Suggestions for/Where to start with Silver/Bronze Age

Thanks so much, y'all are very kind.

Bronze Age? HOWARD THE DUCK, DEFENDERS and MAN-THING omnibii/Essentials, natch.

Ditko Doctor Strange forever and ever and ever. That's an epiphany I have every few months.

re: Bronze Age: Tomb of Dracula is worth tracking down, there are 3 "essentials" volumes that comprise the series (in black-and-white but it works great in B&W unlike some of the other comics catalogued in those sets)

Seconded. To be honest, most bronze age works suffers without even flat coloring. Colan's work on DRACULA is a big exception.

I've been reading through a few series from the start via Marvel Essentials over the past few years and I got a few titles up into the bronze age.

Gerry Conway/Ross Andru run on Amazing Spider-man was really pretty good, definitely better than Stan's last couple years on the title. This would be near the end of ASM Essential #4 and all of #5 & 6. The stories are fun and pretty key to the whole Spider-man mythos, but I really came away that Ross Andru was quite a good artist and a bit slept on compared to some of this contempories. Andru used some really interesting perspective and was really good at creating panels playing off that this was a super hero swinging on a line. Andru also has a really thick and dark line with very good detail that looks really good in black and white.

Steve Englehart's runs on The Avengers and Captain America are also fun reads. I also like his Dr. Strange which had some really good artists in the run. He also was the writer on The Defenders before Steve Gerber.

The Conan comics are also really good for the time. Dark Horse has compiled the Savage Sword of Conan into phonebooks, some issues of which have some flat out awesome artwork. The regular Conan title is reprinted with modern coloring, which at times is a bit much, but I think most of the original Roy Thomas wrote run is quite fun reading and usually has great artwork. Over the run of the two 70s Conan titles, I think pretty much all of the good inkers at Marvel got a shot at working on John Buscema pencils (including not your usual Marvel mainstays like Dick Giordano) and it is interesting to see how each was different and unique.

The first Essential Marvel Two-In-One is a whole lot of fun reading too, especially some of the issues Steve Gerber wrote. The Thing is such a cool and fun character in those comics, it's easy to see why he was one of the more popular characters of the 70s.

My cousin bequeathed me what I think was the entire run of Marvel Two-In-One, I remember loving them as a kid. I'll always have a massive soft spot for Ben Grimm. No idea where the comics are now, possible my folks gave them to charity while I was at uni.

Englehart's run on DR. STRANGE is underrated (though it got oddly truncated with Marv Wolfman stepping in and deflating it a bit, but then Jim Starlin comes in and goes SUPERCOSMIC with it.) That's in I think V.3 of the collected DR. STRANGE ESSENTIALS and is well worth your time. Ben Franklin macks on Clea! The universe comes to an end! Dr. Strange becomes a warthog! EVERYONE WAS ON A LOT OF GOOD DRUGS.

yeah, those issues are great - sort've like a cosmic tour of America - lovely Colan/Palmer art, too

I sort of want to read all the 70s Englehart. Incentive to get an iPad and one of those marvel digital subscription thingies.

Sadly, much of 70s Englehart is not on MDCU. :(

Englehart in the 70s is one of the reasons I'm such a marvel zombie. Great runs on Avengers, Cap and Dr. Strange.

have they done his Cap run in the Essentials yet?

oh yeah, they're past the kirby issues by now (i think they've even caught up with the few bizarre issues written by steve gerber)

Starting in with FF and Dr Strange...!

ward, do you happen to know which Essential Cap volume starts the Englehart run?

Jon, I'm pretty sure it's volume 3 but will check when I'm at home

Have always found this a useful site for this kind of stuff:

http://marvelmasterworks.com/

He started with #153, so you'll get about 4 issues of it in Essential v.3 and the rest of it in v.4, which goes through #186, which is right where his run ended. After that there were a few extremely weird issues written by a guy named John Warner (not much of a career in comics afaict) and drawn by Frank Robbins, before Kirby came back to Marvel. I hated Robbins' art at the time, but have come around on his dynamism since then.

Warner wrote a lot of stuff for Gold Key, and a few bits and pieces for Marvel. Quite an interesting writer at times.

LOVE Frank Robbins, tho' like many other Marvel artists of the period he often suffered wretched Colletta inking, which dampened down his twisted energy considerably. Frank Springer was a much better match.

Just after the Englehart run there's a great one-off issue of Cap written by Marv Wolfman, drawn by Robbins and inked by Kirby associate D. Bruce Berry, that's set aboard a plane.

I've been diggin this Bronze-age centric blog

yeah, gd blog

Here's a bronze age list, fwiw. I've tended to favour comics that are easily available in collections. Periodisation is of course difficult, but for my purposes i've defined the bronze age as beginning w/ Kirby's departure for DC, and ending with Kirby rejoining Marvel, plus the rise of The New X-Men, which under Claremont and Byrne in particular ushered in a new form of mainstream comics that decisively broke with the hippy hangover/psychedelic/counter-cultural classic 70s Marvels that i especially adore.

*New Gods, Forever People, Mr Miracle, Jimmy Olsen, The Losers in Our Fighting Forces, Omac, The Demon, Captain America, The Eternals all by Jack Kirby (p much all Kirby is ESSENTIAL)

*Howard the Duck, the Defenders, Man-Thing all written by Steve Gerber (one of the greatest comic writers of all time, at the very top of his game)

*Killraven by Don McGregor and P Craig Russell, Jungle Action featuring Black Panther by Don McGregor and Billy Graham, Power Man by Don McGregor (it is a fact of life that comics were generally more wordy in the 1970s, and McGregor was the wordiest of them all - so much so that Steve Englehart actually took the piss out of the way McGregor wrote the Black Panther in an issue of The Avengers. But McGregor was extremely sincere, and extremely dedicated, and his best comics have a kind of intensity to them that is quite unique. Sample before buying, maybe, but def check em out)

*The Avengers, Captain America and Doctor Strange by Steve Englehart (Whatever titles he worked on, Steve Englehart never seemed to hack things out, and given enough time he could build really involving long storylines. He was not always well served by his artists at Marvel, particularly on The Avengers - but his very best comics, a definitive version of Batman in a short run on Detective Comics closer to the end of the 1970s, had truly fantastic artwork by Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin.)

*Warlock by Jim Starlin (the ultimate 'cosmic' comic book - i especially love the issues featuring the Magus, a purple-afroed 'negative' version of Warlock.)

*Tomb of Dracula by Marv Wolfman, Gene Colan and Tom Palmer

*The Hulk by Roy Thomas, Herb Trimpe and John Severin

The Amazing Spider-Man by Gerry Conway and Ross Andru (in particular the long Jackal storyline that introduced The Punisher...and the Spidey-Mobile...)

*Conan by Roy Thomas, Barry Windsor-Smith, John Buscema and others, plus at least the first twenty issues or so of The Savage Sword of Conan black and white magazine, if only to appreciate Alfredo Alcala's insanely overworked rendering onto top of Buscema's typically refined pencilling eg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XHSQLhgZzK0/T6atFNUIyEI/AAAAAAAAAkk/kI2JKNnu_w0/s1600/Roy-Thomas-John-Buscema-Alfredo-Alcala%CC%81-The-Savage-Sword-of-Conan-7-19752.jpg

*Swamp Thing by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson

*The Shadow by Denny O'Neil and Mike Kaluta

*Superman by Denny O'Neil, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson (the first conscious Superman 'reboot', collected in the graphic novel Kryptonite Nevermore)

*Shade the Changing Man by Steve Ditko and
*Stalker by Paul Levitz, Steve Ditko and Wally Wood - an underrated, and self-contained, short sword and sorcery series with some very lovely artwork)

that shld be enough to be getting on w/!

had no idea Alcala was on Conan... I should really get one of those compendiums

Yeah, I was subscribing to Savage Sword back in those days -- Buscema/Alcala was an amazing pairing. I used to practice his hatching and crosshatching techniques with a ballpoint pen, page after page.

There was some really cool stuff in the Marvel B&W mags...Moench's Rampaging Hulk was very good, in a "Hulk: Year One" setting when he still had some of his brain cells and language skills.

You want to compare inkers of that time, those 70s Conan comics are the way to do it, as you have many of the better guys working with John Buscema. Since they are with the same penciler, you can really see the differences in their style. I know at least all these off the top of my head worked on issues. Oddly, I don't think Tom Palmer who did a ton of inking on Buscema on the Avengers did any Conan that I can recall (as he was in the middle of the big run with Gene Colan on Tomb of Dracula).

Ernie Chan (aka Chua)
Sal Buscema
John Buscema on his own pencils
Joe Sinnott (which didn't happen very much)
Dick Giordano
Neal Adams (& many hands)
Tony DeZuniga
Alfredo Alcala

I think that particular Buscema/Alcala story might be in Savage Sword vol.1 along with all of the early Barry Windsor-Smith stuff he did in SSofC. I'd say "Red Nails" and "The Frost Giant's Daughter" are some of my favorite comic artwork and I think would be in a list with some of the best Marvel ever put out.

I had no idea Englehart wrote the first post-Kirby reboot of Mister Miracle. how weird.

is Night Force worth reading?

I am oddly fascinated by the Baron Winters concept for some reason

haven't read Night Force since it first came out, but yeah, my memory is that it's pretty good - though i don't think it comes to any satisfying resolution

Five years on and I'm still working the angles on what I like and don't like from these eras, I still refer back to this thread every now and again but I'm very much in DC mode right now.

Made the error of visiting Forbidden Planet as I've been freelancing down the road from there and lit upon the shelves full of DC Gold/Silver/Bronze Age Omnibus volumes, boy are they handsome. so I caved and picked up the Doom Patrol and Adam Strange ones. I already have my eye on some more, yay financial ruin!

The only old school DC omnibus I've bought is the recent Swamp Thing volume, which in typical DC fashion collects almost but not quite everything pre-Moore (the early ST appearances outside of the main title would've been nice to have, but I'm mostly just irritated that they omitted the first Moore issue, which the Moore trades also did). I want to start picking up the new series of silver age LoSH hardcovers they're issuing...except that there's a gap between the last LoSH Showcase volume and the first of the new HCs which is only filled by a long out-of-print and stupid expensive Archive edition. Oh, DC.

Is there any reason why some of those DC Archive hardbacks are really expensive and some aren't?

I picked up 4 for £35 on eBay recently (Superman, Dark Knight, Batman) and I really want Challengers of the Unknown Vol.2 but it's like £80.

No idea. There's inevitably like one or two volumes of any Marvel/DC reprint series (among others...looking at you, that one ridiculously overpriced Krazy Kat collection) which go OOP and make completing the collection a pain in the ass. I'm at the point where I try to pick up new reprints (at least with, say, Masterworks and Omnibi) within six months or so of when they're published to avoid getting burned by that nonsense.

DC and Marvel are both bad where some big collection in a series will go out of print, yet this volume is not available and used market are crazy expensive. There are plenty of Omnibuses or series books like this in both their catalog and in some ways Marvel is worse about it as they don't have the back list warehousing like DC, which has kept many, many collections always in print.

Marvel has had much better luck getting the greater proportion of the old 60s-70s super hero stuff in reprint at least once, but they never stay in print. DC's reprint on books is madly inconsistent, but on some later modern series like Vertigo and others, they have been a big part of the the whole trade reprint business existing. Those series trades are why there is that kind of business now, as they kept popular series in print comic back lists going.

As a reader, the one that is out of print and insanely priced used is Essential Thor Vol. 4. That thing must have had a short first print run and it never has been reprinted, yet volumes before it and after it got a second print. The goofy thing has been going for like $80+ used for probably 5 or 6 years. Don't know if many are being sold at it, but it's one of the few Essentials that I don't have.

And worse on it is the Thor that it's kind of been reprinted around in color too. I think with the last Thor Omnibus that came out finally got it out as the Masterworks was two copies, one of which was also out of print and crazy expensive.

Keep an eye out for the Epic collections. The lack of rationale behind the order of their release is a little maddening, but they do seem committed to getting most of their main titles reprinted in full. Although that might mean waiting five years for them to get around to the volume(s) you're looking for. But I know the Black Panther Essential volume was another that became prohibitively expensive and they've already Epic-ized that material.