Nearly thirty-thousand comic book issues have been published by Marvel Comics in the past sixty-plus yeats and few people, even the most hardcore fans, can claim to have read every single one – but one person who has come as close as anyone is Douglas Wolk, author of All the Marvels: Journey to the End of the Biggest Story Ever Told.

one with Screen Rant from 2022 – in which he discusses diving head-first into the whole extant Marvel canon stretching back to the birth of the modern era in the early 1960s.

All the Marvels is fascinating for its overview Marvel's history, but what makes Wolk's book a vital read is the way it deconstructs and analyzes the publisher's unending, fractal superhero story as a singular storytelling achievement unlike anything else in history.

Author & Comic Book Historian Douglas Wolk Has Read More Comics Than Most Fans Ever Will – Here's Why

The Impetus Behind All The Marvels

The conceit of All the Marvels is that, if all of Marvel's publication history from the 1960s onward is taken as one, giant, interconnected story, it is the longest in literary history, and the most massive, by a margin of millions of pages. It also represents, according to Douglas Wolk, arguably the greatest collaborative artistic project ever. This makes the publisher profoundly important in 20th century culture – an honor that can also be extended to its rival, DC Comics – and worthy of dedicated scholarly analysis. Somewhat paradoxically, however, this noteworthy scope is often an impediment.

Douglas Wolk...had to face this seemingly insurmountable challenge, in order to fully engage with the thesis of All the Marvels.

That is, while Wolk was able to dedicate himself to the remarkable feat of reading over twenty-seven thousand Marvel Comics, many would-be researchers invariably find themselves lost among the labyrinthian –​​​​​​​ in the Borgesian sense – and often convoluted twists, turns, canceled titles, relaunches, crossovers, and more that make up the corpus of Marvel's publication history. For Douglas Wolk, he had to face this seemingly insurmountable challenge, in order to fully engage with the thesis of All the Marvels: that even if the publisher's stories aren't the "greatest" of all time, they are unlike anything else ever produced.

"All The Marvels" Argues That It Is More Than Just The Scope Of Superhero Comics That Makes Them Unique

Comics' Omnidirectional Storytelling, Explained

Douglas Wolk rightfully draws attention to the scope and the grandeur of Marvel Comics as an ongoing, interconnected story, but his insight into comic book storytelling goes even deeper than that. In one of the interview selections curated by MonsterComplex.com, from a discussion about All the Marvels with HEC Books, the author highlighted a facet of superhero storytelling that makes it enduringly appealing to generations of both creators and fans. As Wolk explained:

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.

That is, for writers and artists, as well as readers, the Marvel Universe is inexhaustible and limitless.

This "dimensionality" is perhaps the most exciting thing about Marvel, and DC's, decades upon decades of ongoing, ever-evolving continuity. While fans are often weary of conflicts between canon details, the truth is that clashes, inconsistencies, and overlaps in storylines are as much part of what makes comics enthralling as the continuity and callbacks themselves. This is just one of many insights into what makes Marvel Comics so fascinating that readers will take away from Douglas Wolk's All the Marvels: Journey to the End of the Biggest Story Ever Told.

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