Batman Archives Volume One: The earliest Batman stories are crudely drawn. "Creator" Bob Kane - like Lee above he's frequently given sole credit for a character he developed in collaboration with another (in this case: Bill Finger) - was clearly learning as he went along. There are times when his panels look like something a bored student might've sketched on the outside of his notebook. Finger's scripts remain elementary throughout, but the stories' background, shadow-strewn Gotham City, grows more elaborate. Like watching an old silent horror film (Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), you snicker at the dated histrionics but still find yourself remembering an image in the middle of the night.

Blackhawk Archives Volume One: One of the great comic book creations informed by an impending World War II (the other would have to be Simon & Kirby's Captain America), Blackhawk and his merry band of paramilitary upstarts were the creation of a comics shop overseen by Will Eisner (see Spirit entry below) for a then unique title known as Military Comics: war comics without a cape in sight. As rendered by Chuck Guidera and Reed Crandall, the Blackhawks were idealizations of the European resistance - though many readers mis-remember him as American, in actuality, the lead 'Hawk was Polish - and their brutish adversaries and double-dealing femme fatales remain unmatched.

Marvel Masterworks: Fantastic Four Issues #51 - 60: Marvel Comics has been criminally slapdash in its treatment of its legacy. Where rival company DC has been steadily producing consecutive Archive collections for years and keeping 'em in print, the House of Ideas has been much less reliable. Submitted to support my point: this collection, which is only one of two color hardcover volumes devoted to the line's premiere superhero series (the first covers the mag's first ten issues, leaving a gap of three volumes in between). There's a cheap pb black-and-white Essentials reprint series available, but, c'mon, we're talking about mind-bending, life-changing gifts here! At least this set or reprints is a strong 'un: FF creators Lee and Jack "King" Kirby working in peak mid-sixties form, giving us plenty of the impact-packed tableaus that made Kirby a comic fan fave. No one else has yet matched the man in his flair for rock-'em-sock-'em fisticuffs and magnificent, ludicrously over-elaborate s-f trappings.

Silver Age Flash Archives/Silver Age Green Lantern Archives Volumes Two: The world the Marvel boys imagined was a big brawling contrast to the line's Distinguished Competition, home to Superman, Batman and these two guys. The fifties era Flash (John Broome, primary writer; Carmine Infantino, artist) and Green Lantern (Broome again, w./ artist Gil Kane) were more cerebral comics: puzzle tales that involved a smidgeon of dubious science and villains who could only be defeated by the heroes' inventive use of their superpowers. But what really makes these two books so much fun today is the Infantino and Kane art. With their hints of retro sexiness (Kane, in particular), you can't help visualizing the artists sitting in a studio somewhere with an Ultra Lounge set of tunes playing in the radio background. Definitely period; definitely cool.