Fantastic New Reference Book for Marvel Fans
Want to talk about a labor of love? How about trying to catalog and document all of Marvel Comics’ graphic novels, trade paperbacks, prose novels, and children’s books ever published? That’s exactly what Rob Weiner does in this thoroughly exhaustive reference book. Over five years in the making, Weiner gives Marvel fans a one-stop shopping place for information on all of these books published through 2005.
As I paged through the book I was simply blown away by the amount of information inside. I had no idea that there were so many books out there. But of course, in the past decade, we’ve seen this trend towards preprinting story arcs of varying numbers of issue into book format. Comic fans are no longer merely collectors and some are not collectors at all. They still want to keep up with their favorite characters and buying one book every six months versus having to run to the comic store monthly is simply more desirable for a lot of people and for those people especially, this is a fantastic tool.
What I love about Weiner’s layout is that he didn’t just decide to list books in alphabetical order but instead he grouped the sections by subject matter or characters. For example there is a section for Marvel’s Superheroes with subsections for individual heroes or groups of heroes such as The Avengers, Conan/Kull, Hulk and She-Hulk, Thor, X-Men/Mutants, Wolverine, etc…
Next is the section for special volumes and series like the Marvel Masterworks and Essentials lines and Epic Comics graphic novels, followed by sections for Children’s books, Prose novels, Marvel/DC crossovers, guidebook and indexes and more. Nearly 400 page in all and it’s all backed up by a comprehensive index or indexes I should say as there are three of them: one for title, one for artist/author, and one for subject making it easy to pickup and find exactly what book you are looking for. There are even three appendices including one for all of the Marvel Superheroes game books and modules published by TSR.
Now if this were just a list that might be good enough but it isn’t. Once you look up a book, Weiner provides the artist, writer, year of publication, ISBN#, the issues the book reprints if applicable and a comprehensive summary of the plot. Now I don’t know if Mr. Weiner actually read all of these books but it doesn’t really matter…there is a wealth of information here that is indispensable for Marvel fans. Extraordinarily researched and meticulously laid out, the book is well worth the $49.95 price tag.
