The Penguin Classics Marvel Collection presents the origin stories,
seminal tales, and characters of the Marvel Universe to explore Marvel's
transformative and timeless influence on an entire genre of fantasy
Collects Fantastic Four #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 48,
49, 50, 51, and Fantastic Four Annual #6. It is impossible to
imagine American popular culture without Marvel Comics. For decades,
Marvel has published groundbreaking visual narratives that sustain
attention on multiple levels: as metaphors for the experience of
difference and otherness; as meditations on the fluid nature of
identity; and as high-water marks in the artistic tradition of American
cartooning, to name a few.
Throughout the 1960s, the Fantastic Four doubled as the flagship title
and the creative laboratory of the Marvel Universe. Stan Lee and Jack
Kirby introduced dozens of new characters and concepts in its pages,
while expanding the emotional bandwidth and visual vocabulary of the
Super Hero genre with every issue. This collection gathers some key
tales from Lee and Kirby's lengthy tenure--from their first experiments
in generic hybridity to the remarkable fusion of the cosmic and the
quotidian that is the "The Galactus Trilogy."
A foreword by Jerry Craft and scholarly introductions and apparatus by
Ben Saunders offer further insight into the enduring significance of the
Fantastic Four and classic Marvel comics.
