PRESS RELEASE
Since its founding in 1939 as Timely Comics, Marvel has published some of the most iconic series in American comic book history, including The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and X-Men and built an unparalleled library of characters and stories that have shaped pop culture. For over 45 years, Fantagraphics has published the very best comics and graphic novels that the medium has to offer, including Love & Rockets, Eightball, and My Favorite Things Are Monsters. Now these two publishing titans are teaming up for Lost Marvels, an ambitious series of hardcover releases featuring never-before collected comics by masters of the Silver Age, including Neal Adams, John Buscema, Howard Chaykin, Stan Lee, Jim Steranko, Barry Windsor-Smith, and other masters of the Silver Age.
Fantagraphics will publish three hardcover volumes in the Lost Marvels series this year, all collaboratively produced with Marvel Comics, with more releases to follow in the coming years.
In April, Fantagraphics will publish Lost Marvels No. 1: Tower of Shadows, collecting all nine issues of the series. In 1969, with its revolutionary superhero line well established, Marvel took a chance on the kind of supernatural, EC-style anthology series that had been banned since the formation of the Comics Code in the 1950s. Tower of Shadows featured a staggering array of artists and writers, including Neal Adams, Jim Steranko, Barry Windsor-Smith, John Buscema, Gene Colan, Wally Wood, Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, John Romita, Johnny Craig, Marie Severin, Gerry Conway, and Bernie Wrightson, to name a few. Freed from the conventions of the superhero adventure, these creators brought their storytelling skills to a more quietly sinister genre, producing atmospheric gems of twisted suspense and sardonic horror, including Roy Thomas and Tom Palmer’s adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model”
In July, Fantagraphics will publish Lost Marvels No. 2: Howard Chaykin Vol. 1: Dominic Fortune, Monark Starstalker, and Phantom Eagle. When Howard Chaykin broke into comics in the 1970s, there was nothing quite like him. His original characters Dominic Fortune and Monark Starstalker took classic pulp heroes and ran them through a postmodern blender. This new volume collects some of the most exciting, sought-after work by Chaykin from 1975 to 2008, including retro-science-fiction bounty hunter Monark Starstalker’s debut appearance and all the Dominic Fortune stories, including the character’s unexpurgated Max series, published a generation later. Completing the package is the collision between pulp heroism and the devastating, bloody realities of World War I in Chaykin’s 111-page collaboration with The Boys writer Garth Ennis on War Is Hell: The First Flight of the Phantom Eagle. As the artist behind Marvel’s comic adaptation of the first Star Wars movie and the creator of iconic, influential series like the sci-fi satire American Flagg! and the adults only vampire saga Black Kiss, Howard Chaykin has earned his reputation as a prolific and essential cartoonist.
In November, Fantagraphics will publish Lost Marvels No. 3: Savage Tales. Best known for Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith’s Conan the Barbarian and the first appearance of Gerry Conway and Gray Morrow’s Man-Thing, 1971’s Savage Tales was a stunning comics magazine in the spirit of Creepy and Heavy Metal. This volume will collect all 11 issues of the series featuring work from Stan Lee, John Romita, Dennis O’Neil, Al Williamson, Jim Steranko, John Buscema, and a host of other legendary creators delivering a high-octane combination of fantasy, horror, and action.
“Marvel published a surprising amount of work that fell outside its superhero purview in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, most of it never before reprinted, much of it “lost” except in the fading memories of fans who bought it and read it for the first time back then when it was originally published,” said Fantagraphics Publisher Gary Groth. “Exceptional craftsmen and artists were often featured — Barry Windsor-Smith, Steranko, John Buscema, Gene Colan, Neal Adams, Howard Chaykin, and others— and one of the goals of this project is to create a carefully curated record of this somewhat more obscure work that so many comics readers have forgotten or are unfamiliar with. Lost Marvels complements our Atlas reprints which features so many of the best craftsmen from the 1950s.”
The Lost Marvels series is dedicated to introducing these vital stories to a new generation of readers and restoring them to their rightful place in comics history. Lost Marvels No. 1: Tower of Shadows will be available from Fantagraphics on April 29, 2025; Lost Marvels No. 2: Howard Chaykin Vol. 1 will be available on July 8, 2025; and Lost Marvels No. 3: Savage Tales will be published on November 18, 2025. For updates Fans can follow Fantagraphics on X, Instagram, Facebook, Blue Sky, and YouTube.
