Essential Marvel is a line published by Marvel Comics that reprints vintage comic book material in paperback format. Each black-and-white volume reprints approximately 20-30 issues of a classic Marvel title. Each Essential contains between 450 and 650 pages, printed on coarse, matte-quality paper. DC Comics has a similar range of black-and-white reprint paperbacks, Showcase Presents.
History
The Essential range launched in October 1996 with the joint release of Essential X-Men Vol. 1, Essential Wolverine Vol. 1 and Essential Spider-Man Vol. 1. While Essential Spider-Man started with Spider-Man's first appearance in the Silver Age, Marvel chose to skip ahead to Giant-Size X-Men #1 and Uncanny X-Men #94-119, the relaunch of the title that sparked the X-Men's popularity in the late 1970s and 1980s. The decision to skip the original X-Men in favor of starting with the more well-known "All-New, All-Different" X-Men was controversial, though Marvel ultimately went back and began a new collection of Essential volumes, titled Essential Classic X-Men, to collect the earliest X-Men stories. A new trade dress for the line was introduced in 2001. All the older volumes were eventually reprinted with the new design. The new printings also corrected printing mistakes from previous volumes and reshuffled content to put volume breaks in more logical places, continuity-wise. From May 2005 onward, many of the volumes were reprinted for a third time, with different cover artwork. Initially, the Essential line used newly produced artwork, but these new printings used art from the material they reprinted; the legal indicia in each volume listed them as "Second Edition, First Printing". In 2008, the line's trade dress was revised and given a new look, again initially on older volumes that were going back to press for new printings. Marvel came under criticism for censoring some of the Essential books, specifically Essential Tomb of Dracula Vol. 3 and Vol. 4, in which digital editing was used to remove or obscure brief nudity. Both volumes contained reprints of Dracula stories originally published by Marvel in magazine format, which permitted the use of nudity in artwork. The last volumes were published in December 2013, with the line being canceled and replaced with the Epic Collection.
