How many Marvel comics are there?

OK, so Marvel has been around for a long time, almost 85 years to be exact. And in that time we’ve been introduced to countless iconic heroes and endless memorable storylines. There’s a lot of content to consume as a fan and it’s only picking up speed as the franchise expands at an ever faster rate. 

The rise of the MCU has led to a significant increase in demand from an audience who would have largely ignored the comic books 15 years ago. Because of this, there’s been a boom in comic production, with more new heroes, villains and adventures being added than ever before. So with all this content being released over the course of 84 years it makes you wonder, just how many Marvel comics are there now? Well the reality is it’s pretty difficult to quantify just how many there actually are. It’s possible that someone out there knows the exact answer but it’s such a great amount that we’re going to have to settle for a rough estimate.

So how many are there?

The vast pantheon of issues is probably a lot bigger than you’d think but bear in mind, with over 80 years of releasing comics there. The first reliable source for ascertaining an exact number would be the Marvel comics app: Marvel Unlimited. The app gives users access to pretty much the entire library of comics released under the Marvel brand. The $5.00 monthly subscription service boasts over 30,000 issues for users to read, so if you’re interested in reading up on some Marvel that’s a good place to start. But does it really have every single release from the last 8 decades?

30,000 is a pretty sizable amount, but wait, there’s more! Marvel published an official index in 2009 and they listed 32,000 comics. Of course, if there were 32,000 comics 14 years ago we can safely assume that the number is much higher now. Especially when you consider the fact that investment in characters old and new has only increased as the interest in the medium has risen. We’re seeing more new issues and heroes now than ever before so that number has got to be way higher.

So we know that after 70 years we had 32,000 comics; how many more could have been added to the collection in the space of 14 years? Well, according to most sources and by all estimates we should be at around 40,000 individual comics now, perhaps even more. This number literally includes everything the comic company has put out such as the licensed characters from other franchises such as Godzilla or Star Wars, even the Alien franchise has been done in comic form by Marvel before.

From humble beginnings

It’s weird to think that it all started from a single issue simply titled Marvel Comics No. 1 and published by a company that went by the name of Timely Comics, (they wouldn’t be known as Marvel until the 1960s). The characters featured in that first issue in 1939 are still well known by most today, as you had big hitters like The Human Torch debut as well as Namor, who’s only recently made his big screen debut in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

The company struggled for a while with interest in superheroes waning, but as time went on the audience grew (thanks in big part to DC). Captain America made his first appearance in the forties, a while after that Jack Kirby and Stan Lee were hired and the rest, as they say, is history.

How long would it take to read start to finish?

Out of curiosity I tried to work out just how long it would take to read all of them, you know, for research. A quick Google search and it turns out that the average time to read one issue of a comic is about 11 minutes. So all we need to do is times that by 40,000. The answer we get is 440,000 minutes, or about 306 days. So if you’re hardcore enough, you could potentially read through Marvel’s entire library in just under a year. That is if you never slept, ate, showered or did anything else during that time.

Marvel continues to grow

Across these 40,000 issues, we’ve seen entire universes be explored, and multiverses as well. Estimates suggest that there are about 80,000 characters (including side characters) across the 161 multiverses that we’ve been shown in the comics so far. The scale of the Marvel universe is pretty insane, when you think about all of the content that is packed into this fictional world it makes sense that there are so many of them. It’s crazy to think how much further this world will expand as time goes on and the audience continue to grow. It’s been a pretty wild ride so far and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of it stopping.