From the (Library e-)Bookshelf: All of the Marvels

[krpalmer]

My area newspaper happened to run an article about an “unofficial biography” of Looney Tunes, and that got my attention. While I do wonder about a certain received wisdom weighting the Warner Brothers cartoon directors in such a way as to show “more” is known about them “first glances” would have it, I still started looking up book listings for Jaime Weinman’s Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite. Those listings, though, mentioned in their “you might also like” sections another book, this one by someone making the bold claim he’d read twenty-seven thousand Marvel comic books, more or less encompassing the “Marvel Universe.” Not that long afterwards, Douglas Wolk’s All of the Marvels was reviewed in my newspaper’s Sunday supplement.

Having read many fewer Marvel comics myself but conscious all the same of having lingered on the very edge of that universe for some years, that book also got my attention. A few daydreams about reading it turned into the sudden motivation to check my city library’s ebook lending application. Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite wasn’t there, but All of the Marvels was.

Wolk’s book opens with a lot of self-imposed ground rules as to how he kept the number of comics read to a mere twenty-seven thousand. One of those rules was to skip the “licensed” works that didn’t connect to superheroes. That ruled out the two Marvel titles I had really tried to follow in the 1980s while noticing the house ads in. I did get to wondering to what extent Marvel’s original Star Wars comics had been influenced by their own previous forays into “fantastic outer space” and supposing the gloomier mood of their Transformers comic as compared to the cartoon might have had something to do with soap opera and melodrama elements. (Although it’s a quibble, I was also thinking Spider-Man had appeared in the third issue of Transformers, and just a little later Marvel’s “lost world” was also invoked to bring up “dinosaurs” in advance of the “robot dinosaur” Dinobots, before the comic disengaged from the Marvel Universe and tied in with G.I. Joe, which Wolk mentioned as one of his excluded titles.)

There’s a bit of reassurance about how to get up to speed from your starting point, and a clear declaration Wolk isn’t trying to set a starting point for you, much “recommend issues,” before he steps into the middle of the Jack Kirby-Stan Lee Fantastic Four as its universe opened up. The chapters focus on specific characters or concepts, at times flitting back to previous issues before jumping forward again. A certain amount of it does seem to keep invoking “the Marvel movies,” although Wolk did delve into one title mixing “unfamiliar and unexpected appeal,” “more of a conclusion than you have to expect with this universe,” and also “uncomfortable elements that were being called out at the time in its letter page” before getting to how Shang-Chi, once the “Master of Kung Fu,” did get a movie after all.

Something about Wolk’s enthusiasm for the subject was appealing, but as the chapters wore on I did start sliding back to “some people can take taking in just a bit of something enormous and never-ending, but it seems some people can’t.” (Anyway, I did suppose I’m wide open to accusations such as “like the stuff you divert yourself with is any better for being different.”) The book didn’t quite overwhelm with “I’ve read this little bit” moments and I might have wondered a bit about how much “reading so much of it” really mattered, even if I recognized just a few of the obscure references. Not that long ago I did go through the earliest Fantastic Four and Spider-Man issues through my library’s e-comics lending application for all that “beginning at the beginning” wasn’t recommended in this book available through their other application.

Comments

[davemerrill]

I've read my share of Marvel comics and for whatever reason, the further they get from that mid 1960s Lee-Kirby-Ditko-Heck-Romita-Sinott-Ayers body of work, the less interesting they get, for me anyways. I can read and enjoy the later 70s comics, but they don't grab me in the same way. By the time the 80s rolled around, the characters began to get mired in their own backstory, and the less said about the EXTREME!!! 90s, the better.

[krpalmer]

I can see a certain sense to "once the comics were out of the hands of the people who'd first worked on them something could be lacking," however hard it is for me to articulate. Thinking back on I am aware of how I concentrated on "buying the Transformers comic every month" to the point of picking up anything else (from any other publisher, too, much less anything I'd have to "start in the middle of") just seemed to slide out of my mind regardless of glancing through issues from corner store and supermarket racks, until the Transformers comic ended for the first time in the early 1990s and I was left washed up on the shore, if riffling through the discount bins... (I did just happen to buy a few "Shogun Warriors" back issues around that point.)

In any case, I did happen, after cross-posting a link to this post on my Tumblr, to follow a tag there and happen on a much more thoughtful and articulately critical review of the book.

[davemerrill]

I will say this, that the comics that happened to start when I was in that sweet spot age range - the 8-9-10 ages - those comics felt like "ours" in a way the older properties did not. The Marvel Star Wars comic was one of those, it felt like it was Our Thing. Even more so, the Micronauts comic, based on a toy line we loved and without any other media behind it.

I think Frank Miller began working on Daredevil in the late 1970s and he was left alone to do his own thing; his work was some of the last super-hero comics I bought. His stuff did have that feeling of 'this is new, this is for our generation' that appeals to younger readers. It appealed to me, anyways.