The Four Color Media Monitor

The Savannah Morning News wrote another report on author Wolk's All of the Marvels, the book making no distinction between pre-and-post 2000 publications, in preparation for a local book festival. It begins with:

Marvel superhero movies have been dominating the box office for over a decade, which seems like a minor miracle considering that the cinematic universe has ballooned into over two dozen interconnected films and television shows. For someone who might be thinking about just now getting into the Marvel movies, but are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of content to consume, imagine if they tried to read the comic books that they are based on.

Well maybe that's why it'd be better if they avoided much of what came after 2000, because it's so flooded with political correctness or just totally pointless, there's no use reading any of that. Next:

“My kid and I read some stuff at the beginning chronologically, and then we both realized it’s so much more fun to jump around,” said Wolk. “I grazed. I read whatever I felt like on whatever given day. I had a spreadsheet downloaded from mikesamazingworld.com.

“Near the end of the process I realized that there were some chunks on the spreadsheet that I had been avoiding which is how I ended up locking myself in an apartment for eleven days with a case of protein drinks and 30 years worth of 'The Punisher.'”

Which, as noted earlier, he declared the least favorite of his reads, and it's enough to wonder just how political Wolk became when he got around to looking over Frank Castle's tales. The article then proceeds to tell the following:

As popular as American superhero comic books are, there is no denying the explosion of Japanese manga in the U.S. Go into any Barnes & Noble and you will notice that the manga shelves are larger than most other sections in the store.

Wolk’s son is currently reading manga like "One Piece" and "Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure," when he’s not diving into superhero books.

“Manga series tend to be real linear,” explained Wolk. “There is this one, and it’s the one thing, and you read it in sequence and people try to map that onto the Marvel story, which doesn’t work that way. It is a grid, you can come in at any point, you can find your way, you can go backwards, forwards, sideways, whatever. It’s not like there’s a single, specific order to read. It just works differently which is one of its strengths and also one for the things that, honestly, scares people off from it sometimes.”

Yet he makes no committed effort to critique what went wrong with Marvel by the time he got around to writing about his experiences in reading their past archives. And why say superhero comics from the USA are still popular without providing any concrete sales research to back it up? Besides, doesn't the size of the manga supply at Barnes & Noble make clear their claim is hugely exaggerated?

After reading 27,000 issues, Wolk struggled to assemble his ideas into a book. It took him scrapping 85% of his first draft to find the right voice. “It was me talking to the inside my head,” said Wolk. “It was not entertaining. It did not communicate.

And neither does he. Wolk wouldn't take an objective approach to reading stuff like the company wide crossovers that plunged to a serious low with Avengers: Disassembled, House of M and Civil War, not to mention Secret Empire from 5 years ago. That's why he so hugely disappoints.

“What I realized I really wanted to be was a tour guide. To be somebody who could show, not really what I thought was closest to my heart, but how to find the stuff that is closest to their heart. That was when it all clicked for me.”

Wolk takes readers on a guided tour of the Marvel Universe, pointing out interesting story arcs, historical or political context, an artist’s stylistic evolution, or even in the case of "Master of Kung-Fu" in the seventies, the importance of the letters section in addressing woeful stereotypes.

It's one thing to take a tour, but another not to approach the subject matter objectively, and if he's sugarcoating the crossovers, in example, he isn't going about this with objectivity. But it won't be a shock if he downplays any bad liberal politics in any of the books he read.

For Wolk, every issue, good or bad, holds some creative value.

“This is Stockholm Syndrome talking, but after a little while I really started to enjoy the bad comics, too,” said Wolk. “Things where the craft failed, or where there was something that didn’t work on a creative level or a craft level, it was bad in a way that said so much about its historical moment that was an absolute blast. Or there might be a particular detail of what an artist would do or what a writer would do, even what a letterer or colorist would do, or one particular character would do that is totally them. That is cool to see. That’s cool to recognize. I had so much fun. Maybe it’s the particular weird way my brain works. The good stuff I could enjoy on the level of “Wow, that’s cool’ and the bad stuff I could go, ‘This is awful, but it is really interesting!’.”

In a sense, he sure did enjoy bad tales, if Brian Bendis-penned stories went by without a whisper of complaint. Let's remember, Wolk was reading Marvel books until about 2017, so if he wouldn't at least draw the line there, then again, he's really disappointed.

“I am a writer, I am a word person, I often think in terms of narrative and story and language, but I also think that is a reductive way of looking at comics,” said Wolk. “I trained myself to think of them more visually and that’s been really rewarding. I think in the book I maybe err on the side of being too much about narrative, too much about what is happening in the story rather than how it is happening and how it is shown. The beauty of comics specifically, the thing they do that movies and television don’t is that images come from a particular person’s eye and hand. You are seeing an artist’s sensibility in every line and that’s amazing.”

If he's got no complaints about how far Marvel fell in artistic quality in over the past 20 years, he's being more reductive than he admits. And he doesn't think of them more artistically, if he took a superficial view on the visual side. Too much about narrative and happenings indeed. This is such a joke. It's one thing to talk about history. But Wolk's proven yet another liberal propagandist who won't discuss the artistic side or merit of the books he's read through. All that refusal to look at them through a meaty lens just makes him look like another somebody who won't step out of the line drawn in the sand by the establishment. No wonder Mary Jane Watson suffered so badly from misuse as a character in nearly 12 years after One More Day.

Labels: conventions, crossoverloading, history, manga and anime, marvel comics, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, sales