Douglas Wolk Interview: All Of The Marvels | Screen Rant
We speak to Douglas Wolk, author of the book All of The Marvels, which chronicles his experience of reading every Marvel comic written to date.
The legacy of Marvel comics and the characters that sprung from it stretch back literally decades. Their stories also tie into each other to form a complete, long-form literary narrative. Writer Douglas Wolk knows that better than anybody, as seen in the pages of his new book All of The Marvels.
For All of The Marvels, Wolk set about on a very daunting task - read every comic to date in the mainstream Marvel Universe. Over the course of his journey, Wolk saw the evolution of Marvel's characters in the most up-close manner possible. This enabled him to fully document the essence of Marvel comics as one gigantic story with the layers of storytelling therein and their history of change all captured in All of The Marvels.
We speak to Douglas Wolk on his epic journey of reading such a huge amount of Marvel material, how he translated that quest into the book, and some of the major things the massive endeavor revealed to him about the universe of Marvel comics.
Screen Rant: How did you get started as a writer?
Douglas Wolk: I kind of fell into writing by accident. I moved to New York after I got out of college and I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was working as a temp and I was hanging out in rock clubs. I met a woman who worked at a music magazine, and when I couldn’t get temp work, I would go and hang out in her music magazine. I noticed how badly copy-edited it was, so I just started picking at pages and fixing them. They said ‘Do you want to do that for money?’, and I said ‘Sure.’ Then they said ‘Do you want to write a column?’, and I said ‘Sure’. And that led to more copy-editing gigs. Then I was working at another music magazine, CMJ New Music Monthly, and I was there for a few weeks. Then, abruptly, there was a big staff shake-up, and all of a sudden, I was the managing editor. There was a magazine that needed to written, so I wrote it under a whole bunch of pseudonyms. So, if you’re ever looking at the old music magazine and you think “Huh, that’s interesting. A bunch of these writers share names with members of the Legion of Superheroes”, that was me!
It sounds like you grew up as a pretty big comic book aficionado as a kid?
Douglas Wolk: Very much. Very much so, yeah.
So, going into your book, it’s quite an endeavor where you’re reading every Marvel comic ever written to date for it. How did it all come about?
Douglas Wolk: Well, it kind of got started thanks to my son. About six years ago, he and I were starting to read some comics together, and he was very interested in the big picture of how continuity works. His brain is very much into complicated systems. He loves those and I kind of do too, and as we were reading I was wondering ‘Huh, I wonder would it would be like to actually read all of this stuff?’, because it’s all one really big story, right? So, what would it actually mean to read it? How big would the scope of that be? And that sounds like it might be a book project, and I was looking for some book project to do. I might not have done this if I paid for it, but getting paid for it made for a great excuse to do it.
Well, since Marvel comics have essentially been one continuous story since the beginning, how long exactly did that take you? What was your starting point, and how’d you go about accomplishing such a huge undertaking?
Douglas Wolk: So, looking at the scope of it, I decided it has to be comics set in ‘the present day’, and the main world that all of Marvel’s comics are set in. Not really alternate universe stuff, although I did end up reading a lot of that. They’ve published a lot of comics that are not connected to that big story. They’ve published ‘An American Tale’ comics, a lot of Conan comics, which are distant past if anything. Really, just narrowing it down to that stuff, it was like ‘Okay, it seems like about 25,000.’ Note that that number went up! I figured it would take about a year and a half to read everything, and then another year to write the book. And six years later, here we are.
Were you going through the comics alongside your son?
Douglas Wolk: No, he reads some stuff and what he’s interested in, and I think that’s a much healthier way of reading from what I did! He was interested in reading certain things, and we still read comics together every night, he and my wife and I. He still reads some Marvel stuff, but he’s much more interested in One-Punch and a couple of manga series. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure I think is his favorite. How I went about it and once I figured it was going to be a book, it became my job. I would get up in the morning, get some exercise, a little food, and settle down for reading until my eyes couldn’t handle it anymore.
I didn’t read stuff in order. I grazed, whatever I felt like reading on any given day was what I read, and it seems like it was much, much healthier that way. I think I might have fallen into the pit of despair if I had to read everything from 1994 at once. But grazing was great. I had my spreadsheet, I crossed stuff off as I read it. Toward the end I realized there were certain areas of the spreadsheet that I’d kind of been avoiding, which is how I ended up locking myself into an apartment with a case of protein drinks and not coming out for eleven days until I’d read 30 years-worth of The Punisher.
Wow!
Douglas Wolk: That was the thing – I said ‘I’m going to read it all, I’m REALLY going to read it all!’
So, in reading so much material, who would you say your favorite character is or some of your favorite stories in that many years of Marvel comics?
Douglas Wolk: Oh, that changes every day. Yeah, I have a favorite character today, and it might be somebody different tomorrow. Favorite stories today? Yes, but I’m less interested in saying what I like best than in pointing people to what they would like best. I have a very soft spot in my heart for Squirrel Girl. I think she's an amazing, amazing character. I think Spider-Man's an amazing character, and there's a tiny supporting character in some of the cosmic stuff called Skreet. She's appeared maybe a dozen times or so, but I like her. I like when she turns up. Everyone's got their favorites. There's No-Girl, who first showed up during the Grant Morrison period of X-Men, and she's actually no longer No-Girl. She has a body now and she's calling herself Cerebella. It's always about what I'm in the mood for. I like a lot of recent stuff a whole lot, I love a lot of the stuff from the '60s and from the '80s. Recently, I've been kind of obsessing over the House of X and Powers of X stuff from a couple of years ago, and I'm super, super excited for The Immortal X-Men, which starts in a couple of months. I went back a few weeks ago and read all of Immortal Hulk over a couple of days. That thing really, really holds together astonishingly well.
Going into writing the book, were you writing it in parallel with going through all the Marvel comics, or did you read the comics first then write the book?
Douglas Wolk: I did the reading first, then really plunged into the writing full speed ahead. I was taking a lot of notes and I had a couple of Tumblrs where I was keeping sort of public note-taking. One of them was just panels that I thought were interesting, or connected to other things in one way or another. One that was suggested by my son MarvelBah.Tumblr.com, which is just any time a Marvel character says 'Bah'. So, I did the reading first and then wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. I wrote significantly more than ended up in the book. I basically ended up writing the book twice. The first time, it just did not work, it was just me talking to the inside of my head. This needed to be something that was not just friendly to readers, but actively enjoyable and useful and fun as a thing to read, even for people who were not necessarily interested in the subject.
And something you've mentioned is you were going through the whole legacy of Marvel comics in terms of how it's reflecting the times and things like the Cold War and economics. Is that something you set out to do or was it something you more discovered along the way?
Douglas Wolk: Well, I'd read a lot before I'd started the project, so I had a vague sense of what the big picture might be like, but I wanted to see what the big picture was like. I knew I was going to see stuff that was going to reflect the historical moments it was made in, and I wanted to see exactly what that was and just see the stuff that I would not have run into if it had just been 'Oh, you know, I read some of these, bits and pieces.' I just wanted to let interesting stuff reveal itself to me. There was some stuff where it was more or less what I expected to see, and occasionally, there were things where it was 'Whoa, I was not expecting that! That's cool!'
You mentioned you started on this project six years ago. Did you publicly announce it or was there any awareness at Marvel that you were going through all of their comics?
Douglas Wolk: Well, I made a cryptic public announcement on Facebook. I just posted a whole bunch of panels from old Marvel comics that had penguins in them, and a couple of days later it was like 'Alright, I got a contract, I'm writing this books for Penguin Press'. This is not an officially Marvel-endorsed project, it's an independent piece of reading criticism. Since it came out, I've appeared on a couple of Marvel podcasts. Actually, a thing that made me incredibly happy, there's an issue of The Defenders that came out a few weeks ago where on the last page, you see Doctor Strange in his home in his library and one the books on his shelf is my book. And also on the shelf is Will Hermes' book Love Goes Buildings On Fire and Paul Morley's book Words and Music and those are two of my favorite books about music. So, it's really great to be in the company of those books on Doctor Strange's book shelf!
Awesome, that's fantastic! Was Stan Lee ever aware of the book before he passed away in 2018?
Douglas Wolk: Not that I know of. I spoke to Stan Lee exactly once, and that was in 1999, I believe. It was an interview for a magazine that had just started that had initially wanted to have a feature that would be a round table between Stan Lee, Spike Lee, and Jim Lee. Then Jim Lee and Spike Lee weren't available, so it was 'Okay, let's just go interview Stan Lee.' So, I talked to him and it was really interesting and a lot of fun.
Stan Lee has not really had anything to do with the comics since about 1972. He'd poke his head in once in a while for the occasional one-off anniversary story. I go into this in the book, his role in Marvel is kind of not what it is perceived to be publicly. He never created a character on his own, he co-created characters with a whole bunch of people. He didn't single-handedly create these stories. Lee and Jack Kirby, and also Steve Ditko, who Stan Lee created Spider-Man and Doctor Strange with, the way that they very often worked was that the artist would very often plot the stories with editorial suggestions from Lee. And then Lee would go in and write the dialogue. So, Lee's job for the last fifty years or so was really to be a figure head and the public face, but he wasn't really directing anything about what happened in the stories.
One thing that I thought was really, really interesting when I interviewed him was that he had a reputation for downplaying the contributions of his collaborators. And I don't know if that reputation is actually earned, because when I talked to him, I was talking to him about Spider-Man, and he made a very, very big point of praising all of Steve Ditko's contributions. He'd say 'Oh, that was Steve's idea, that was his thing, that was brilliant, that was all Steve.' When the article went to print, all mention of Ditko had been excised from it, because it was a general interest magazine, and the editors were like 'Well, we're here for Stan Lee, nobody knows who this other person is.' So, for all the world, it looked like once again here is Lee taking all of the credit and not mentioning his collaborators, when in fact he totally had. So, I could see where some of this comes from where people who write think of the way you make a narrative as writing, as putting words down, and there are people who illustrate, and it's not that. It is a huge, huge creative contribution, but it's hard to communicate that to people who are thinking of stories as the thing that gets written.
So, in reading so much Marvel material, the whole 60-year story, what was your biggest takeaway that stood out to you the most?
Douglas Wolk: I guess the biggest takeaway is how completely the comics of every moment are the comics of that moment. The way that they reflect what their creators are thinking about all the time and what they're fascinated by and worried about. And that shows up in ways that are maybe even invisible to people in that moment. Comics from right now just seem like comics from right now. If you look at them in twenty years, people are going say 'Wow, that is such a 2022 comic book! Oh my God, those poor people!'
What Marvel characters do you feel really had the biggest impact on the public consciousness? Spider-Man is a given, but who else would you say?
Douglas Wolk: Well, before Spider-Man, there was the Fantastic Four in 1961. I have a whole thing in the book is that before the Fantastic Four, one thing that Marvel was publishing was monster comics and comics about teenage girls and young professional women. And those characters stick around, they stay in the story even when they don't have their own series anymore. That's fascinating. I have one whole thing about Linda Carter, Student Nurse. That's a comic that started two months before Fantastic Four. It had the premise for an ongoing series of 'Let's follow a student nurse', and she sticks around. She hangs out with the Defenders now and she was Doctor Strange's girlfriend for a while and she's still around. But the characters that have made a huge impact on the public consciousness have often done that through other media. The X-Men movies, the Avengers movies, the Iron Man movies. There's a sense that the movies are what bring this to wider public awareness, but where it all starts is the comics. That's where all the amazing stuff gets generated, and that kind of dichotomy, it's strange but it's fun to see that happen. Howard the Duck, in his way, made a cultural impact in the mid-70s running for president. Blade was not a particularly significant character, but then suddenly, there's a movie in the late '90s, and that's the one that sort of demonstrates that a movie that's based on one of Marvel's comics can be a successful thing. Then, three steps later, you've got Baby Groot appearing on bags of salad greens.
Actually going into that, Marvel has become so ubiquitous in the public consciousness with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and it being so predicated on the interweaving continuity, how do you feel that's carried over from the comics to the movies?
Douglas Wolk: One thing I love about the MCU is that it feel no obligation to be 'faithful' to the comics. It just treats them as an assortment of ingredients that it can use to make stuff work as movies or as TV shows. That's great, I love that, I do not want to see direct adaptations of a comic, because it's a different medium. The stuff that works on the page when it is drawn by a particular artist is not going to be what necessarily works as a movie or a TV show, and so the MCU just takes the things that do. But this thing that Marvel started in the '60s almost by accident is that all of these stories don't just take place in the same world, but they have effects and ramifications that spill over into each other. And you don't necessarily have to read more than one strand of it, you can read one series or one storyline or one particular character and you'll be fine. But if you read a few, you see how they relate to each other, and if you read a bunch of them, then suddenly this bigger picture opens up. That's something that's kind of new, it's a new kind of storytelling and it's hugely fun, and it really, really works when it works.
So, after All Of The Marvels, what do you have coming up next? Will your next book be on everything DC?
Douglas Wolk: You know, everybody makes that joke! I've got a couple of big projects brewing. It might be having something to do with comics in a very different way, or it might be something that has almost nothing or nothing at all to do with comics. We'll see, I'm still in kind of the promo mode, but I'm trying to figure out what the next project is going to be and see if I can do something fun.
All Of The Marvels is out in book stores and online retailers now.