a journey to the ends of the biggest story ever told
"The superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are, [the author] notes, the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and growing. The Marvel story is a gigantic mountain, smack in the middle of contemporary culture. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. And not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing--nobody's supposed to. So, of course, that's what [the author] did: he read all 27,000 comics that make up the Marvel universe thus far, from Alpha Flight to Omega the Unknown. And then he made sense of it: seeing into the ever-expanding story, in its parts and as a coherent whole, and seeing through it, as a prism through which to view the landscape of American culture. In [his] hands, the mammoth Marvel narrative becomes a funhouse-mirror history of the past 60 years, from the atomic night-terrors of the Cold War to the technocracy and political division of the present day--a . . . tragicomic . . . epic about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders. As a work of cultural exegesis, this is . . . significant, even a landmark; it's also . . . fun. Looking over close to sixty years of Marvel's comics, [the author] sees . . . patterns -- the rise and fall of particular cultural aspirations, and of the storytelling modes that conveyed them. He observes the Marvel story's progressive visions and its painful stereotypes, its patches of . . . hackwork and stretches of . . . creativity, and the way they all feed into a . . . cosmology that echoes our . . . hopes and fears"--Provided by publisher.
