This omnibus edition takes the first 18 issues of the 1980s run of the Surfer plus a few extra bits and pieces. I first came to the Surfer in my teens through my brother’s copies of Stan Lee’s Origins of Marvel Comics trilogy wherein he detailed how Marvel became the powerhouse it was. I started buying my own comics at around the time of The Infinity Gauntlet and the middle of Ron Kim’s superlative run of artwork for the comic so the storyline and events were not unfamiliar to me and it was nice to see how a few of the storylines I came into the middle of had begun.

It’s a beautiful looking comic. Even in black and white it looks gorgeous. The storylines are easy to follow and the characters easy to differentiate and the mix of Earth and Cosmic settings is ridiculously well done. The only downer for me is that sometimes the segueing from one plot into another doesn’t click as neatly as you might want. There’s also - and it’s really churlish to complain about this in a comic that’s part of a history as convoluted as Marvel’s - the problem of the info-dumps which often feel clunky or shoehorned at the expense of the main plot.

But for longtime fans like myself, this is great fun.