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I first read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities in ninth grade, in a slim Signet edition. It was 1996, 137 years after it had been first published, and I had very little in common with its first readers, who first encountered it in serial form. Many of them weren’t even readers, but listeners, a true audience. Someone at the corner shop would read the latest installment aloud to a group of illiterate working men who had pooled their money for the new chapters; a father would do the same for their children in the evening after dinner. Dickens’s full, urban characters lent themselves to caricatural illustrations, many of which are absent in reprinted editions. And his heroes and villains had not yet become icons. Sydney Carton was still new, as was Madame Defarge.
I have here on my desk six Penguin Classics editions of Marvel Comics from the 1960s and ’70s, all released in the fall of 2022 just before the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s annus horribilis. Marvel and DC movies are not yet dead, but the appearance of the series, just at the conclusion of the box office dominance of superheroes, suggests a key moment in a project that is now more than a half century old, one that stands at the intersection of commerce, pop art, and high art.
An undergraduate defined that project in 1966, upon Stan Lee’s visit to Princeton: “We think of Marvel as the 20th Century mythology, and you Mr. Lee, as this generation’s Homer.” Anyone dipping into these books has something in common with that student, but only so much. He read the work in fragile periodicals—now affectionately called floppies—and his comparison to Homer carried more than a whiff of irony. That irony was present, even in the 1980s, when I started reading Marvel Comics. In 1987, the publisher started releasing handsome hardcover “Masterworks” editions that collected the most celebrated stories. They were gorgeous volumes, but even to a six-year-old they looked ridiculous.
It cost money to read Dickens in the mid-nineteenth century, and if you were a kid, it cost very good money to read classic Marvel in the late twentieth century. The average Masterworks edition went for $29.95, $82.34 in 2024 dollars. But A Tale of Two Cities, now long in the public domain, is no longer a commodity. The best Marvel stories, likewise, are accessible in a way they weren’t when I was growing up. You can now buy dirt cheap monthly subscriptions that provide you a treasure trove of e-book versions of back issues. Public and school libraries are well-stocked with paperback collections.
But people still pay for Penguin editions of literature they can easily obtain for free. The books are handsome and comforting. Those uniform black spines elevate the work. Arthur Conan Doyle nurtured ambitions to become a great historical novelist, in the vein of Sir Walter Scott, and despite the massive popularity of Sherlock Holmes, he would likely have been surprised that his detective novels and stories would one day be more widely taught and seriously studied than Ivanhoe. Genre writers like Richard Matheson likely never imagined themselves as future Penguin writers, nor did Dickens, who died some decades before the publisher was founded. He was also a populist who had a firm eye on his present moment.
The biggest problem with a Penguin, or any classics edition, is its tendency to end discussion, its implicit request that you ignore a book’s shortcomings. I think of Andrew Davies, the screenwriter who has adapted several English classics, and who has often complained that students are discouraged from pointing out when, say, Joseph Conrad lets a scene go on too long or employs a plot device that doesn’t work.
On that note, let me point to a scene in Jungle Action #20, dated March 1976, collected in Penguin’s Black Panther. The hero has just defeated a group of thugs in a grocery store, and now the cops are on their way. “Sirens reach the scene as the quicker-picker-upper disposable towels fail to absorb the spreading stains,” Don McGregor’s narration reads. “But then, isn’t everything disposable these days? Toys? Cars? Buildings? Human relationships?” The Penguin Classics edition will draw several first-time adult readers to these stories, some of them influenced by their admiration for the Black Panther movies. Many of them may struggle to get through these lines and they may not be aware that even within the conventions of the superhero genre this is considered gloriously bad writing.
Is it still a classic?
Of course. Penguin says so.
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The word “classic” once had a very specific meaning, namely a text written in Greek and Latin during the era of antiquity. But the first editions in the anglophone world of what we now think of as classics were published in late eighteenth-century England. These were handsome multivolume sets, collections of English poetry of the previous two centuries. As artifacts, these editions have much to say about the era in which they were first published. At a moment when the country was solidifying itself as the world’s great center of commerce, when it was just decades away from establishing itself as the world’s great colonial and military power, these books, often purchased along with specially designed shelves and other accoutrements, were a statement of national purpose and identity. To own them and display them in your home was to declare a love for the English language and an allegiance to the English nation.
The Library of America, a series which began in the ’80s, pursues a similar project, but no one I know has ever read an LoA edition to define their role in an imagined community. Outside of bookstores, I have never seen them displayed at anyone’s house as a statement. The closest equivalent in early twenty-first-century America to those eighteenth-century collections of English poetry aren’t classics at all. They’re presidential biographies or popular histories of military triumphs.
Penguin’s Marvel series is more of a piece with classics editions of genre fiction, like the LoA anthologies of science-fiction and crime novels. It appears several years after comics studies has been firmly established as a legitimate academic discipline. Edited by Ben Saunders, a professor who began his career with Renaissance poetry, and accompanied by essays from several prominent scholars, the series provides solid context. The essayists avoid the pitfalls of fanboy discourse, limiting comparisons to Homer and defensive declarations of comics’ importance, anything that smacks of “This work is LITERATURE! LITERATURE! LITERATURE! And my ability to see that makes me superior to you.”
The introductions are more considered and more thoroughly researched than the majority of essays you can find in Penguins. The editions themselves are not as beautiful as the new Taschens—which are prohibitively expensive—but they carry the aura of gentility. And they force me to qualify my cynicism. McGregor’s strained metaphor regarding human relationships and paper towels notwithstanding, these books are LITERATURE! LITERATURE! LITERATURE!
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The Penguin editions take the comics on their own terms, even if they don’t wade too deeply into the controversies of production, authorship, and labor exploitation chronicled in Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story and Abraham Riesman’s True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee. More importantly, they serve as a beginner’s guide.
Saunders points out that Steve Ditko, who developed an attenuated and tragic style from his years as a horror illustrator before co-creating Spider-Man with Lee, is just as much an “author” of the character as his collaborator. “[C]haracterization is a function of demeanor as well as of dialogue—conveyed by facial expression, posture, and costume as well as vocabulary,” Saunders writes. It may be an obvious observation, but it’s necessary for several readers who have not been taught a visual lexicon, and who may discover that thanks to Ditko, the Peter Parker of the early ’60s is a far more complicated figure than the lovable heartthrobs portrayed by Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland.
These editions would not exist if not for the dominance Marvel heroes have enjoyed in our monoculture for the last quarter century. And just as first-time readers discover that Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are far more cynical than anything imagined in the most recent iterations featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr., first-time readers of these comics discover that the original versions of these superheroes invited more opportunity for interpretation than the live-action adaptations.
A case in point: Marvel largely stayed out of the Vietnam War in the ’60s for fear of alienating readers, but the effect of the war on Steve Rogers/Captain America’s identity is evident. By the latter part of the decade, Rogers walks around New York, a quiet man alone in a trench coat. There were World War II veterans who believed in America’s war in Southeast Asia, and others who saw a clear difference between the two conflicts. By staying out of the conversation, Rogers becomes a symbol of ambivalence. True patriotism is difficult, and Chris Evans’s version of the character never captures his melancholy.
At its best, these particular Penguins undercut that tendency and ask you to struggle with the work. The Afrofuturist writer Nnedi Okorafor, who has written revisionist takes on Black Panther in recent years, remarks on her own discomfort with the character. Okorafor is Igbo, an ethnic group in Nigeria that has historically rejected anything we would call a monarchy. As such, the mythology of Wakanda, a fictional African kingdom, challenges her ideals. She calls herself a diplomat, not a tourist, in Wakanda, and she implicitly invites the reader, presumably a member themself of a democracy, to do the same.
Marvel’s greatest artistic and narrative achievements in the ’60s can be found in Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four comics, which also happen to be the source of four of the worst superhero movies of all time. No one has successfully imitated Lee’s carney-barker narration, nor his story-telling innovations that broke the assumptions of the twenty-page-or-so comic. Kirby’s techno-modernist eye and arresting photo-montages probably can’t be duplicated in another medium; film adaptation may be impossible, Saunders writes. Reading these comics in book form, particularly Penguin book form, transports them into a psychedelic novel, a visual version of Lee and Kirby’s contemporary Thomas Pynchon.
In my own head, however, I can’t help but imagine a Fantastic Four film. The last comic in this edition was published in 1968. Let’s go back to that year. Federico Fellini, one of Marvel’s admirers, directs. Ennio Morricone composes a psychotronic score. Donald Sutherland is Reed Richards, Faye Dunaway is Sue Storm, Anthony Quinn is the Thing, and Franco Nero is Johnny Storm. Klaus Kinski is Dr. Doom and John Cazale is Mole Man. This is my way of saying that these comics are very much of their wonderful time, and these editions encourage us to think of them both as living texts but also opportunities to commune with the past.
McGregor, the only representative here of the rebellious, countercultural storytellers who emerged at Marvel in the ’70s, deserves a defense. These collections do not collect Steve Englehart’s Captain America stories, which firmly positioned the character as an enemy of the right-wing, nor Chris Claremont’s X-Men tales which closed the gap between metaphor and reality in regards to the mutant rights and civil rights movements. These writers were capable of the kind of goofy prose that only comes from youth and single-minded fearlessness. Perhaps future Penguin editions can give these creators their credit as well.
Canon formation is a never-ending project. There’s a good chance that readers of this site have read Moby-Dick (first published in 1851) but not The Last of the Mohicans (first published in 1826). The opposite would have been true in 1900. Industrialization, environmentalism, the rise of totalitarianism, and modernist sensibilities gave twentieth-century readers the keys necessary to understand Herman Melville. Likewise, our interest in these comics relies on our greater appreciation for visual language and genre fiction, as well as the narrowing gap between childhood and adulthood. Penguin does not make the Marvel stories respectable—they were respectable enough for Dylan-loving, arthouse-theater-dwelling undergrads in the ’60s—but it does remind us that they are vital.
Paul Morton writes about comics and animation. You can contact him at [email protected].
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