes you go, Oh, now I get it. That’s a different kind of narrative from things that have a linear kind of construction.

“But I think it’s something that’s really special about this kind of enormous enormous story. There’s also this sense of history that has been building up for 60 years or more. There’s a pre-history— 20-plus years of comics before ‘the beginning of the story,’ but it’s always there. It’s weight is always there even if it’s not being directly referred to.”

Douglas Wolk on Reading 27,000 Marvel Comics for His Book ALL OF THE MARVELS | Inside the Book | Penguin Random House

“One thing that really did kind of surprise me was how much the Marvel story reflects the world around it at every turn if you look at the images and read the words and see just the kind of offhanded references to what was happening in the world you can see 60 years of American culture through this kind of like fun house mirror effect which is a lot of fun it’s sometimes very strange.”

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