Prestige Comics: On the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection

Really, the trouble began in 2013. That was the year Penguin Classics published Morrissey’s Autobiography, a move that caused a ruckus among both fans of Morrissey and Penguin Classics. While some were glad that this onetime icon of the bookish underground was getting his due from the literary establishment, many balked at the decision to include Morrissey—that clever, keening poet of ostracism and martyrdom—in the same catalog as Montaigne and Murasaki.

Chances are there will be even more handwringing in June of this year, when Penguin Classics will release the first three volumes of their Marvel Collection: Black Panther, Captain America, and The Amazing Spider-Man. Over the past decade or more, the conquest of the cultural landscape by quippy spandexed superheroes has been Napoleonic. The idea that a citadel of bookishness has fallen to this siege of adolescent fantasia could easily take on outsize importance.

Since its founding in 1946, the Penguin Classics catalog has served as the best and most convenient rendering of the modern canon. Binding an author’s work with that stark and distinctive black cover confers a stamp of approval unlike nearly any other in modern publishing. Penguin Classics began by publishing classics in the most literal sense: the series’ inaugural book was ’s translation of  Before long, the imprint was pumping out cheap paperbacks of everything from and to and . According to ’s , after the release of sixty titles, editor-in-chief asked, “How many more titles in the classical literature of the