Customer Reviews

Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Era Heroes - Volume 3

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Out of the three Marvel Masterworks devoted to the Atlas Era of Marvel Heroes this one is the best; so says Roy Thomas in the introduction; and I agree.

This is not to say the other two volumes are bad, but the artwork from Bill Everett, creator of Sub-Mariner is top notch. If there no words in this book you could look at the fantastic illustrations and be entertained; but the stories are fun also. They even have tales of Namor (the Sub-Mariner) when he was young.

The odd thing is his personality changes from story to story. Sometimes he wants to kill the "surface-dwellers" at other times he is friends with us. Such a moody hero. But all in all the stories are like proto-Marvel stories, not as simple as golden age stories can be, and yet not as sophisticated as Marvel would become.

Died too much before his time Joe Maneely provides provides the covers for several of the issues, illustrating a talent that would surely be missed.

Rounding out this volume is some filler stories (pretty amusing); a smattering of golden-age Human Torch and Toro stories, and the forementioned Roy Thomas introduction which gives one a context for these stories.

A very entertaining volume, and this is coming from someone who does not really love the golden-age comics all that much.

As a kid growing up the Sub-mariner was my all time favorite comic book heroe.I couldn"t understand how it dissappeared from the newsstands after 10 issues.You can't imagine my joy when marvel publihed a book with all 10 issues in a nice hardcover.The coloring is great and its as close to owning the comic books which now run for hundreds of dolars each as you can get.I recommend this book for all comic fans,the stories from the 50"s are much more exciting then the 1940's Sub-mariner comics,the 1950 Sub-mariner battled Communist,space aliens and was the first anti heroe.

This book reprints 10 very well done submariner comic books from the golden age of comics. (In the mid-1950's)You also get several great Human Torch tales drawn by the excellent Dick Ayers as well. The rest of the book is all subby stories and they are all alot of fun. You get the origin of the character redone by his creater Everet as well. Bill Everett was a excellent artist by anyones standards and some of his finest comic stylings are in this book. Everett was a artists artist in that he was just prone to excellent work and that's saying alot considering some of the giants at work when these issues were first printed. As another reviewer said if you tried to buy these in their original comic book form they'd be extremely expensive and probably have yellowing pages. With the masterworks series you can read old comics and they look cleaned up and better than they did even back then. The papers better after all. Anyways I would like to see marvel reprint alot more of the Sub mariner. They are at volume 3 in the golden age series and bill didn't start redrawing the character until he returned from the World War in 1946. but at least we get to read these classic tales a affordable rate and they look great too.