Marvel fans, you’ve got something new to add to your Christmas list with the Folio Society’s latest release, ‘Marvel: The Golden Age 1939-1949’. Lovingly curated by Marvel editor Roy Thomas, this gorgeous collection celebrates 10 years of Marvel history with a collection focusing on the core heroes of the golden age of the comic-book titans.
While having a grand collection of key comics from the period is enticing enough by itself, what truly makes this set a thing of beauty is in the presentation. Arriving in a gold laminated box adorned with character designs, you open up your box to reveal a large blue book bound in screen-printed and metallic foil blocked cloth. In here, some of the earliest stories featuring the likes of The Human Torch, Captain America and The Submariner can be found. The comics are reprinted with a sense of reverence for the material, with all the issues building up to a classic team-up between heroes you know and heroes you’re not too familiar with.
The collection is a beautiful piece of art as it is, super-sizing these classic comics to give their old school serialised adventures a fresh life, whilst also holding a sense of history and time. The amount of care that’s gone in to both selecting the issues featured and reproducing them into a compendium that collectors will find hard to refuse. It feels impossibly pristine, and having to reproduce comics that are close to 70 odd years old could not have been an easy task, so for the issues to be as gorgeously presented as they are is simply a collectors dream. The extra icing on the cake is not just the presentation within the gorgeous gold box, but the couple of little extras that The Folio Society pops in for good measure. That comes in the form of a small red sleeve that contains a 64-page recreation of ‘Marvel Comics #1 and an exclusive piece of artwork by Marvel artist Marco D’Alfonso. The collection is enough of a treat for comic book fans, but to include these extra gifts makes this feel like its a collection made for the most die-hard of Marvel fans.
For those who are keen to add to their comic collections, ‘Marvel: The Golden Age’ offers a concise selection of some of the very best moments of the golden age of the comic book behemoth, right back from their humble beginnings, going into some of the most classic stories, namely involving Captain America across the period of the Second World War. It is not hard to see from this collection why Marvel has been such the comic titans that they have been since these early days. The stories are dynamic, the illustrations are exceptional and this set from The Folio Society celebrates the artistry from the early pioneers of the Marvel brand. It’s a collection that’s bound to make Marvel fans of any age giddy with super-heroic glee.
