All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told Paperback - 2023

From the publisher

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

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

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

"Thorough, fascinating, and joyfully executed, All of the Marvels is essential reading for fans and scholars alike." --G. Willow Wilson (Ms. Marvel)

"A revelation, a tour both electrifying in its weird charisma and replenishing in its loving specificity . . . a testament, and a tribute." --Jonathan Lethem

"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 Daz, New York Times Book Review

The superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961are the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Everyone recognizes its protagonists. Eighteen of the hundred highest-grossing movies of all time are based on parts of it. And Douglas Wolk has read the whole thing.

Wolk sees both into the ever-expanding story and through it, as a prism through which to view the landscape of American culture. In his hands, the mammoth Marvel narrative becomes a fun-house-mirror history of the past sixty years--a boisterous, tragicomic, magnificently filigreed epic about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders.

A huge treat for Marvel fans, this book is also a revelation for readers who don't know Doctor Strange from Doctor Doom. Here, truly, are all of the marvels.

About the author