The Essential Marvel Essentials // Comic History 101

Before the era of easy comic archives through services like Marvel Unlimited and DC Universe, much less digital purchasing platforms like Comixology, it was remarkably hard to find comic back issues. For a kid just starting out reading comics in the 1990s, there was a nigh-unbroken string of comics stretching back into the 60s when it came to Marvel. DC was less dense, as their connective tissue was being re-told after the Crisis rebooted their universe. It was nothing short of daunting, especially when creative teams on comics would pull weird tricks like bringing back the Clone of Spider-Man from the 1970s, or editorial boxes mentioning we had to go buy an issue from over 20 years ago to figure out the weird plot twist in this month’s X-Men. That isn’t to say that Marvel didn’t try, though.

Marvel Saga was the first attempt from Marvel Comics to put out any kind of historical document to their history that modern fans could collect. Framed as the Watcher explaining the history of the Marvel Universe, Marvel Saga premiered in 1985 as a monthly series that would re-tell all of Marvel’s history in chunks that would side-step the fact that the books had been running for almost 25 years now. First issue, for example, touches upon the insanity that is the Celestials, Inhumans, and Eternals… before diving into how the Fantastic Four came into being. The book was constructed out of panels from comics published at the dawn of Marvel, with joining narration to fill in the gaps and some new art where the original couldn’t be drawn from. The overall content feels incoherent to someone unfamiliar with the source material, but helps draw Marvel as close together as possible for someone who wasn’t reading Marvel at the time.

For over a decade, this was how Marvel fans could experience legendary stories:

Unfortunately, despite going completely scattershot throughout the years of Marvel, it barely only scratched the 70s with most of the issues. Issue 22, released in September of 1987, would make it to then-modern times, as it covered the history of Mary Jane Watson and Peter Parker to hype up the marriage happening in Amazing Spider-Man that month. With 24 other issues dedicated to Marvel History, though, the final issue just… gave up, and gave breakneck summaries that only vaguely touched upon major histories.

Rather than shelve the concept, though, Marvel would bring a pair of four-issue mini-series for their most popular characters. Wolverine Saga would hit in 1989 and Spider-Man Saga would follow in 1991. Both would be more prose-concentrated, but would summarize the characters and what we knew about them up to that point. 

The Official Marvel Index was another series format that, starting in the 1970s, would be released once in a while to cover the history of a key character or team. However, these would only contain cover art and a brief summary for fans to dream about the content held within. Regardless, the vast archive Marvel had was still out of reach for most casual fans.

Sure, you could go out of your way to a local comic shop and dive through their back issue bins in order to pick up an old comic or three. Sometimes, you’d find a rare or great issue for cover price, but you could pay up to ten times the cover price just to add an issue from a well-known creator! God help you if you wanted to collect a classic story line like the Dark Phoenix Saga or The Kree-Skrull War. 

It should be said that you would also see some rare releases of graphic novels, starting with the late-1980s, and a 1970s deal with Pocket Books would see some digest-scaled releases of Marvel content. If you were lucky, one of the larger anniversaries could bring about a reprint of a great issue, or your hero could have a series like Classic X-Men or Marvel Tales Starring Spider-Man to reprint content from decades ago. However, the Pocket deal fell through after a year or two, and the graphic novels only collected those larger or critically lauded storylines… and the two reprint comics were eventually cancelled as well.

Then, finally, someone within Marvel had an idea. Rather than re-releasing comics, or selling high-priced premium content… what if they crammed as many issues as possible onto cheap paper with spines the size of a major metropolitan phone book?

Well, now. That could be something. Enter: Marvel Essentials.

Released in late 1996, Marvel focused on their top names for their first volumes. X-Men and Wolverine are the first two volumes ever released in this black and white format, while the Amazing Spider-Man would join in two months by December 1996. While black and white comic collections weren’t anything new, it was somewhat unique that color comics were being collected in black and white for the first possible time. Usually, it was the other way around, with black and white books being colored in for bound releases.

Paper quality was remarkably rough at the time, basically little better than the newsprint that had been used for comics in the 1980s. People likened them to phone books, but the paper was much thicker than the easily-ripped phone book paper. However, the covers were remarkably snazzy, with new art from a lot of the popular artists of the day, and a unified design at the time. They also contained over 500 pages of comics within them!

The Essential X-Men volume 1, for example, covered the 1975 special Giant-Size X-Men, as well as Uncanny X-Men issues 94-119, featuring such seminal events as Jean Grey becoming the Phoenix. The Essential Wolverine volume 1 covered the first 23 issues of his 1988 solo series, being the latest content used for quite some time by the Essential series. Finally, The Essential Amazing Spider-Man would contain Amazing Fantasy issue 15’s origin story, as well as the first 20 issues of the main comic, and the first annual. Since these massive tomes of comic lore retailed for between $10 and $16 USD, this was a massive steal. In fact, they proved massively successful, but did have their own problems as well.

Early volumes of The Essential X-Men, particularly my own personal copy of volume 2, had some weird quality issues. For instance, several lines of dialogue were missing from The Days of Future Past storyline despite the dialogue balloon being blatantly present… or the comic itself used incomplete cover art.

I did wind up printing off and taping in the proper text. It irked me a lot at the time.

Other early volumes would have annuals or issues included that would be considered out of order from the official canon, and would be corrected in later re-printings. For example, volume 3 of The Essential X-Men would have annuals 3 and 4 later removed, and replaced with annual 6, as well as Avengers annual 10. Annuals 3 and 4 would instead be reprinted in volume 2’s re-prints. This can make things a complete headache for anyone trying to collect these books, especially since it’s remarkably easy to miss content with a reprinting!

Oh, and each reprinting could introduce new covers or spines, resulting in a collection that could madden those with particular tastes.

These are both The Essential Wolverine Volume 1. My entire collection of these is littered with these differences.

Of course, the black and white process was also imperfect. While we don’t know how Marvel did it these days, it’s likely they scanned in their archived volumes to be color-corrected digitally. As such, some of the pages can seem remarkably dark or washed out depending on the editor. 

The Essential Avengers Volume 4, second format. Covers in this volume and release were often semi-greyscale, while comic pages were not.

It also has the issue of leaving pages of spectacle and amazement feeling downright bland and plain. This is to be expected when dealing with the reduction of a format from multiple colors down to shades of grey, but it does lose some of the magic here.

The Essential Avengers Volume 7 vs The Avengers 141

However, even with these problems, Marvel Essentials was still the best way to find and read obscure content. Ever want to dive deep into Howard the Duck, but comic piracy still wasn’t a thing in 2002? Well, Marvel put out a massive tome of almost 600 pages that contained content from 1973 and his introduction up through 1978, basically collecting creator Steve Gerber’s entire written work for the character.

What about Godzilla, with Herb Trimpe’s seminal bonkers storyline? 2006 had Marvel bringing that back, thanks to some licensing voodoo. Sure, the art was in black and white, but the chaos and insanity remained. Luckily, none of the other licensed characters had to have their names changed in this reprint!

This wasn’t the same for all licensed characters in these books, though. Any references to ROM: Spaceknight throughout the Essential volumes had to be ditched, as well as any issues that guest-starred licensed characters like Doc Savage.

What made it easier to digest Marvel history is that these volumes would also include any tie-in issues as well. Did Captain Marvel cross over with Iron Man issue 55? That can be found in The Essential Captain Marvel volume 2! Did a Defenders storyline cross over with an Avengers annual, Marvel Team-Up, and a book name change? That’s found in The Essential Defenders volume 6! Suddenly, any kid on the playground could read about Marvel history on more than just the back of a trading card or contained within an editor’s note.

In fact, this archival printing would prove so popular that DC would release their own take on this concept. 

Called Showcase Presents, DC would release these around 2006, but how much content they covered would vary between lines. The Legion of Super-Heroes would focus on the Silver-Age Legion content from the 1950s, while The All-Star Squadron used the volume from the 1980s that was crammed full of editorial notes about the World War II incarnation of the book. Characters like Batman also arbitrarily started from the mid-60s rather than the Golden Age, with little rhyme or reason. I have a few of these volumes, and while the paper quality is better than that of the Marvel Essential line, it would also be a slightly more expensive line as well. Batman would actually have the most at six volumes of content before the line was essentially cancelled in 2013 with no inexpensive release format to follow.

Marvel would release dozens of volumes in this line, with hundreds of Marvel comics becoming available for modern readers in an affordable format. However, like with the Showcase Presents comics above, The Essential line would not last forever. The costs of printing would fall, and Marvel would eventually want a more unified way to present older content at a lowish price. And so, in 2013 as well, Marvel would cancel the Essential line of books. Instead, Marvel would come out with the Epic Collection line.

Marvel’s Epic Collections line would actually have a numbered release, though the books themselves would jump around in release order. However, even if Iron Man volume 10 came out first, followed by Thor volume 16 the next month, fans could at least rest assured that eventually Marvel would release volumes to fill the missing numbers in those collections. At least, that’s been the plan. The initial collections would focus on popular storylines to hype up the collection, and they were printed with fantastic quality on better paper than The Essential line had been. These new tomes also contained a similar number of pages to the old Essential line, making it easier to stomach the $30 to $40 price point.

However, there’s still something magical about those black and white prints. Maybe it’s the fact that the pulp Marvel comics were finally released on a visual medium that matched the storytelling and art. Maybe it’s the fact that comics history was slapped into the hands of fans for what could be a kid’s weekly allowance. Or maybe it’s the fact that you could buy over 10 years of comic history for under the price of an issue of Uncanny X-Men 137 on the secondary market.

There’s about a hundred volumes, and varieties, out there these days. Some are pricey as hell, but others are dirt cheap. In my experience, the following volumes are fantastic to grab if you can:

The Essential Amazing Spider-Man volume 1. This is where the some of the best of Marvel began, and the stark black and white delivery fits Steve Ditko’s art wonderfully.

The Essential Amazing Spider-Man volume 6. This volume covers most of Len Wein’s run on Spidey, including the set up and delivery for The Night Gwen Stacy Died. Fantastic comics contained within.

The Essential Captain America volume 4. This massive volume contains 600 pages of Steve Engehart’s run on Captain America. This also includes the original, legendary Secret Empire storyline where Richard Nixon tries to stage a coup over the United States of America. Cap also becomes Nomad temporarily, and we see why Cap’s costumes have never had a cape before or since.

The Essential Fantastic Four volume 3. Galactus appears, with the trio of Lee / Kirby / Sinott at their strongest. I don’t need to say any more, do I?

The Essential Ms. Marvel. This is one of the easiest ways to get Carol’s earliest adventures before she took the title of Captain from her predecessor. It could easily be cheaper to get an Epic Collection these days, though.

The Essential X-Factor volume 3. This tome features the original 5 X-Men coming into their own as heroes that are publicly lauded… before going into space and pulling a massive Star Trek storyline as an event. Fantastic stuff.

The Essential X-Men… any volume. The Uncanny and Classic volumes carry the Silver Age content, as well as some delightful Bronze Age content featuring the X-Men when their book was cancelled. Any of the further volumes are all from Chris Claremont’s legendary run on the Uncanny X-Men. Any single volume is going to feature some of the most fantastic comics we’ve ever seen published… for the 1980s anyhow.

If you come across an Essentials volume in your browsing of an old comic or book shop, give it a chance. Odds are good it’s gonna have a bunch of comics for your buck, and you might even find a surprise or two.