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Recommendations For Classic Superhero Comic Collections?
mvdwege (243851) writes "Due to being in a relationship with a comics geek, I have gotten interested in the history of superhero comics. I would like to get a better grounding in the Golden Age (pre-Comics Code) comics, so here's my question to the Slashdot audience: what are your recommendations for essential reading? What collections/omnibus editions of Golden Age comics would you recommend?"
The Flaming Carrot
Dare I share it?
The hero of win
& mega-whisker chin
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Marvel Comics has a Marvel Masterworks line which includes a lot of Golden Age volumes. They are very expensive, but there are also $20 paperback editions that come out 7-8 years later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
DC Comics has its DC Archives program, but most of those never get reprinted in paperbacks and the program rarely releases much nowadays.
Also, something about this topic seems to bring out the stupid in Slashdot. No, Flaming Carrot is not a Golden Age comic.
Also, I'd like to take notes while reading those comics.
Which text editor do you recommend? Vim, Notepad or Emacs?
Superhero Comics existed but really were not as popular prior to the Comics Code... There tended to be more of the horror and shock type (in addition to cowboy and funny book types) which inspired the code to be created... Superheroes tended to be more magical than science based and more violent than today... (For instance, Batman had a gun in his earliest comics.) The Golden Age Spectre Archives, Vol. 1 might be a good start...
Boy did you come to the wrong place. Slashdot is all about calm and dispassionate intellectual debate about issues important to science nerds and not frivolous things like comics. Why we have never even had a flamewar around here!
Get DC++, join comics hub. Easy to get access to all the comics you could ever want.
My personal suggestion is to go back where the superhero genre first started. DC Comics released a Superman Omnibus last summer (http://www.dccomics.com/graphic-novels/superman-the-golden-age-omnibus-vol-1).
If you want to read about the golden age, Paul Letvitz (long time DC comics writer and one time President) wrote a great book entitled The Olden Age of DC Comics (Amazon)
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Oh please. After you've been a "grownup" for 30 or 40 years, you may realize it's overrated...
I'm not sure how, but I'd never heard of this "Comics Code" you mentioned in your question.
Wow! That's a hell of a story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Thank god that's dead.
Maybe not commonly associated with 'golden age' comics but published concurrently and extremely influential and well-loved are "Tintin" (orig in french, starting c. 1929) by Herge (the pen name of Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi) and of course, the hilarious "The Adventures of Asterix" by Goscinny and Uderzo (orig in french, starting c. 1959). Enjoy!
This is a great resource for old school comic books: http://comicbookplus.com/
I would head over to the Digital Comic Museum, create a free account, and start going through the public domain titles in addition to the Masterworks/Archives listed by others. The DCM will also give you access to stuff like The Spirit, Lev Gleason's Daredevil, Fawcett's Captain Marvel, Whiz (where CM first appeared), and Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, the golden age/western hero Ghost Rider (with the unfortunate outfit), and thousands of others. Follow your interests; the 1930s and 1940s were part of an era when superheroes weren't quite as dominant as they would later become, so you can find piles of romance, comedy, crime, and so forth in the mix.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
[Life and Death of Superman] - that's some classic Superman right there. Superman vs Doomsday is literally my favorite fight in comics that I've ever read. It would be wise to not forget [Red Son] which like TDKR tells a what if story, of what if Superman landed in Russia instead of USA. Maybe you'll have better luck than I did in finding [Superman: Blue] I can find evidence it exists it wasn't just a dream I had but I can't find evidence that it's anywhere. To be fair most people seem to dislike it based on the less than 7 reviews I've read but I read the back of the graphic novel and I was intrigued. The idea is that Superman doesn't have his powers and develops new ones. Instead of stopping bullets, They phase right through him. He's still invulnerable but it's harder to protect people when you can't be a body shield anymore....etc etc etc.
[Knightfall] - a fantastic Batman book that introduced someone more powerful than batman. There's [The Killing Joke] which if I have my stories correct is how Batgirl got paralyzed (sorry for the spoiler but there's a lot of good beyond that)
If you're familiar with Batman already then you can't go wrong with [The Dark Knight Returns] there's a reason it's so revered. Again not the typical Batman story but it's awesome.
Static/Static Shock - because that is some freaking hard junk to find. At this point I would literally pay for Static but I can only find the first run of Static first fun of Static Shock and first fun of new 52 Static. Those are the only ones grouped into graphic novels that I can tell. It's only made me hungry for more.
These are kinda the stories of my youth with the exception of Static that I wish I'd known about back then.
I know it's not golden age but I don't read much marvel in part because I'm still stupidly loyal to DC, in part because I have less interest in their characters and in part because I haven't read much comic books lately, but I would greatly recommend [Planet Hulk --> World War Hulk]. It's a fantastic story in one of the few Marvel characters I like. Planet Hulk literally brings a tear to my eye every time I read it. I heard it hugely recommended at the time and eventually I broke down and read it. Best decision ever.
[Identity Crisis] is a cool JLA story. If you've seen Teen Titans the show that'll help just a skosh. But it's a mystery and it's certainly an interesting one. It's been somewhat controversial in the comic book scene for reasons I can't reveal but should be fairly obvious in the end. But it has a lot of great comic elements.
Just another second banana
Have you tried asking your partner what she'd recommend? You don't seem to have the experience with comics to realize it, but your question is extremely loaded. There are so many threads from the Golden Age that you could start reading about and reading through a particular thread and it may wind up having no relevance to what your lady likes. Is she into Dick Tracy? Classic Superman, WonderWoman or Batman? Submariner? Human Torch (not to be confused with Johnny Storm from Fantastic 4)? If you talk with your partner about what she likes from that era, she may be willing to open up to you more and start to take you under her wing.
On the other hand... if she looks at you with a highbrow "you're not worthy" sort of look and seems to be annoyed with you learning this world, she may want to keep this world to herself for her own private enjoyment.
If you really want to understand comics, get and read "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America". It's a part of American literary history that shouldn't be forgotten, and is indispensable for understanding the evolution of comic books. And then get a hold of every Justice Society of America comic, omnibus, and reprint that you can and starting reading from there through the 60s and 70s related titles. You will never look at modern comic books the same way again.
http://comicbookplus.com/
You are all welcome :)
The Golden Age may be awful, but it's interesting to some people just because it was the beginning of the medium. The first movies mostly suck, but they're still interesting because they're the first movies. James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans" is an awful book, it would never sell if someone wrote it today, but it's notable because at that time and place adventure novels were rare. etc... etc...