The New Yorker:

By publishing Marvel comics like Black Panther, X-Men, and The Avengers, Penguin Classics is pushing the literary canon into new, contested territory.

By Stephanie Burt 

In September, 2023, Penguin Classics, the venerable publisher of elegant Anglophile editions and portable canonical texts—Robert Fagles’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge”—released three books that push the term “classic” into new, contested territory: “X-Men,” “The Avengers,” and “Fantastic Four.” These handsome hardcovers, whose gilded edges make them look like collector’s editions of Shakespeare, mostly feature early Marvel stories from the nineteen-sixties—what aficionados sometimes call the Silver Age of comics. They join Penguin volumes of “Black Panther,” “Captain America,” and “The Amazing Spider-Man,” published last year. People who think of classics as time-tested pinnacles, books we read in school, or writings by long-dead white men, may be surprised. “A classic can only occur when a civilization is mature,” one dead white man, T. S. Eliot, intoned in 1944. “It must be the work of a mature mind.” Penguin’s first Classic, published in 1946, was E. V. Rieu’s influential prose translation of the Odyssey. How did Iron Man and Wolverine come to occupy the same shelf as Odysseus and Elizabeth Bennet?

The first “classic comics,” from the nineteen-forties, were canonical novels like “Moby-Dick” and “Ivanhoe” recast in comic-book form—prestigious intellectual property that was old enough to have entered the public domain. Superhero comics from that period, later nicknamed the Golden Age, did not advertise themselves as classic, or literary, or durable: they promised excitement, suspense, and adventure, right now. So did the first stories that bore the name Marvel Comics. The cover for Amazing Spider-Man No. 1 (March, 1963) promised “2 great feature-length Spider-Man thrillers!” Its splash page made the series sound like the opposite of a classic: “there’s never been a hero like—SPIDERMAN!”

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