Celebrating 80 Marvelous Years: A Review of Marvel Comics #1000

written by Al Ewing and Various
art by Various

I'm not the biggest fan of anthology comics, or of "jam" comic books which feature the works of different writers and artists crammed into one massive volume. Sometimes they work for me, and other times they don't. This issue, which presents a multitude of different stories with one story threading through many of them, is a little bit of both and in my opinion, at least it does manage to work.

Marvel Comics #1000 is an unabashed celebration of 80 years of Marvel's existence as a comics publisher, which started way back in 1939 when they were still called Timely Comics, and as a result readers are treated to characters who have appeared in the publisher's books dating all the way back to the Golden Age, with one-page stories as envisioned by top-flight creators, some of whom have never actually worked on a Marvel Comic book before like the incomparable Brad Meltzer, who had previously only ever worked for one of the Big Two, namely Marvel's Distinguished Competition.

More than just an anniversary bash, though, main writer Al Ewing, who writes the most content of the army of writers, uses the occasion to launch a new story, specifically one dealing with the mystery of the black mask, one worn by the Enclave who created Adam Warlock, and which may hold the key to the future of the Marvel Universe. As cliche as that may sound, I have to say Ewing does a fairly good job of selling it, embedding his underlying narrative thread in a way that doesn't disrupt the festivities happening all around.

It's hard to rate an issue like this with so much disparate talent on display, but I was really thrilled to finally see Meltzer work on a Marvel comic book, and on my favorite character no less, Spider-Man. I was also thrilled to see a number of other Spidey one-page stories, including a cheeky little comment on his origins by Into The Spider-Verse architects Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, as well as a much-welcome sequel/epilogue of sorts to Spider-Man vs. Wolverine by the original creative team of Priest and Mark Bright! For me the cherry on top, though, was finally seeing Marvel acknowledge, in a way, how regrettable the execrable "Sins Past" storyline was in a one-pager by the author himself, J. Michael Straczynski.

There's way more to the book, of course, than three pages of Spider-Man stories. It was really quite an impressive feat to pull this all together, and to weave a coherent narrative throughout all of this. Apart from Ewing, credit, I think, must go to Marvel editor-in-chief, C.B. Cebulski, who reportedly conceived this project, and the editors who pulled everything together.

On the downside, though, it was quite pricey and I can't quite bring myself to scream "it was worth every penny" but I can honestly say I enjoyed it quite a bit.

7.5/10