And he knew from superheroes, to put it mildly: He and Simon had come up with Captain America, giving Hitler a sock in the jaw on the first issue’s cover months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. With an earlier creative partner, Joe Simon, Kirby had essentially birthed the romance-comic craze of the previous generation. Jack Kirby was Lee’s senior and, unquestionably at that point, his superior in impact on the medium. Lots of things about the story, polished to a high shine over the years, are left out, most notably the genius of Lee’s co-creator. And so he did, bringing new levels of sophistication, characterization, contemporaneity, wit, pathos, and cosmic imagination to the business. But when his boss tasked him with writing a book about a team of superheroes to ape the current smash hit on the newsstands, DC’s Justice League of America, his wife, Joan, told him he should put it all out there. He’d even kept his birth name, Stanley Lieber, away from the four-color books for just such an occasion, preferring to rely on a pseudonym. Read: Stan Lee was synonymous with American superhero comicsīy his own account, Lee had previously thought of the funny-book business as a way to make a living on the path to writing the Great American Novel. It was, in fact, the fulfillment of a long-held artistic ambition. (Notably, when Marvel started bringing out its own collections of these stories in the ’80s-archival editions, hard cover, fancy paper, fulsome Stan Lee intros-it called them “Marvel Masterworks.”) And for Lee-at least the way he told the story-this wasn’t just hype. Lee himself-the only figure represented in all three of these volumes-was the most vocal proponent that issues like the ones reprinted in these volumes, of The Amazing Spider-Man and Tales of Suspense and (yes) Jungle Action, considered ephemera at the time, would go on to be canonized, not just cherished but collected. “With this classic take, the Marvel age of comics reaches a new plateau of greatness!!!” shouted the text on the first page of a typical Marvel comic, the words undoubtedly penned by the Marvel Universe co-creator/wordmeister/company face/pitchman Stan Lee.
#Epic books for kids.com skin#
Maybe let’s start with the one figure on record who’d been insisting that these books were classics from the beginning-though, to be fair, he had skin in the game. But let’s first dispense with the question of whether what’s called for is the wringing of hands, gnashing of teeth, and quoting of “O tempora! O mores!” or the jubilant acknowledgment of a birthright. We’ll get to the whys and wherefores of the particular selections a little further on.
#Epic books for kids.com series#
Last month, the “leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world” (language from the company website) released, in collaboration with Marvel, three volumes from what's being called the “Penguin Classics Marvel Collection,” featuring a hefty series of stories from the early days in the life of three Marvel superheroes: Spider-Man, Captain America, and Black Panther. Another Pulitzer, 2001’s fiction prize, went to Michael Chabon for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which suggested, alongside books like Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, that comics, particularly the branch of the medium dedicated to superheroics, were a useful basis for high-culture novelistic meditation.Īnd now, a generation after that, the apotheosis: Marvel comics have become Penguin Classics. That same year, this magazine featured a story titled “ Comic Books for Grown-Ups”-an early entrant in a genre of journalism so pervasive, it’s sometimes known to fans by the acronym CAFKA (as in, “Comics aren’t for kids anymore”). Art Spiegelman received a special Pulitzer citation for his graphic novel Maus, first published in book form in 1986. Mid-century-modern artists like Roy Lichtenstein adapted (okay, lifted) images and panels from comic books. Roosevelt in celebration of his comic strip, Bringing Up Father. George McManus received a congressional dinner and warm words from Franklin D. The slow embrace of the comic-book medium by elite audiences is a history with its own particular milestones, each marking a moment of sudden approbation by previously disapproving constituencies.
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