I'd say Avengers was kind of the "it" book for Marvel (X-Men being the up and comer who was just coming into it's own but Avengers was the standard bearer through the 70s) and the Shooter run in the late 70s including the Ultron-Nefaria-Korvac sagas (so say 160-177-all of which plus more is collected in the one Avengers Epic collection from that era The Final Threat)gives you a great feel for what experience of reading Marvel in the late 70s was like if you are looking for a one-stop sample. Maybe add in the Final Threat storyline by Starlin that ran in Avengers Annual 7 and Marvel Two-in-One Annual #2 form those years as well. It gives you a glimpse of shared sandbox storytelling Marvel style, heroes with feet of clay-the Marvel specialty, a taste of the cosmic entities of the Marvel U, a glimpse at Thing (from FF) and Spidey in the 2-in-1 annual and the typical Levitz paradigm* style storytelling that was the Marvel specialty (even though named after a DC guy).

-M


*For those unfamiliar with the term, the Levitz paradigm is what many writers working in the industry call the style of serial storytelling used in comics where you have A-D plots, where the A plot is your main story and gets most of the pages in your issue, the B plot is your subplot and gets a page or two in the issue, and your C and D plot sore things brewing that get no more than a few panels. When your A plot is resolved, B becomes A, C becomes B, D becomes C and a new D is introduced, ad infinitum, so the story seems ot be continually evolving. However, a change in write rcan leave some of the lower tier plots abandoned on a mainstream book over time.

Here's a pic of a couple of the not-so-great looking pages - but really it looks better in the photo than in the book.  In the book the colors are much more muted, making all the panels look dark.  I tried messing with the picture color settings to make it look more like the book, but it still looks better here.  Kind of annoying that they couldn't have made it brighter in the actual book!



And a pic of some of the more typical nice bright pages:



Really not bad.  It does look rougher (and in some cases darker) in the book than in these pics, but that's the nature of the original comics from way back then.

In my mind, the defining mainstream titles of the late 1970s and early 1980s were X-men and The New Teen Titans. Of the two, I'm starting to think Titans aged better. It was always a little hokey, but X-Men was the more serious title back then and reads a little more melodramatic in hindsight.

Thank you for these!

I can see where those duller pages look quite awful.
What I don't understand is why would they go through the process of touch up for some but not all of the pages?


And the Phantom Lady ones were the ones I was looking at, too, so again, thank you for putting these up for me.

I had no idea about this paradigm, but it explains perfectly what I like about comics from this era. Reading those random comics as a kid I always felt like I was reading a story much larger than what was contained in those 20+ pages. It didn't feel like the comic was incomplete, but rather there was a real world happening behind the scenes (eg. when Commissioner Gordan stop talking to Batman he didn't just freeze until their next meeting, but rather I believed he when back to his office to file paperwork ). That makes for great world building.

Thanks for the Marvel suggestions, but I'm a DC guy for the most part. Other than the Swamp Thing and Titans suggestions (which I'll checkout), what was tops from DC that fits the late 70's to early 80's era/paradigm?

Not as big a DC fan either, but the one post-Crisis run I always heard a lot of praise for was the Waid run.

edit: Oh and a there were a lot of really big fans of William Messner-Loebs run.

edit2: Both Waid and Johns have had multiple runs on the Flash. I think consencus is that their first runs are best in both cases.