At this time of lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus I needed something completely escapist to read and also to take me back to happier times. This magnificent set is part of the 2020 Spring collection from The Folio Society and is a follow up to the 2019 offering entitled Marvel: The Golden Age – 1939-1949. Although I enjoyed the first set, what is regarded as The Silver Age encompasses the comics and characters I remember reading as a child, even if in the slightly later UK editions of the comics rather than the hard to track down American imports. As Michael Moorcroft says in his introduction

these new titles were hard to come by in the early 1960’s. Marvel had yet to have a national distribution in Britain. Two powerful and puritanical chains then owned or controlled UK newsagents in every high street, every railway station and airport. Other distribution through independent suppliers was patchy and erratic. US distributors frequently sold mixed bundles of American returns through UK distributors after they came off sale in the US

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Patchy distribution, usually on wobbly racks in obscure corners of the shop meant that sometimes an issue of the Avengers would arrive two weeks after the following issue had just appeared, leading to somewhat surreal story lines.

Living in a small market town in England finding these comics was a real challenge so I treasured the ones I did mange to track down but even then it was rare to be able to find all of a multi-part story. You needed a lot of imagination to fill in the gaps until the later UK printed licensed editions finally came out in the 1970’s. Interestingly the UK versions were larger than the standard US comic book although from memory not as big as the reproductions included in this book which are considerably over size. The original comics were 10 inches tall by 7 inches wide whilst each page of this volume is 13 inches by 9 inches.

The book itself includes fourteen complete comics ranging from The Fantastic Four number 5 from July 1962 to The Silver Surfer number 3 from December 1968 but includes several important issues such as the one illustrated above which sees the first appearance of Spiderman. Also making their debut in the book are Iron Man (in his incredibly clunky original suit) and The Vision and we also get the first re-appearance of Captain America after he was apparently killed off back in the 1940’s. The pages are quite heavy paper-stock and very glossy making the book pretty heavy. The comics are beautifully presented with black separating pages and the quality of the printing is superb.

The Avengers issue included is from March 1964 as this is where we see not only the return of Captain America but also another long standing character, Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner. He has been running in his own comic for decades by now, having been one of the first characters featured in their comics before Marvel even existed as a name and they were known as Timely Comics, but also had a habit of appearing in the comics dedicated to other characters, usually as the bad guy. In truth he is normally more misguided and misunderstood then actually evil and varies from being an antihero combating The Avengers and others (see below) to for a while being part of both The Avengers and also The Defenders which was a similar group of heroes.

Daredevil is the first blind superhero and here in issue 7 he is combating The Sub-Mariner but this is also a highly sympathetic portrayal of Prince Namor. Daredevil is a good example of Marvel’s creation of heroes with failings, in fact pretty well all their characters have their own problems, there is no all powerful hero who is just too good to be true and that is one of the reasons why I liked their production so much. That strong character development was unusual in the genre at the time and the need to have a back story rooted them in their environment and made them more than just throwaway ciphers you felt you could get to know them over a run of comics.

There is one comic in the fourteen selected that stands out as it looks so very different to the others, Nick Fury was written and drawn by Jim Steranko and this issue was clearly inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles. The artwork is completely unlike any Marvel Comic I have seen. Nick Fury completely passed me by as a youth so this was the first time I had read anything featuring him. This is much darker in tone and style with full page and even double page illustrations alongside the normal comic book cells. This looks more like an illustrated book in places rather than a comic and I really need to find more work by Steranko.

There is also a magnificent facsimile version of the first Fantastic Four comic which includes their origin story although confusingly The Human Torch had been a regular character with his own comic since 1940 as android Jim Hammond with his sidekick Toro so he was completely re-invented to go with the others. Number 5 of The Human Torch comic from 1941 is included in the Golden Age book and makes an interesting contrast to his relaunch as part of the Fantastic Four as the two characters despite both being called The Human Torch have almost nothing else in common. The facsimile (like the one included in the Golden Age set) is scanned from an original and printed on as close as they could get to the right paper. The one in The Silver Age is considerably more successful as the 1939 comic has serious ink bleeds and blurring which makes it quite difficult to read whilst the newer version is very clear.

All in all the unlikely collaboration of The Folio Society and Marvel to produce these books must be regarded as a success and I’m glad that both of them are in my library. As you can see from the picture below the first one has a blue embossed cover with red page edging all round in a gold foil box whilst the latest book has a red embossed cover with blue page edging in a silver foil box.

All images are taken from the Folio Society website and at the time of writing both books are still available and are priced at £150 each.