Description

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

‘Brilliant, eccentric, moving and wholly wonderful … All of the Marvels is magnificently marvellous. Wolk’s work will invite many more alliterative superlatives. It deserves them all’
JUNOT DIAZ, New York Times

Every schoolchild recognises their protagonists: the Avengers, the X-Men, your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man. The superhero comics that Marvel has published since 1961 make up the biggest self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages and counting. Eighteen of the 100 highest-grossing movies of all time are based on it. And not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing – nobody’s supposed to.

But Douglas Wolk did. In All Of The Marvels, a critic and superfan takes on the epic to end all epics. What he finds is a magic mirror of the past 60 years, from the atomic terrors of the Cold War to the political divides of our present. Wolk teases out Marvel’s mixture of progressive visions and painful stereotypes, its regrettable moments as well as its flights of luminous creativity. The result is an irresistible travel guide to the magic mountain at the heart of popular culture.

Publisher Review

Douglas Wolk's naked dive into the Marvel source code is a revelation, a tour both electrifying in its weird charisma, and replenishing in its loving specificity. As an account of how a motley gang of accidental collaborators created a vernacular mythology out of the dodgiest of commercial occasions, it's also a testament, and a tribute -- Jonathan Lethem What sounds like a madman's quest turns out to be a deeply emotional hero's journey. The best work yet from the best writer about the medium of comics -- Brian K. Vaughan, author * Saga *