Marvel: Absolutely Everything You Need To Know

Barnes & Noble has an exclusive variant cover
that boasts Spider-Man.

   Marvel: Absolutely Everything You Need To Know promises readers to give them the complete inside scoop on the Marvel Universe. But this 240-page chronicle doesn't even come close to scratching the surface.
    Let's look at the positives first:

• It's a DK Book and they do amazing work. Their volumes are like museums in a book. If you need a guide getting around a city or state or particular topic, they are folks you trust to make sure you have arrived. 
• The illustrations are rather stunning and there are some really great factoids that I have wondered about for years and finally got answered.
• For someone who loves Captain America, he's very well covered in this book. The Avengers are also main features.

     But sadly, I think I have more negative things to say than good. 

     First of all, there's a lot of wasted space. At least 20 pages are comprised of splash pages of epic battles with no words. That really trims the book down to about 220 pages. I've read some books about Marvel that take 220 pages just to examine the history of how Atlas Comics in the 40s became Marvel in 1961! So a lot of history is glossed over.

Each 2-page spread looks like a museum display.

     Marvel has gotten a lot of flak over the past 5 years in how they have handled their properties licensed to other movie studios. I'm talking mainly about X-Men and the Fantastic Four. Both entities are virtually non-existent in this book. Wolverine, who was Marvel's most bankable character from the early 80s until about 2010 is mentioned maybe twice. 

       But I also found it odd that many of the characters that Marvel has decided to make the focus of their enterprise in the 21st century are for the large part overlooked. The In-Humans, seen as the poor choice to replace the X-Men, really only get 2 pages devoted to them. Ms.Marvel, Kamala Khan, only gets a 2 sentence blurb on the Captain Marvel page. And where the heck is Deadpool? I don't think he's in this book at all! (This book was found in the children's section, so maybe DK decided to tone down the violence. But it didn't read like a kids book!)

     The lay-outs are also a weak point. Several are presented in a pin-up fashion, meaning you have to turn the book sideways in order to read it. There's even 1 segment where you have to read the book upside down!

An example of the book's odd formatting.
I did not doctor this in any way.

     If I was going to give this book a new title, I would call it "Marvel: Everything New Readers Absolutely Need To Know In Order to Read Current Marvel Comics." I know that in the past couple of years, Marvel wiped out their original 616 universe in the pages of the Secret Wars. But it's not like everything reset to zero. If anything, it just molded the comics to be more like the Marvel movies and I think that's what Marvel and Disney told DK to do when crafting this book: only tackle things that are relevant to the company's plan for the heroes of the Marvel Universe.

     DK has rights to license DC Comics properties. Though I do not see plans for a volume such as this one, I hope if DK does produce a DC Comics version that the publisher will not be bound to Marvel's parameters. There is so many ways that DK can improve and if anyone from DK reads this review, I hope they will take this Madman's critiques and complaints to heart.

     An informative volume that focuses less on the company's illustrious 75 year plus history and more on the events of the past 15 years of their cinematic universe.

     Worth Consuming

     Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.