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Andy Sullivan: Against the Grain

This week we touch on another CBS Sunday Morning gem.  Behind every Marvel movie lies a multiverse of comic books.  Since the 1960’s, a tale has been building.  A single, connective narrative involving thousands of characters and millions of pages of comic books.  “Stories that happened in 1961-62 have consequences in comics that are coming out this week”.  Douglas Wolk is a writer and Marvel expert who explains Marvel might be the longest-running and most voluminous story told in human history. 

It's all connected.  If the Hulk stubbed his toe in 1979, Captain America could be dealing with the consequences in 2022.  Marvel started publishing comics in the 1930’s.  According to Wolk, it was in the early 1960’s that Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby pioneered the idea of having all the characters live in the same universe.  Wolk had been a fan of Marvel comics since he was a boy, His son Sterling didn’t start off sharing his love of, as he calls it, spandex violence.  Eventually. He told his father he wanted to read the comics in the order that events happened to the characters, not the order in which the comics were released. 

“You just have to find your way in and wander around inside it.  There’s lots of weird, boring, arcane and confusing parts.  There are beautiful, magical and fascinating parts”.  They found themselves jumping around from comic to comic, devouring page after page and issue after issue.  It was at this point Douglass Wolk started to transform from mild-mannered Portland writer to Dr. Marvel Brain, aka one of the few people on planet earth to real all the Marvels, which is the title of the book he wrote about the experience.  “Superhero comics are stories about our world made much bigger than life and turned into this enormous, endless, ongoing soap opera”

It seems hard to imagine now, with Marvel films regularly breaking box office records, but for years they struggled to get their work adapted for the big screen.  You might recall I talked about this several columns ago: the first Marvel feature movie was Howard The Duck.  It was a box office bomb so bad that it was declared the worse film of 1986.  The Marvel Cinematic Universe has come a long way since then, turning out hit after hit.  In fact, Howard has been seen as recently as the Guardians of the Galaxy. 

It all started with the comics.  “On the last page, we see Dr. Strange hanging out in his study at home and on his shelf is a copy of All Of The Marvels.  The book I wrote exists within the comic story.  I could not be happier”.  An unusual origin story but proof there’s room for everybody inside the biggest story ever told.  

Douglas Wolk is a Portland, Oregon-based author and critic.  He has written about comics and popular music for publications including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, www.salon.com Pitchfork Media, Vanity Fair and The Believer. Wolk is 52 years old.  

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