A labour of love!
As any regular reader of this blog will know, I’m a great fan of comics, and their more mature cousin, graphic novels. As i wrote in The Joy Of Comics, my earliest encounters with the classics were through Classics Illustrated, in which books like Wuthering Heights were rewritten as comics.
But my staple diet as far as “proper” comics were concerned came from the DC publishing house: Superman, Batman and so on.
The main reason, I suspect, was that the plot lines of their main rival, Marvel, all seemed a bit convoluted and complicated. (To be fair, I was only about 12 years old when they started to appear.) However, I do know that where Marvel really scored, apart from the magnificent artwork (courtesy of luminaries like Jack Kirby) was in making their heroes “just” heroes, not superhuman. Also, I often find myself quoting that famous line from Spider-Man: With great power comes great responsibility.
Apparently, the author of this book took on the gargantuan task of reading through 27,000 Marvel comics (which sounds exactly like the sort of job I’ve been looking for!), and has unravelled the interconnections and categorised the Marvel universe into themes. I think any writer who has created their own fictional universe in which there are crossovers of characters and events might find this book useful.
It sounds fascinating, as does this, from the publisher’s website:
“What he [Wolk] 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.”
I think the part about the Cold War is especially interesting. A course on the sci-fi films of the 1950s drew many parallels between that and the invaders from outer space. Also, some of the stories I’m looking at in my Dystopian Visions series can be seen to be based on the fear of a nuclear holocaust. (It’s ironic, is it not, that many people both in the UK and the USA were convinced that comics were anti-educational and led to juvenile delinquency, as I explored in my review of Ex Libris, when at least some of the time they were tackling serious themes?)
I haven’t read All of the Marvels, but it does look very interesting.
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