Golden Age Comics Suggestions

[Jon Rock]

So while at a expo recently I picked up the Golden Age Marvel Comics Omnibus along with the Nelvana of the Northen Lights collection. I am making my way through these and am enjoying them, so I was hoping to get some suggestions on other Golden Age comic collections to check out.

[Tony]

The best of the golden age would be Plastic Man, Wonder Woman, and Superman. Also I really enjoyed Hawkman. Captain Marvel was good.

[mars]

This can be had for less than $30 and is really good.



I'll second Plastic Man, and while I haven't read them I've heard good things about Superman and Captain America (both of which have readily available omnis).

[FanboyStranger]

The cream of the crop is going to be from EC Comics, particularly Kurtzman's war comics. I love the Fantagraphics b&w artist collections, especially Corpse on the Imjinn and Williamson's 50 Girls 50.

Superhero-wise, the best is Jack Cole's Plastic Man. Fantastic work.

[day_walker]

Plastic Man and the Spirit, as far as what I've seen.

[The Lucky One]

Plastic Man and the Spirit, as others have said, are considered to be very good -- both have been collected, in full (Spirit) or in part (Plastic Man) in DC Archives editions that you should be able to get for below cover price. (Slight sidebar: Will Eisner, creator of the Spirit, served in WWII, and while he was away they had other writers and artists doing The Spirit. The first four or five volumes are Eisner, but after that there's a few volumes of fill-ins before he returns and takes back over.)

Captain Marvel is not to everyone's taste, but has a great sense of whimsy that many fans enjoy. His earliest adventures are collected in four DC Archives volumes called "The Shazam! Archives." As a nice bonus, CM's Golden Age adventures are almost all in the public domain, so if you have a tablet and prefer digital comics, you can download pretty much all of his Golden Age adventures for free, completely legally.

Captain Marvel Jr. goes in pretty much the other direction -- while CM's adventures were generally whimsical with a cartoony art style, CMJr's stories tended to be darker, with a more realistic (but gorgeous) art style. Some of them have been collected in one DC Archive, "The Shazam! Family Archive" (along with a couple Mary Marvel adventures). And again, the Golden Age stories are pretty much all public domain now, so you can get them all online for free, totally legal.

I'm a big fan of the All-Star Archives (collecting the full 55-issue run of the Justice Society of America), but the stories definitely vary in quality. (Especially during the war years, when a lot of the good artists were off in Europe.) If you're interested only in the peak, Roy Thomas (comic writer and Golden Age historian) considers All-Star Comics #33-41 to be the absolute "best of the best" of the original JSA stories; those are collected in volumes 7-9 of the All-Star Archives.

The Golden Age Batman stories vary in quality, but the first year or so (collected in Batman Chronicles volume 1) are really cool, even the truly bizarre ones.

Pretty much Starman's entire run in Adventure Comics (collected in two DC Archives) is considered great art and solid stories. Hawkman had slightly more uneven stories, but some of them were great, and he benefited from some great artists (Sheldon Moldoff and Joe Kubert foremost among them).