Marvel All-On-One Review

By | Wednesday, September 10, 2025 Leave a Comment
I'll have to admit that when I first heard Marvel was going to do an issue with nothing but splash pages, I wasn't keen on the concept. A lot of what I like about comics is the storytelling, and how an artist is able to break down the pages to draw the reader through a page and focus (or not) on particular actions and such. And while there is some element of that in giant, single-page images, I feel the focus on the illustrations over the storytelling to be less interesting. Personal preference on my part. So I was a little surprised when my monthly box of comics showed up on my doorstep a few days ago, and I found Marvel All-On-One #1 among them. I didn't recall specifically ordering it, so I guess my old school Fantastic Four completist mindset kicked in when I was filling my online shopping cart.

The story is basically explained on the cover. As the Thing returns home after a mission, the rest of the Fantastic Four attack him for no apparent reason. The Thing initially assumes someone's mind-controlling them but quickly realizes they're actually robots, allowing him to let loose without fearing of actually hurting them. He's then attacked by the Avengers, the X-Men, and pretty much everyone else in the Marvel Universe. Heroes and villains. And most of the issue is just an extended fight scene until robot-Phoenix drops the moon on the city, obliterating everything but the Thing.

At which point, the real antagonist shows up (I won't mention who it actually is to avoid spoilers) and the whole thing was basically just an elaborate setup as part of basically a real-life role playing game, and now Thing's wrecked it because he just spent the whole time clobbering everybody instead of trying to investigate all the intricacies and subplots and such. But the Thing thanks him for the workout and goes to his actual home, less frustrated than he was before.

Honestly, I found this just boring as all get-out. There was really no plot so the dialogue was almost entirely just catch phrases and quips, and while Ed McGuiness's art is pretty, the repetitiveness of page after page of splashes felt monotonous. I found myself barely skimming things by page 10 or 12, and when I caught a line of dialogue 40-ish pages later about a moon being dropped on him, I had to flip back through the issue to see what they were talking about because I had completely lost interest and zoned out by that point.

I get it. Splash pages are generally used for large, dramatic moments so if you want to do an entire page of splashes, it makes sense that you'd do it as a giant fight where every page is someone punching, leaping, flying, falling, crashing through something, etc. But the storytelling rhythm becomes absolutely static pretty quickly. Regardless of how you bookend the fight with story elements and use dialogue to highlight individual characterizations, it's just a 'song' that has a driving bass line and drum groove, but with no guitar solo or lyrics to any dynamism to it.

Back in the mid-1980s, Scott McCloud did a one-shot comic called Destroy!! in which he had a superhero go mad and just start smashing things, and another superhero had to come in to stop him. There was -- by design -- literally no characterization at all, just the bad guy yelling "DESTROY!!" over and over, and a quick explanation from a bystander telling the good guy "he just started yelling 'destroy' and began smashing things." Then it's 30-pages of these two guys hitting each other. That was more interesting to me than Marvel All-On-One #1 because, despite having technically less characterization and story, at least McCloud broke the pages up into various panels and there was some variation in the cadence and pacing.

If you're a fan of McGuiness's art, I expect you'll enjoy looking at the illustrations here. And because it's the Thing versus "the Marvel Universe," he drew all the big name characters. But I can't really find a reason to recommend this otherwise. It's not bad for what it is; I just think what it is isn't very interesting in the first place. Certainly not for a $7.99 US cover price. The book came out a couple weeks ago, so it should still be readily available at your local comic shop if you are interested though.
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