It was one of those presents that have impact far beyond the usual Xmas present run. In 1966, I received a copy of Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes, and it forever changed the way I looked at both comic books and popular art. Feiffer's hardcover, a collection of superhero tales from comic books' Golden Age (the 30's - 40's) was unique in its day. There weren't a lot of publishers wanting to focus on this still vaguely disreputable form of entertainment back then: closest you could find was an outfit called Nostalgia Press, which focused on reprinting classic newspaper strips (Terry and the Pirates, Little Nemo in Slumberland), though they would eventually hit the first great line of decidedly non-heroic comic books in the early 70's with a collection devoted to EC Horror Comics of the Fifties.
What made Feiffer's book so fascinating and so endlessly re-readable to me was the way he showed me characters whose exploits preceded my own boyish comic book reading by decades. Placed out of the fifties/sixties context that I knew so well, these four-color figures acquired a new strangeness (abetted, at times, by the much less sophisticated art that passed for acceptable in the infant days of the industry). In addition to the reprint material, Feiffer had also included a forty-page-plus essay: a breezy blend of personal reminiscence and historical review that, for me, was the first time I'd really come to grips with pop culture criticism. To this day, I know vestiges of that essay still linger (probably to my detriment) in my own writing.
Feiffer's book has been out of print for years, though I recently read that Fantagraphics Books is planning a paperback reprint for 2003. (Still have my old copy, though the dust cover has unfortunately bitten what-it-was-meant-to-cover years ago.) In the years since the book first appeared, numerous comic book hero reprints have been published. But with holiday giftgiving approaching, it seemed apt to recommend the pick of the currently available material. I had three base criteria for my list: they needed to be hardbacks to survive the wear-and-tear of decades of revisiting; they needed to be from an era that was as least as strange to a current young reader as the Golden Age was to me; and they needed to be good exemplars of the form.
Marvel Masterworks: Amazing Spider-Man Volume Two: I've already written about this book, but I couldn't omit it here. Lee and Ditko's hero remains unmatched in his inherent goofiness and self-pitying poignancy. Return to a day when high school boys were still expected to wear ties to school (unless they were an exempt jock like Flash Thompson, of course).
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