In September, 2023, Penguin Classics, the venerable publisher of elegant Anglophile editions and portable canonical texts-Robert Fagles's translation of Virgil's Aeneid, Thomas Hardy's " The Mayor of Casterbridge"-released three books that push the term "classic" into new, contested territory: " X-Men," " The Avengers," and " Fantastic Four."
The first "classic comics," from the nineteen-forties, were canonical novels like " Moby-Dick" and " Ivanhoe" recast in comic-book form-prestigious intellectual property that was old enough to have entered the public domain. Superhero comics from that period, later nicknamed the Golden Age, did not advertise themselves as classic, or literary, or durable: they promised excitement, suspense, and adventure, right now.
People who think of classics as time-tested pinnacles, books we read in school, or writings by long-dead white men, may be surprised. 'A classic can only occur when a civilization is mature,' one dead white man, T. S. Eliot, intoned in 1944. 'It must be the work of a mature mind.'
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