Plastic Man Archives Volume One: Jack Cole's lunatic creation has recently been the subject of an artsy Art Spiegelman/Chip Kidd hardback appreciation. And as much as I appreciate Spiegelman as an artist and critical historian, I'd still recommend this basic collection of the character's first adventures any day. Cole was definitely an eccentric comics genius, capable of merging endlessly inventive cartoonery with wonderfully appalling ideas (check that story about the man whose hands escape from him). I don't blame any parent who came into contact with this stuff when it first came out for freaking out: no one else was ever so creatively attuned with the lighthearted grisliness of young boy readers.

Shazam! Archives Volume One or Two: One of the more frustrating aspects of Feiffer's original Golden Age collection was the fact that he was only allowed to reprint one page of Superman's greatest commercial rival, Captain Marvel. Cap had been in limbo for years, thanks to a lawsuit entered by Superman's owners that claimed he was a swipe of Superman. (Well, yeah, but wasn't Batman a swipe of the Shadow?) In one of those ironies that only could only exist in the voracious world of corporate capitalism, DC comics eventually bought the character - only to see Marvel beat them to the publishing punch by creating a new character with the CM moniker. Which is why our hero appears these days under the Shazam! logo. Reading these tales today, you can see why the Kryptonian's owners sweated: as written by Bill Finger and rendered by C.C. Beck, the Big Red Cheese's adventures are light and comically entertaining in a way that the Man of Steel never managed to be. Real kids' stuff - and I mean that in all the best ways.

Spirit Archives Volume Four: And for contrast, we have Will Eisner: who took the dark promise of early Batman and extended it into full B-movie glory. Eisner's masked vigilante, Denny Colt, is dashing and indestructible, but the world around him is futilely violent in a way that comics hadn't previously acknowledged. Produced for a comic book newspaper insert, "The Spirit" could get away with a greater level of ambiguity than more straight-laced comic book heroes; at their best, they create the same kind of mock adult playground that John Huston created in his movie visualization of The Maltese Falcon. Volume Four in the series shows Eisner reaching his stride just before he leaves to join the service (subsequent volumes in the series show the character ghosted 'til his creator returns: the Archives series hasn't reached the second wave of Eisner material yet). It's the place to start.