Marvel Entertainment has not been shy about licensing its backlist to partners who do prestige format reprints. Taschen, Penguin Classics, the Folio Society, IDW’s Artist Editions, and most recently Bloomsbury are among the publishers doing deluxe editions of Marvel material, along with Marvel itself. But one partner stands out: Fantagraphics Books, the quality-conscious Seattle-based independent publisher and longtime bastion of, well, everything that Marvel is not.
Fantagraphics has been working with Marvel for the past several years on a line reprinting the pre-superhero comics done under the Atlas imprint in the 1950s, and has one of the longest-lived publishing deals with Marvel parent company Disney for classic Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse stories. Now, Marvel has expanded that partnership to cover lesser known and previously unreprinted material from the late 1960s through the mid '80s, branded as Lost Marvels.
“Marvel was very happy with how we’d been doing the Atlas reprints so they approached me to see if we’d be interested in publishing some of the weirder material that wasn’t necessarily superheroes,” said Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth. “They like our editorial packaging, our production values and our marketing capabilities.”
The combination is a bit surprising in that Fantagraphics has, in the past, been a harsh critic of corporate-produced comics in general, and of the business practices of Marvel in particular. Unlike the vintage Atlas and Disney comics that date from an earlier, less self-conscious age of comics, Lost Marvels reprints material from the era where Fantagraphics first defined itself and its canons of taste in opposition to the kind of work Marvel was publishing.
“It is strange bedfellows,” Groth acknowledges, “but strange bedfellows with a purpose. People thought it was odd when we got our Disney license, but that was material that we wanted to publish and it has worked out well for everyone.”
Fantagraphics editor Michael Dean has been poring through the Marvel output identifying curiosities and overlooked gems to include in the Lost Marvels line that have aesthetic interest as well as commercial appeal. “There was a lot of oddball work, stuff around the edges that hasn’t been seen since it was first printed in the 60s, 70s, and 80s,” he says. “We’ll be looking at the color comics, but also the black and white magazines that Marvel was doing for a while.”
The first title to hit the shelves is Tower of Shadows, collecting most of the stories from a short-lived horror/fantasy anthology published in the early 1970s, featuring some of the best artists of that era. The series came out as the Comic Code loosened restrictions on certain horror and supernatural content that had been in effect since the days of EC Comics in the 1950s, and shortly after Marvel had obtained newsstand distribution that allowed it to dramatically expand its lineup.
The stories followed predictable genre formulas and were often used as tryouts for young writers like Gerry Conway and Len Wein, who went on to better things, but the artwork was truly the star. The first issue features one of the final Marvel stories by Jim Steranko, and is one of his most polished and formally innovative works. Other stories were drawn by a virtual who’s who of top American comic artists of the era including Neal Adams, John Buscema, Gene Colan, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Bernie Wrightson, plus old EC stalwarts like Johnny Craig, Marrie Severin, and Wally Wood.
The art is reproduced from files provided by Marvel, using original color schemes. The deep blacks preserve the quality of the linework and the color pops nicely on the non-gloss white paper. Fantagraphics’ production is definitely the best of the licensed archival Marvel work currently in the market, without the problems that occur when trying to simulate the cheap and distressed look of the comic pages too closely, or else recoloring and “remastering” the work in ways that destroy the original atmosphere. It’s a fine line, but Fantagraphics, which has specialized in this kind of work for over 40 years, knows how to navigate it.
Dean said a collection of early work by Howard Chaykin is next. Prior to, or contemporary with, Chaykin’s breakthrough on Marvel’s adaptation of Star Wars, he did a handful of stories featuring his trademark swashbuckling adventurers like Dominic Fortune and Monarch Moonstalker, as well as work on lesser-known Marvel characters like Phantom Eagle and Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. Fantagraphics recently announced the preview of this book slated for Free Comic Book Day has been canceled due to uncertainty around FCBD sponsor Diamond Distribution, which has entered bankruptcy. The full edition is still being published as scheduled.
Subsequent Lost Marvels volumes will include material like the 1980s run of Savage Tales, stories from Marvel science fiction titles like Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction, and action/war material like Doug Murray and Michael Golden’s The ‘Nam. Dean hopes to collect Chamber of Darkness, the companion title to Tower of Shadows, featuring a similar mix of horror and fantasy.
Groth also says that Fantagraphics is working with Marvel on a deluxe two-volume set featuring all the Marvel work of artist Barry Windsor-Smith (exclusive of his run on Conan the Barbarian), comprising nearly 900 pages over several decades. Fantagraphics published Windsor-Smith’s monumental graphic novel Monsters in 2021, which began as a story for Marvel.
