My first foray into the Golden Age

[bestoftimes]

I have read a bunch of comics over the last year. Everything from Batman to Maus to Asterios Polyp to AKIRA and I loved it all. Now I want to start tapping the Golden Age. I have googled some and stumbled over William Eisner's The Spirit which looks promising as well as Batman Chronicles Vol 1. What do you recommend?

[CromagnonMan]

The Spirit would be my pick but its all down to taste. Any of the Titan Simon & Kirby books are good too.

A lot of people prefer the 1950's to the 1940's so you might want to look at that era too.

[The Confessor]

I'll second the recommendation for Eisner's The Spirit. I'm really not a big fan of Golden Age comics per se, but I do really enjoy The Spirit. I love Chester Gould's Dick Tracy newspaper strip from that period too. The EC horror & sci-fi series like Tales From The Crypt or Weird Science are really good, but to me those are more "Atomic Age" books or early Silver Age, rather than proper GA titles. Your mileage may vary though.

I've tried to read GA era Batman a number of times, and while the stories are interesting from a historical standpoint, I really can't say I actually enjoy them as good comics. Most GA era stuff is way too crudely drawn and scripted for my tastes. However, I'm definitely in the minority in that respect in this forum.

[dupont2005]

I've read some Spirit and I have to say the art was ahead of it's time. Hard to believe this was being released at the same time as those early Action and Detective Comics. I want to start getting into pre-code horror. The new book called "Zombies: The chilling archives of horror comics (vol. 3 I think)" is high on my want list.

[Aaron King]

I second (third? fourth?) the Spirit. What's great about it is that you can grab any of the Archives and dive right in, or you can find tons of cheap pamphlet-style reprints by Kitchen Sink and DC if you're not sure about investing that much money. DC even put out a Best Of trade that's pretty affordable and gives a nice survey of the strip over the years.

As for my own personal favorite Golden Age comic, I don't think you can get any better than Jack Cole's Plastic Man. Grab an archive, or pick up the Art Spiegelman/Chip Kidd bio/reprint Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits to see a nice sampling of Cole's work alongside the story of his life.

[CromagnonMan]

Thinking about it, The Best of Simon & Kirby from Titan is a good sampler of many different 1940's to 50's genres. It is massively oversized, so really makes the best of the artwork. You can get it fairly cheap, too. Highly recommended for an entry to this era of comics.

[emb021]

Regarding the Spirit, there are different phases on the "comic", done by different people. There is the original Eisner Spirit. Then the war-time period by others, then the post-War Spirit by Eisner (which many feel is the best phases), and a brief phase toward the end where Wally Wood was involved.

DC did do 2 trade paperback collections of "Best of" that I think would be a good starting point, as these have some of the best stories taken from the post-War Eisner work.