- Some of the most popular and profitable stories today are based on characters created and developed by authors and artists at Marvel Comics.

Today's guest has read all 27,000 issues to unpack the hopes, the anxieties, and the cultural aspirations in their half a million pages.

He is Douglas Wolk this week on Story in the Public Square.

(bright upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And I'm G.Wayne Miller with the Providence Journal.

This week, we're joined by Douglas Wolk, an author who read the entire Marvel Comics catalog.

That's right, more than 27,000 issues and wrote about it in his new book, "All of the Marvels".

Douglas, Thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you so much for having me.

It's good to be here.

- You know, so we're gonna talk about the book, which the New York Times book review calls magnificently marvelous.

But before we get to the book, I wanna talk about you a little bit, and your love affair with comic books.

When did that begin?

- Probably started when I was about nine years old, you know, the age, the kids typically sort of pick up on these things.

Yeah, on summer vacation, picked up a Green Lantern comic book, needed to find out what happened next, came back the next month, got, oh, there's another comic book has the same character, I should read that too.

Oh, and this one looks good too.

Oh, and there's a store down the street that has nothing but comic books and they get them every week and maybe I can start going there every week.

And by about two and a half years later, they're like, "Okay, Douglas, we're just gonna teach you to use the register.

(Jim and G.Wayne laugh) - And was this in Portland?

Where did you grow up, Douglas?

- I grew up in East Lansing, Michigan.

Where fortunately I had access through my dad, who was a professor at Michigan State to the Michigan State University Library Special Collections Division, which had thousands and thousands and thousands of old comics, so I ended up spending pretty much every weekend doing that.

- How old were you when you realized that comics were sophisticated storytelling?

- Probably nine also.

You know.

(Jim and G.Wayne laugh) - [Jim And G.Wayne] Precautious.

- [G.Wayne] Yes.

- No, at the point when I started reading them, I was like, "Okay, this is the thing for me."

I didn't quite realize why they were the thing for me.

That took a little while longer to formulate, but it kinda got into my system and realizing that it was visual and it was verbal and it was not just visual it was an artist's work.

It was the world interpreted through somebody's eye in hand, and that was really, really special, and that stuck with me.

- So we're gonna get into your book and in just a second, but you wear other hats besides being an author and a comic expert.

You teach and you're a podcaster, and the podcast is called Voice of Latveria.

Tell us about that, what it is and how that came to be.

- The Voice of Latveria is...

It's another comics thing.

It's another Marvel Comics thing in fact.

Ostensibly it is a shortwave propaganda broadcast from the Cold War era of news from Latveria, which is the fictional country that the Fantastic Four villain Marvel Doom runs.

More actually it is a conversation with somebody every week about a particular old Dr. Doom story.

And more actually than that, it's a conversation with somebody every week about whatever they feel like talking about.

- [G.Wayne] Do you have any sense of the size of the audience for that?

- And it's not super large but it is super devoted weirdly.

I've got a Patreon for it, and people keep like signing up and paying me money and telling me that they really enjoy it and I love doing it.

It's so much fun to talk to people about this stuff.

- So what inspired you to read all of Marvel's more than 27,000 superhero comics.

When did you get the idea why, and walk us through that because extraordinary achievement, needless to say.

- And I'm curious, is the right term, the Marvel Comics catalog or is it the canon?

- I would actually say the canon rather than the catalog.

I mean, you can go either way.

The canon specifically because I didn't read everything published by Marvel Comics.

I read everything that is set within their fictional universe.

So, you know, they've done like movie adaptations, and they've done, you know, Care Bears Comic and licensed things and stuff, but everything that is set in that one world where most of the comics they've published since 1961 are set, where any character can meet any other character, where any past story can be made reference to in a current story.

Where all of the events in all of the series are supposed to be more or less compatible with each other, all of those, that's what I read them, and that was the 27,000 plus, 540,000 plus pages, and there's another, you know, 500 or so added every week.

(Douglas, Jim and G.Wayne laugh) So it adds up.

How I got started with it is my son when he was about, you know, nine or 10 years old, also like suddenly realized, oh, superhero comics are a complicated system.

I like complicated systems.

"Hey dad, I'd like to read all the Marvel superhero comics."

I'm like, "Okay, well, this is the last week, "it'll be a nice week we have together."

And then three months later he'd read, you know, a couple hundred issues, and he was like, "Actually, I'm more interested "in the modern crossover era, Dad."

I mean, we jumped forward to 2005, 2006, and we were reading together and we were having a lot of fun and like bonding in a way we never had before and around then I started thinking like, what would it actually be like to actually read all of those?

What would that gigantic story look like as a story and thought, "Okay, so this will be a big reading project "and a big writing project, "and it'll probably take me two and a half years to do, "and six years later here we are."

- Does it hang together as a continuous narrative art or is it too episodic for that?

- So when you zoom out, like I tried to do, when you see the big picture it sort of turns into like a gigantic more or less coherent story.

You can see themes running through different parts of it, and obviously it is massively collaborative.

It was never conceived of as a single story.

Not even the people making it have read the whole thing but also because it is made by people on deadlines all the time, like you got to crank out the next month's issue and working very closely in collaboration with each other, and also, not with each other, like across time.

Collaborating between people who have never met, who lived decades apart and continents apart, but they're all interested in what is happening in their world at that moment that they are creating these stories.

And so it becomes this kind of weird funhouse mirror cultural history of the last 60 years, and that's a story.

- And that really is I would argue the genius of the book.

How comics reflect the era and how you interpreted them, and what you wrote about in the book.

Let us start in the 1960s, when the Cold War was still with us, where the threat or fear or of atomic bombs was very much a part of the culture.

Talk about that era and the comics from that time, which again would have been in the 1960s.

- Yeah, the 1960s are where what we think of as Marvel Comics really gets started.

You know, Fantastic Four and Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk.

And these comics came out of a line of comics that was mostly or at least about half monster comics.

"Tales of Suspense", "Tales to Astonish", "Strange Tales", "Journey into Mystery", "Amazing Adventures".

These were monthly comics, and three or four stories in each issue, that were usually like some kind of monster, some kind of thing created by weird science or radiation or any of this stuff that people in the early '60s were terrified by and fascinated by, and these stories come out of that.

There's radiation in the X-Men's origin, and Spider-Man's origin and the Hulk's origin, like everywhere in the story.

And sometimes it's really pretty specific.

Like we think of The Hulk getting his powers from like an exploding gamma bomb.

We think of that, oh, like that's nuclear bomb terror, that's the early '60s, that's the Cold War.

Well, it's not just that.

It is specifically the end of the international atomic testing moratorium that happened just a few months before Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created The Hulk.

Like it is that specific moment and that specific cultural concern that turns into this myth that stayed with us.

- Was that in the minds of the creators of that time or do you have any sense of that?

Obviously Stanley Lee is no longer with us, but do you have a sense of that?

- There was always in Jack Kirby's work and Stanley's work, and Steve Ditko's work, not a sense of directly responding to that week's headlines.

Sometimes there was like something that was in that week's headlines, but more like they were living in the culture, they were reading the newspapers, like there were things that they were concerned about, and that turned into their art.

That turned into the stuff that they were creating.

Just whatever was on their minds and important to them at the time.

And that's what turns into the stories.

- In the 1970s you talk about the impact of the Vietnam War, spell that out a little bit for us here.

- So in the '60s, the Marvel Comics of the '60s there is this very big sense of like, you know, Go America, Gung Ho, we make everything right.

And as the Vietnam War progresses, and as America gets more and more uncomfortable with that, we see that play out in the comics.

There's, you know, when Iron Man is introduced, he's literally an arms manufacturer.

He runs a weapons factory.

And so 60 years worth of Iron Man comics are always kind of a moratorium on, a moration, 60 years worth of Iron Man comics are always kind of a way of taking the temperature of how do we feel about the military industrial complex at any given moment.

And so in the 1970s, you know, there are student protestors picketing Tony Stark's weapons plant, which is amazing.

We start seeing language from Watergate, showing up in the comics.

You know, we see Daredevil's, you know, cape, quote, "twisting slowly, slowly in the wind", just a little phrase from around the Watergate times.

We see like encouragement for 18 year olds to vote, showing up in the last panel of comics.

And we see characters actually involved in Vietnam.

We see Flash Thompson who is, you know, Spider-Man's teenage tormentor going off to Vietnam and coming back and returning from war tours of duty and through wars over the decades until like eventually like he gets maimed in an explosion in Afghanistan, that were like 10 years or so ago.

We also see like in romance comics, in the teen humor comics, "Patsy Walker".

Patsy's boyfriend goes off to Vietnam when he graduates from high school and then six months later he comes back, and something awful has happened to him.

And he is traumatized, he breaks off his engagement, he can't even talk to his girlfriend anymore.

This is happening in like the equivalent of Archie.

That's what Marvel was publishing.

And that is what the kids and the teenagers reading those comics were hearing about, and concerned about and what was gripping them.

That was Vietnam.

That was amazing.

- So what about the 1980s?

I mean, it's fascinating really to go decade by decade, but the eighties of course was the Reagan era, it was the fall of the Soviet Union, it was the end of the Cold War.

How was that... All of those developments, and there were many more of course during the '80s, how were they reflected in these comics?

- In the 1980s, there's much, much more cultural uncertainty going on in Marvel Comics.

You see it in Daredevil where suddenly like everything is just urban decay and shadows and terror and everything on the borderline between life and death.

You see it in X-Men comics where identity politics are becoming a gigantic thing.

Like this is a series that used to be like a school for superheroes comic, and now it is about cultural identity and where characters fit in and where cultures fit in, and what you have to do as a member of a culture if you see the world coming for you, and people like you and how to protect your group.

And then there's a moment in the late 1980s where fascinatingly everything in Marla's comics suddenly goes underground.

Everything that has been happening above the surface of the earth dives below the surface of the earth.

And there's all these significant stories that happen inside the earth or in, you know, a mythological underworld or under the sea.

And there's this kind of bubbling up of energy under the surface as the underground emerges.

And that all comes to a head in 1989 where everything kind of like bursts up from the ground, within the stories, and these are stories by a bunch of different people.

This cannot have been planned.

This cannot have been an intentional thing, and yet all of these writers and artists working together kept having the same impulse to suddenly have things erupt from underground, around 1988, 89, that's really interesting.

- What do you think that means?

What's the significance of that imagery?

- I think the significance is that there is a sense that where culture was happening was no longer in the surface.

There was no longer a monoculture.

There were people doing their own stuff in little underground groups that suddenly became much more mainstream, much more evident to the world.

Like that is what was happening culturally at that moment.

You also see in the 1980s, and especially going into the 1990s, this kind of doubling of familiar figures.

Every character gets a shadow self, every, you know, character gets a kind of duplicate.

There's another version of Iron Man, there's another version of Thor, there's another version of Spider-Man.

And a lot of that is about the idea that you no longer had to have a secret identity.

You no longer had to have a side that you showed to the world and the side that was your private self.

And how you deal with that when you've had that as part of your psychological makeup for a long time is you split, you have this kind of schism.

And that's what I think was kind of happening to the American psyche in the '80s, in the '90s, the sense like there was no longer, this very simple sense of culture that everybody had this kind of other self or darker self that could come to the forth.

- You know, what's interesting to me in this, and particularly I'm thinking about what you just said about the way Marvel responded to the Vietnam War.

I remember the response of the comic industry after 9/11, particularly after Abu Ghraib and some of the reports of American offenses in Iraq and in the war on terror, particularly in the Captain America series.

Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

- Yeah.

Immediately after 9/11, what Marvel's comics did, like what everybody did, was just being sentimentally concerned, like fight the war on terror, here is a flagship ribbon we're gonna stick on the cover of all our comics for a month, never forget, whatever.

And went on like that for a little bit, and then we started seeing things, getting weirder and more complicated.

Like in Captain America, as he say, like there are some sequences where, you know, captain America goes to Cuba, and meets with Fidel Castro and hears about, you know, CIA dirty tricks, and is really uncomfortable with that.

There's a fantastic series that Robert Morales and Kyle Baker did called "Truth: Red, White & Black" which is where we find out that, you know, the super soldier serum that produced Captain America actually came about through something very much like the Tuskegee experiments.

Yikes!

And that there was a black Captain America in World War II that we've never heard about before.

And there's this sense of loving America and also being really, really uncomfortable with some of its history and having to face that history.

And that comes to a head in the 2000s in Civil War, which was the thing that museum more or less adapted into a movie on the MCU, which is really about a conflict between Captain America as the spirit of, quote, "American liberty", and Iron man as the personification of the military industrial complex, and what happens at the end of it is Captain America gets killed, and oh, no, captain America is dead we'll never see him again.

Whenever you hear like, oh, this character is dead we'll never see them, you'll see them again.

(Jim and G.Wayne laugh) Like if a character matters enough that it's going to be dramatically effective for them to die, they matter enough that they're gonna have to come back because somebody is gonna care about them that much.

But for two years Captain America was not in the captain America comic book.

It was just about like what does a country do when it has been completely morally undermined?

And that's amazing.

- So that's powerful.

That is powerful.

What about today with the political divisions in our country, with technocracy?

Again, a different era.

How is that reflected in these comics?

- It is sometimes hard to see how the present moment is reflected in comics because we're living in it.

Like you can see a little later, like I'm sure, 10 years from now, we're gonna look at comics from 2021 and go that is such a 2021 comic book, those poor people.

Those poor people.

But what we've been seeing in the last few years of comics is this recurrent idea that the villains are the people who are trying to control the narrative, who are trying to control how history is written, the creators of fake news quotes.

Super interesting to see.

We see, you know, there was a big story that was again like related to Captain America a couple of years ago, about a fascist takeover of America where they promptly say like, oh, and there's this big lie about history that's been taught for the last, you know, 50 odd years but actually, you know, America has always been like our fascist state, Hail Hydra, and anything you've heard to the contrary like that that was just propaganda.

That was just lies.

Yikes!

That's terrifying and amazing.

And the plot that, you know, eventually the real Captain America comes back, and overthrows this and everything is fine again but that being presented as the threat, the rewriting of not just the present day but of history, that's amazing.

And that is in some form a recurring thread in a lot of comics of the last five or eight years.

- Wow, I think that really is amazing.

How have comics reflected in gender in American culture over the last six years?

And we could do a whole show I'm sure on that one topic but obviously there has been a change in the culture and a change in the comics that reflect the culture.

Talk about that.

Regarding gender.

- Yeah, and the easy and fast answer to how comics reflected gender is badly, but it's changed a lot, - [G.Wayne] Yeah.

- Especially in the last decade.

There was a period in like the forties and fifties where there were a lot of comics with women protagonists, not a lot with women creators.

And then there was period in the '80s and '90s, especially where like you didn't see a lot of women protagonists, you still didn't see an awful lot of women creators, and now that's really, really changing.

You see a lot more women writing and drawing comics, and you're also seeing a lot more interesting women characters, women protagonists.

I think for Marvel a lot of big shift happened around 2012, 2013, 2014 with the new "Captain Marvel", the one that we saw in the movie, and the new "Ms. Marvel", Kamala Khan, who's the one who is gonna be in a TV show next year, and she's a great character.

She is, you know, a teenage Muslim Pakistani American girl growing up in Jersey City, gets super powers she never asked for, like your typical protagonist and has to figure out like, okay, what do I do with this?

How do I make the world better with this?

How do I fit in with my culture?

How do I fit in with my family?

How do I fit in with my school?

How do I fit in with the superhero community?

And if this story sounds familiar in some ways it's 'cause it's the Spider-Man story.

But Kamala Khan is the Spider-Man or the Peter Parker for the 2010s, the 2020s.

- And what about race over the last six years?

And again, we could do an entire show on that, but obviously the culture has changed and comics reflecting that have changed.

Can you give us an overview of race in comics?

- Absolutely.

And again, it's a thing where you started to see things changing within the narrative before you started to really see things improving much in terms of who was making these stories, of who is telling their stories.

Still you get Marvel's first black superhero, the Black Panther in 1966, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee once again.

The first African-American superhero was a couple of years later, that was the Falcon, and you start seeing black creators working on stuff in 73, 74, Billy Graham was a drawing Hero for Hire, Luke Cage he was drawing Black Panther.

And again, you start to see more and more characters who are not the same old white dudes who have been making the stories and have been the stars of the stories for a really long time, and now there's more and more of them.

The point has always been to reflect the culture in which the comics are being made, and they've taken a while to catch up to that but that is the goal.

And it always kind of has been the goal.

And it's really lovely to see it being realized a little better now.

- And we've got a couple minutes left here.

I'm curious, is there activist intent in some of the storylines?

Are they trying to advance a particular, I don't wanna say political agenda but a particular kinds of things that we're talking about are generally progressive ideals that seem to play out.

Is that intentionally, do you think?

- Comic books, superheroes have always been political.

Always, always, always.

The cover of the very first Captain America comic is Captain America punching out Hitler.

- [G.Wayne] Yeah.

- That was Captain America comic number one published in December, 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor, a year before the US entered World War II.

Captain America was created by two Jewish men from New York, specifically as an argument to get the US to enter World War II.

That's political, if anything is.

And yeah, there is a lot of progressive ideology behind superheroes.

There always has been.

That's the point.

Making the world better has always been the point.

Occasionally you do see some reactionary stuff coming out in superhero comics too.

It is not universally the way it's done but it's always political one way or the other, and I think the best ones, the ones that we remember best are the ones that are politically progressive.

- We have 15 seconds.

Do you have a favorite superhero?

- Every single reader in the world.

(Jim and G.Wayne laughs) - [Jim] And yours is?

- What?

Oh no, I said my favorite superhero is every single reader in the world.

- [Jim] Oh, every single reader in the world, I got ya.

- Yeah.

- That's a great answer.

He is Douglas Wolk and the book is "All of the Marvels", and it's a great read.

That's all of the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about Story in the Public Square you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

(bright upbeat music)