Description: The Penguin Classics Marvel Collection presents the origin stories, seminal tales, and characters of the Marvel Universe to explore Marvel's transformative and timeless influence on an entire genre of fantasy
Collects Fantastic Four #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 48, 49, 50, 51, and Fantastic Four Annual #6. It is impossible to imagine American popular culture without Marvel Comics. For decades, Marvel has published groundbreaking visual narratives that sustain attention on multiple levels: as metaphors for the experience of difference and otherness; as meditations on the fluid nature of identity; and as high-water marks in the artistic tradition of American cartooning, to name a few. Throughout the 1960s, the Fantastic Four doubled as the flagship title and the creative laboratory of the Marvel Universe. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced dozens of new characters and concepts in its pages, while expanding the emotional bandwidth and visual vocabulary of the Super Hero genre with every issue. This collection gathers some key tales from Lee and Kirby's lengthy tenure--from their first experiments in generic hybridity to the remarkable fusion of the cosmic and the quotidian that is the "The Galactus Trilogy." A foreword by Jerry Craft and scholarly introductions and apparatus by Ben Saunders offer further insight into the enduring significance of the Fantastic Four and classic Marvel comics.Review Quotes: "There are many, many, many collections of Silver Age Fantastic Four comics to choose from, but the Penguin Classics version is particularly beautiful and well-curated, and it includes some excellent contextualizing essays." --Book Riot
"A groundbreaking example of comics representation in literature."--Publishers Weekly "Penguin provides introductory essays; superb analyses by the series editor, Ben Saunders; and extensive bibliographies."
--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post "Stories become classics when generations of readers sort through them, talk about them, imitate them, and recommend them. In this case, baby boomers read them when they débuted, Gen X-ers grew up with their sequels, and millennials encountered them through Marvel movies. Each generation of fans--initially fanboys, increasingly fangirls, and these days nonbinary fans, too--found new ways not just to read the comics but to use them. That's how canons form. Amateurs and professionals, over decades, come to something like consensus about which books matter and why--or else they love to argue about it, and we get to follow the arguments. Canons rise and fall, gain works and lose others, when one generation of people with the power to publish, teach, and edit diverges from the one before ... A top-flight comic by Kirby--or his successor on "Captain America," Jim Steranko--barely needed words. You could follow the story just by watching the characters act and react. Thankfully, Penguin volumes do justice to these images. They reproduce sixties comics in bright, flat, colorful inks on thick white paper--unlike the dot-based process used on old newsprint, but perhaps truer to their bold, thrill-chasing spirit."
--Stephanie Burt, The New Yorker
"As before, all three of these volumes re-present Professor Ben Saunders' learned general series intro which does an excellent job of succinctly explaining the rise of Marvel Comics and the Marvel Method."
--Forces of Geek