ALL OF THE MARVELS: Journey Into The Marvel Comics Universe with Douglas Wolk

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. Author Douglas Wolk will be joined in conversation by WWUH’s Culture Dogs co-host Sam Hatch.
 
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. 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.

FREE virtual program, although donations are gratefully accepted. REGISTER HERE.

Signed copies of All the Marvels will be available for purchase through the Mark Twain Store; proceeds benefit The Mark Twain House & Museum. Books will be shipped after the event. We regret that we are NOT able to ship books outside the United States as it is cost-prohibitive to do so.

About Douglas Wolk:

Comics writer, critic, journalist and teacher Douglas Wolk is the author of the Eisner Award-winning Reading Comics and the host of the podcast “The Voice of Latveria.” A National Arts Journalism Program Fellow, Wolk has written about comic books, graphic novels, pop music and technology for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Believer, Slate, and Pitchfork. He lives in Portland, Oregon.