Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of comic book history that interests me.

Last week, Zach Rabiroff wrote an excellent essay about his time spent reading the entire Marvel Comics catalog from Fantastic Four #1 to the present. It was really well written and it was fascinating seeing him hit various lulls in his reading, like his criticism of 1970s Marvel in general, "The lightness of the Lee/Kirby epoch had given way, by the mid-1970’s, to a kind of baroque complexity, the comics referencing themselves and their sister titles in an infinite regression of footnotes." Meanwhile, my friend Chris has ALSO been reading the entire history of the Marvel Comics catalog from Fantastic Four #1 to the present. Chris is chronicling his journey at his website here. Chris and I have a lot in common in our comic book reading histories. We're roughly the same age and our entry to comics was basically the same and, of course, we're both big continuity guys.

For people who love continuity, there's nothing more sacred than the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, the project spearheaded by Mark Gruenwald that launched in late 1982.

Like me, I'm sure Chris devoured all of the handbooks as a kid and absorbed all of the details (the Deluxe edition that came out a few years later was probably both of our first experiences with the Handbooks, though). They were an amazing endeavor by Gruenwald and the rest of his staff (his assistant editor, Mike Carlin, his researchers Peter Sanderson, Alan Zelenetz, Ralph Macchio and Elliot R. Brown and, of course, Brown's MIND-BLOWING work as a technical artist detailing the various diagrams for the series). Obviously, they piqued the interest of a whole generation of comic book fans. Soon, DC had its own version of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe with Who's Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe (by the way, I don't mean to act like this stuff started with Gruenwald. Fanzines doing this sort of thing had been around for quite some time. Heck, the FantaCo Chronicles series of Marvel "Chronicles" launched over a year before the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe). And in the years since, the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe has been CONSTANTLY updated (like the Deluxe edition I mentioned before) and, of course, the modern day equivalents exist in the form of the Marvel Wiki plus Marvel.com's version of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

So I am a big fan of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. So are lots of other people. Really clever, intelligent and dedicated writers continue the work of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe to this day. I appreciate their efforts a lot.

However, at the same time, one of the interesting things about the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is that, of course, there is no official handbook of the Marvel Universe.

There can't be, because there is no "Marvel Universe." There is a collection of stories by hundreds of writers telling thousands of stories over sixty years, but they inherently can't co-exist together in any true fashion. Zach gets to that point in his essay, as well, as he talks about how his reading got more complicated as it went along, "Greater complexity in the comics called for greater organization in my project, so more and more of my post-reading time became dedicated to the clerical minutia of recording and planning my next moves: keeping detailed spreadsheets of series and characters (the better to lay out the grand map of Marvel continuity, as if it were a thing that had ever actually existed in the first place)."

I added emphasis to an important point by Zach. He's right. There is no grand map of Marvel continuity, because it isn't something that actually exists. All of the stories in the history of Marvel Comics clearly exist. However, they just as clearly don't co-exist.

We would see that in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe back in 1982, where Gruenwald and his brilliant researchers and co-writers would take the then-20 year Marvel history and try to make it all make coherent sense and they did an amazing job. However, it was just as much of a fiction as any issue of Avengers or Spider-Man or whatever, because there IS no coherent Marvel history.

I literally have a column for JUST this sort of thing, The Book of Knowledge, where books like the Official Handbook, in effect, CREATE Marvel history by trying to make past stories make sense with each other. And that was basically FORTY YEARS AGO! So however long the "Marvel Universe" existed, we've now doubled that time since then!

A few years back, as part of her Allure cover shoot, the great Elizabeth Olsen did a video where she detailed Scarlet Witch's comic book history. Now, as you might know by this point, I know the Scarlet Witch's comic book history more than most. I know ____'s comic book history more than most, with the blank being pretty much any notable comic book character. And yet, while listening to Olsen read off the Scarlet Witch's history, I was struck by just how ABSURD it all sounded.

All of these Scarlet Witch stories existed, but they obviously can't all CO-exist. And nor SHOULD they. Forgetting the sliding timescale stuff like Reed Richards and Ben Grimm fighting in World War II, we don't need to be beholden to "Spider-Woman is an evolved spider" or "Steve Rogers was inspired to become Captain America by his brother dying at Pearl Harbor despite Steve becoming Captain America before Pearl Harbor."

So, naturally, we just pick and choose what to follow and what to ignore and that's great. That's how we SHOULD be doing things, as the Scarlet Witch of 2021 plainly is not the same character as the Scarlet Witch of 1964. It is not a matter of her maturing or whatever, the characters are clearly not the same, because almost SIXTY YEARS have passed. So we just adapt her history into a new, fictional history that we can live with.

The modern day Handbook writers, like my pal Kevin Garcia, do a great job with dealing with the many years of Marvel stories. Just last year, after I wrote about how Cap and Namor first met each other in the current Marvel continuity, Kevin told me how he put a bunch of Captain America Golden Age retcons together to form a coherent story and it was really clever of him (Kevin just mentioned to me that it was for the "World Faces Destruction" profile in Blockbusters of the Marvel Universe). But, again, it was Kevin coming up with a story to try to make sense of stories that did not actually make sense together. With an ever-changing universe, there obviously can never truly be an "official handbook" or a grand map of Marvel continuity to it, but there are still a lot of people who are really good at coming up with ways to connect some (but not all) of these stories in handbooks and comic book writers who can revisit these past stories and look at them in new and exciting ways (like a Kurt Busiek, an Al Ewing, a Mark Waid or a Fabian Nicieza). So while there may be no grand map of the Marvel Universe, it can still be a lot of fun to follow whatever map it is you have on you.

If anyone has an idea for an interesting piece of comic book history, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!