Comics as Books

I see that TASCHEN have launched into the fray publishing the first few Spider Man comic books as a limited edition hardcover in 2 states. There is a series to follow. In contrast to the folio MARVEL highlights version, it will be possible to follow the story from it’s inception for the first 20 or so issues. Thoughts on the merits of the TASCHEN VS FOLIO approach and is anyone familiar with the initial episodes?

>1 paulmoran: Taschen has already published a MARVEL highlights edition: 75 Years of Marvel Comics: From the Golden Age to the Silver Screen (2014). They also published: 75 Years Of DC Comics: The Art Of Modern Mythmaking (2010).

>1 paulmoran: The Taschen Spiderman is much larger in size and nearly 700 pages, more than twice the FS. Instead of a sampling of issues over a span of years from 1962 to 2018, Taschen has all the the 21 first issues from 1962 to 1964. However, FS has the facsimile of issue no. 1. I bought the entire first 21 or so issues when they were first published and thought they were great. I only stopped buying them when I thought, at 13, I was too old for comics. 56 years later, I am buying them again. I must be getting younger.

Marvel has also published a large series of hardcovers called Marvel Masterworks that collect the stories of many of their most prominent characters and titles from their inception (and also prominent runs that were particularly acclaimed). They used to do a pretty poor job of keeping them all in print (DC Comics did much better with their own DC Archives collection), but perhaps that has changed with Marvel now being owned by Disney (and thus having loads more capital). Those may be worth checking out, as well, as another alternative.

And then there are the Omnibus editions.

Book versions of comic books are typically called graphic novels and have been around for decades. Will Eisner's A Contract with God is among the first and arguably the most important of the early modern graphic novels. Taking old comic strips and printing them in book format is also far from new. It may be new to Taschen and Folio, but far from new for the industry. Some graphic novels are truly spectacular, and others are meh, but of course this is true for any work of literature. You may want to familiarize yourself, a good place to start is here
https://guides.library.cornell.edu/comics/home

I just received the Taschen Spider-Man and was very impressed. They have created a special paper that has the look and feel of the original "news print paper" without being as flimsy (and hopefully won't yellow with age as the originals did). However, the covers of each issue are on glossy paper which also matches the originals. They wisely departed from the originals by making the pages much larger so that the artwork really pops out.