Originally published at: Check out this new book about the man who read every single Marvel Comic ever written. | Boing Boing
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I don’t doubt it could be, but that’s crazy to me.
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Oral traditions make it trickier to assess, but it’s totally plausible that no one other culture has compiled a half-million pages worth of the same shared story. That’s a lot of ink!
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the largest single body of fiction mythology in the history of mankind
DC Comics might like a word.
Curious about that measuring contest too… I think DC had a head start and for awhile had a leg up. But I think in the 80s and 90s Marvel eclipsed DC in output.
Still - that is A LOT of comics. Did he have a cut off date for that?
This book might be up my alley.
There are probably other people who’ve read every single Marvel comic. He’s just the one who brags about it.
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I think there’s a worthwhile distinction in that DC has had its “crises” and continuity resets, while Marvel has kept the same story going, more or less.
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The best I can tell Marvel has written about 32,000 comics and DC about 25,000. It isn’t easy to get good numbers though.
If a comic has about 5000 words in it, that would mean that all of Marvel amounts to 160,000,000 words or the equivalent of maybe 400 novels. I don’t know of any series of novels that is that large. (Is the Warhammer 40k series there, maybe? Those are big honking novels too so they might have more words in them. Star Wars novels?)
If you were to compare it by information on the other hand, I would think that Marvel comics wouldn’t even come close to something like the James Bond film series, even if you had very crude metrics of information.
Does one count the NY Post as “fiction mythology”?
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Crazy! Though not totally surprising.
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I wonder how the Star Wars universe stacks up. I’d bet a few bucks there’s larger shared fan fiction universes, but I take your point. And this is just in time for the perfect Soltice gift for the comics fan friend in my life. 
I’ve never before heard exegesis refereed to as bragging…but maybe you were joking?
Well, there’s also Star Trek, which also spans novels and comics… 
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Seriously needs to get a life.
Of course, at this point, Disney owns Marvel and Star Wars, so it’s all the same anyway…
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Why? Because he seems to be enjoying what he’s doing, which seems to be reading stories that he enjoys and then writing about the experience. What would YOU suggest that he does with his time? Calculate actuarial tables? Beat himself while wearing a hairshirt?
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