The Great Comic Book Heroes: The Origins and Early Adventures of the Classic Super-Heroes of the Comic Books (Grade: 1-)

Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965) was an unusual collection of superhero comics reprinted by the prestigious Dial Press. The collection featured recolored versions of early stories, mostly dating from the late 1930s and early 1940s and produced by some of the major comic book publishers, featuring Batman, Captain America, The Spirit, Superman, and Wonder Woman.

Comic Book Heroes brought these stories back into print before the now-popular reprints, and also included a forty-page introductory essay (and a five-page afterword) combining personal reflections and some analysis of Feiffer. (These prose pieces have been reprinted several times - see below - and are available online).

These prose pieces are widely credited with elevating superhero comics into literary circles, as Feiffer was a longtime cartoonist, playwright, and Oscar-winner in the Village Voice, and he was actively involved in the production of a number of collections of his cartoons and comics in the 1960s.

British edition of the book. Published by Penguin Press, London.