It's Over Nine Thousand

All of the Marvels, by Douglas Wolk, isn't really about one man's experience of reading 27,000 Marvel comics, although it touches on that. It's not a history of Marvel, although it touches on that. It's not a summary of the Marvel Universe story so far, although the final chapter skims through that.

Instead, this is Douglas Wolk, after reading 27,000 Marvel comics, picking out his favourite bits, and that makes for a compelling book, although it's not exactly how the book is marketed.

But it is interesting how, in all of those thousands of stories, Master of Kung Fu stands out as problematic as heck but also really, really good, or how the Dark Reign crossover turns out to be more clever and insightful than it appears, or how Jack Kirby was a genius but his Black Panther run was (probably) terrible.

I like that personal, my-favourite-bits, approach, and while a couple of chapters feel a bit perfunctory, I could quite happily have read another 15 chapters of this.

(Or maybe another 15 chapters by someone else. It would be lovely -- if impractical -- to get other people to read 27,000 Marvel comics and present their own favourite parts, just for a variety of voices. I'd love to read sequels to this by other authors.)

There are some disappointments -- there's an early interesting Grant Morrison-esque thought about the Marvel Universe being a unique fictional construct but it doesn't go anywhere; the Black Panther chapter doesn't quite grasp the importance of what Don McGregor was doing -- and perhaps overall the book is a bit fluffy, but it's always entertaining, and well worth reading for the parts in which Wolk pulls out a surprise favourite, or delves a bit deeper into a subject, or both.