Of all the things I thought my recent trip to Amsterdam would inspire, perhaps the one I least expected was a rekindled love of reading comic books.
One balmy afternoon in the De Wallen district, my cousin Patrick and I visited Lambeek, one of the oldest continuously operating comic bookstores in Europe. Frankly, it reminded me of many comic shops I've visited in the US, including the beloved 4th Wall Comics and Comic Store in Lancaster City. As I scanned the tables and shelves, the 2021 book All of the Marvels by author Douglas Wolk caught my eye. I wrote a note and got a copy from the Lancaster Public Library when I returned to Lancaster.
More than just an account of Marvel Comics from its beginnings to the present, Wolk writes about his arduous multi-year journey of reading every single Marvel comic, approximately 27,000 (at the time of writing) individual issues. He did not read in order, but according to his own fantasies, perhaps to preserve his sanity.
At the end of his quest, he writes in the book, Marvel's main story, from roughly 1962 to the present, is one of the longest running stories told in human history. I realized that it is. Unlike DC Comics, home to Batman, Superman, and thousands of other works, which have rebooted their core storylines over time, Marvel has spent decades creating huge stories. In order to deliver this, we have simply continued, reworking the timeline and making minor adjustments.
The book focuses on most of the popular characters from the past 70 years, carefully parsing thousands of issues to understand timelines and events. Between each chapter are fascinating interludes that explain how writers have gently modified real-life scenarios over the years, both within and outside of specific character origin stories, such as wars or certain presidents. are scattered throughout.
In his book, Wolk mentioned Marvel Unlimited, the comics brand's current official app, as a way to make up for the physical comics he couldn't access. Ever since I was a kid and preteen reading comics, I've always sought out physical books. Starting with the big gray omnibus collection on the shelves at your local Barnes & Noble, to the small graphic novels at countless local libraries.
When Kindles and other e-reading devices started to become popular, I felt a huge gap in manga reading. When I tried to read something on the tablet, it just felt awkward to have him zoom in on each panel with two fingers, then zoom out a few seconds later and move on to the next panel.
Well, it's been a few years since I left the game and technology seems to have caught up. The app's “smart panel” settings make reading comics as easy as any other swipe-based app. At first, it still felt a little wrong. Instead of the gorgeous art that should fill the entire page, your phone displays it in sections. However, this feeling gradually disappeared when faced with the huge number of treasures waiting in the app, which I had never come across in collections and stores.
Take, for example, Fever Dream, the 1982 “Fantastic Four Roast.” Marvel's First Family is given a Friar's Club-style roast by both heroes and villains, each deploying puns more harmful to the human psyche than punches or laser beams. . It was terrible, sure, but like all worthwhile comics, it was a fascinating time capsule.
The app's powerful search capabilities helped me find work by great authors like Jonathan Hickman and Ryan North, as well as people who don't normally write comic books. Scott Aukerman Burn of the podcast “Comedy Bang!” wrote a fascinating article about the Spider-Man and Deadpool team-up in 2016, and then-Saturday Night Live cast members Seth Meyers and Bill Hader wrote their own funny Spider-Man Halloween in 2009. I wrote a story about.
My main goal when I returned to the world of comics through the Marvel Unlimited app was to do things that I never would have thought of doing as a preteen, let alone had the means to do. . Tie-up book. Like many comic book conventions, crossover events are now fairly common thanks to the Marvel movies that regularly hit the big screen.
One of the biggest crossovers in recent history was 2015's “Secret Wars,” which also happened to be the last major chapter featured in “All of the Marvels.” I am. I won't go into the entire complex main story, but the crux of the story is that worlds collide, timelines are tampered with, and you're left with a patchwork world created from the remains of decades worth of characters and storylines. That's it.
While the main story unfolds over just 10 issues of the Secret Wars comic, there are a whopping 60 tie-in stories, each spanning from one to five issues.
I got through about 50 of these tie-ins before it started to feel like a chore, but I still ended up with 219 individual comics alone, so I think I did pretty well. For the real deal, I recommend checking out the aforementioned Lancaster Public Library, comic book stores, and 4th Wall Comics, but when the time comes, Marvel's Unlimited will reignite that flame like it did for me. It might be perfect for you.
LNP's Kevin Stelliker | LancasterOnline Staff Writer. “Unscripted” is a weekly entertainment column produced by a rotating team of writers.