All of the Marvels

Since 1961, Marvel Comics has built the longest continuous work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages spanning thousands of writers and artists. Douglas Wolk set out to read the entire thing — every Marvel superhero comic from Alpha Flight to Omega the Unknown — and All of the Marvels is his attempt to make sense of what he found: recurring patterns, cultural blind spots, moments of real artistry, and a shared cosmology that reflects six decades of American anxieties and aspirations.

Winner of the Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book, this is both a love letter for longtime Marvel readers and an accessible cultural history for anyone who's never picked up an X-Men comic.