X-Men by Lee & Kirby (Penguin Classics Marvel Collection)

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. For the first time, these classic stories of some of the most iconic super heroes in the artistic tradition of American cartooning, to name a few. Throughout the 1960s, The Fantastic Four doubled as both 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 through to the remarkable fusion of the cosmic and the quotidian that is the “The Galactus Trilogy.”