So What Exactly Are We Talking About When We Talk About the Bronze Age? 2 2

[Zonker]

It occurred to me that one reason all the many debates about the merits of GL 76, what book started the Bronze Age, etc. etc. keep spinning around and around is because there really isn’t a concise definition of what we mean when we talk about a bronze age of comics.

 

With Golden Age, it is pretty much accepted that it is the rise of comic book costumed super-heroes. With Silver Age, it is pretty much accepted that it is the return to popularity of comic book costumed super-heroes. With Bronze, it’s usually a case of can’t define it / but know it when I see it.

 

In this thread, I’ll invite your opinions about how to define the Bronze Age—independent of any consideration of what was first, what was the greatest, what was the most influential, what should receive the highest price when encased in plastic with a big number at top left, etc.

 

So what do we think we mean when we talk about the Bronze Age?

- The rise of the anti-hero? Yes

- Increasing use of violence by super-heroes and super-villains? Sure

- Accelerating death toll of characters? Yes

- Greater prevalence of monsters and occult themes? Certainly

But in my opinion, that’s too narrow an idea, as to my way of thinking, the Bronze Age was more than just that, and those aspects were just part of the larger picture. Surface symptoms of a larger underlying transformation, if you will.

 

In my view, the Bronze Age can be defined by 3 inter-related trends:

1- More adult themes captured within commercial, Comic Code Approved American comic books

2- New generation of creators coming on board with new political and artistic pretensions.

3- A fertile period of experimentation from the Big Two Publishers: the inmates begin running the asylum, as Stan Lee went to Hollywood and Carmine Infantino was pretty much flying blind at DC.

 

...more soon...

[Zonker]

1. More Adult Themes

 

- Anti-authority, whether it’s GL questioning the Guardians or Captain America taking on the Secret Empire (aka the Nixon White House). You no longer automatically know who the good guys are.

 

- Conan has his own moral code, and the world around him is one of moral ambiguity. Kings can be treacherous, thieves can be loyal friends. This world is much less morally black & white than that found in the previous Silver Age material.

 

- Batman starts to threaten suspects, never-mind-the-Miranda-decision

 

- Violence: Conan, Kirby’s Fourth World, Simonson’s Manhunter, Kaluta’s Shadow, Wolverine. On the villain side, the Punisher is introduced, and the Joker returns to his original portrayal as a homicidal maniac.

 

- Drug books, first pill-popping in Spidey, then the more explicit GL/GA heroin 2-parter.

 

- Death as a natural outcome of “real-world” super-heroing: Gwen Stacy, certainly. But also Manhunter, Thunderbird, Jean Grey (until she got better), Elektra (ditto).

 

- The occult and monsters take on a new prevalence. The CCA was revised to allow for vampires for the first time since 1954. Tomb of Dracula, Monster of Frankenstein, Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, The Demon, Ghost Rider all emerge.

 

- And can you imagine a post-Code period either before or since when a comic entitled “Son of Satan” would be marketed to an all-ages comic book readership?

 

- Sex: Mike W Barr said Green Arrow & Black Canary (in the O’Neil-Adams GL/GA ) were the first comic characters he could believe had a real sex life. Later, I think that would apply equally well to Phoenix-Cyclops and to Batman-Silver St. Cloud. And it is certainly implied that Jean Grey took a walk-on-the-wild-side during her Black Queen segments.

 

- Joe Quesada gets a lot of grief for his current stewardship of the Spider-Man franchise, but I don’t think even he is having Peter Parker making references to current porn stars, as in this Deep Throat reference from Marvel Team-Up 16:

 

[Zonker]

2. New generation of creators, new pretensions, both political and literary

- Denny O’Neil came along carrying a lot of literary and/or journalistic aspirations. His GL/GA was captioned with quotes from Norman Mailer’s “Armies of the Night.” He added Dylan quotes to at least one of his World’s Finest scripts.

 

- O’Neil’s New Journalist faux-realistic writing style found a perfect complement in Neal Adams’ photo-realistic art style, a style that emerged as a competing house style to the Jack Kirby model of an earlier time. Rather than a science-fiction sense of wonder, the new style was realism, or occasionally an allegory trying to make a point about the real world.

 

- While in earlier years you might have pop culture celebrities like Elvis, the Beatles, (or Perry Como even farther back) show up in the books, Roy Thomas chose to turn New Journalist Tom (“Electric Kool-Aide Acid Test”) Wolfe into a comics character in Hulk 142. (And apparently Wolfe appeared earlier as well, though I don’t have the footnoted book cited below):

 

- In earlier years, you had a few writers doing most of the work: Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Gardner Fox, John Broome, Bob Kanigher. Kanigher made the transition to the 1970s, as did guys like Roy Thomas, Bob Haney and Arnold Drake. But the later decade saw a huge influx of new talent to Marvel & DC, many of them comics fans turned pro: Denny O’Neil, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Archie Goodwin, Steve Gerber, Steve Englehart.

 

- Most of these writers were decidedly left-of-center, and one way it showed was the social consciousness storylines in the early 1970s, most notably in Green Lantern / Green Arrow, but also in Superman and Justice League comics of the day.

 

- Marvel was more subtle, at least up until the Captain America Secret Empire arc, but there was this aside in Conan #3, which I always thought was a swipe at the prosecution of the Vietnam War—but for all I know it might be in the Robert E. Howard original.

 

- Comics creators started handing out awards to each other, as in the Academy of Comic Arts “Shazam” awards. In the 5 years they were handed out, the majority went to Conan, Green Lantern / Green Arrow, Manhunter & Swamp Thing. Previously there were the fandom-based Alley Awards, but now we had pros congratulating each other for their artistic successes.

 

- We may disagree on the merits of Kirby’s Fourth World, but clearly he was attempting something epic in scope, and envisioned it as a multi-volume permanently-bound collection, a graphic novel before there was such a thing. His reach may have exceeded his grasp, but the ambition was certainly there.

 

- In the wake of Conan’s success, creators looked to other pulp fiction for material to adapt. DC procured the licensing for Edgar Rice Burroughs’ creations, Fritz Lieber’s Fafrd & the Grey Mouser and The Shadow. Marvel got most all of the Robert E. Howard library and Doc Savage. It got pretty ridiculous when DC apparently arrived at the conclusion that a good way to take on Conan was to launch a comic book recounting the adventures of… the Old English epic poem Beowulf.

 

[Zonker]

3. Radical experimentation / anything goes / the suits relinquish control

 

- Though there are many different stories out there about The Night Gwen Stacy Died, it is clear that Stan Lee had left the day-to-day oversight of the character by then:

DEFALCO: Is that why you eventually decided to kill Gwen?"

ROMITA: "Here's the way I remember it: Stan had left the book to become Marvel's publisher. Roy Thomas had taken over as the Editor-in-Chief, though I think we only called him the editor in those days, and Gerry Conway was writing Amazing. Roy and Gerry wanted to do something to shake up the book, and get people to pay attention. They were going to kill somebody in the strip for shock value and I think they settled on Aunt May. I didn't like that idea.... I thought we would really shake up the fans if we killed Peter's girlfriend. Gerry agreed and so did Roy. I think Roy even ran it by Stan, and got his okay. Stan claims that he was never in on it, but you know how bad his memory is.”

 

- Indeed, after Stan Lee stepped down as Marvel Editor-in-Chief, Marvel went through 5 EICs in as many years: Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Gerry Conway, Archie Goodwin.

 

- Howard Chaykin (in his intro to the Best of Walt Simonson TPB) remembers with paper shortages being hyped in the early 1970s, that “most of us with half a brain figured comics were due for oblivion by the early eighties.”

 

- Over at DC, the editors apparently have no idea what’s really selling. D ick Giordano tells this story:

CBA: How did you know if your books were selling?

D ick: In those days we didn't have sales figures given to us as we did in later years. Every editor had a cork board with their Books' cover proofs pinned up. Sometime during the night, Carmine or somebody would turn over the cover and write a figure down for that particular title. It wasn't number but a percentage, but we weren't given the print run numbers so we never knew how many we sold. I didn't pay too much attention to the numbers because I had no way of comparing them to anything that made sense to me.

 

- Irving Donnefield told Bob Beerbohm in an article published in Comic Book Artist #6:

Up until I left in 1968… I spent time with all the wholesalers, and I knew every one of them. My father knew all their fathers… so everywhere around the country, I had an ‘in’ …during my tenure, I maintained a large roving field force who were our reps in all the major markets. These reps made reports every week which went right to me. In the really large markets, we had a man or two who worked inside each wholesaler building, all the time. Based on this feedback, I determined what our print runs should be on every book…While I was at DC, I had control over everything. After I left, Carmine couldn’t do what I did. He wasn’t an owner privy to the levels of information I was able to access. He simply did not know the people I had grown up with in the wholesale market.

 

- In that same issue, Neal Adams says to Beerbohm:

Nobody knew what the hell was going on after Irwin Donnenfeld left in ’68, what was selling, why it was selling, how it was doing, what the sales really were, they had no idea—and books got cancelled, reputations got hurt, people got hurt…

 

- Creators were beginning to be thought of as more important than the creations. DC brought Kirby over from Marvel, and let him run wild. Some of Kirby’s resulting Fourth World stuff I thought was wonderful, but some of it (Goody Rickles, anyone?) cried out for an editor.

 

 

- But this piece of self-indulgence takes the cake. In one of DC’s flagship titles, JLA, scripter Mike Friedrich is allowed to devote an issue to his vanity project love letter to Harlan Ellison. “Crash-pounding of his creative soul” my . I can’t imagine what the typical 9-year old boy thought when he picked this issue up, expecting to read a story of the world’s greatest superheroes, and finds this instead…

 

 

- In summary, there came a time when the business controls became pretty loose over what made its way in to print. This was evident both by frequent editorial hands-off behavior, as well as a lack of reliable, actionable metrics regarding what was actually succeeding in the marketplace. While these were certainly management problems, I would suggest those problems oddly enough contributed to an explosion of creativity that mainstream comic book readers and collectors have benefited from ever since.

 

 

OK, now your turn...

[kimik]

DC did not know what their sales figures were for a while? Sounds like the original dot.com business plan where sales did not matter.

 

Edited November 5, 2009 by kimik

[Zonker]

Makes it a bit more understandable how they would green-light titles like Strange Sports Stories, Prez, or Brother Power the Geek, doesn't it?

[jools&jim]

 

Excellent analysis, Zonker!

 

[awe4one]

I just make it simple and say the Bronze Age started with the 25 cent Giants....

 

Jim

[VK]

Excellent analysis, Zonker!

 

I agree. Very well thought out.

 

I personally still believe that the begining of an Age is based on something the fanbase took notice of first and foremost. Fans were definitely becoming more aware of the inner workings of the biz by the early 70's, but to the typical fan or collector, what was noticed first was what hit the racks. The GL/GA storylines were definitely groundbreaking, but didn't garner as much acclaim then as they did after the series was cancelled, a few years hence. Kirby's 4th World Universe was something to take notice of (bad art and all), but only because he had left Marvel. I still say the relaxing of the CCA is a herald mark for the beginning of the Bronze Age, and it translated into more mature and adult oriented writing as a result. Hence, the ASM non-CCA approved drug issues were ahead of their time. I still point to CONAN #1 as the watershed moment, when the SA gave way to the BA. I guess in industry terms, it was essentially when Roy Thomas took over the reins at Marvel. I was 11 years old, and buying off the newstand racks back then, and the Summer of 1970 is the pivot point for me.

[Snake Eyes]

All I can say is WOW :o :o Incredibly well-written Zonker. Certainly makes me want to delve into some research and my early 70's books to see what I can find. As an aside, I think this is an excellent way to approach a discussion about an age's starting point (if it can be pinned down at all). Helps eliminate the biases and my book suggestion is better than your book suggestion (or Jeebus help me the marvel zombies vs. the DC-ites)

 

 

[kimik]

Makes it a bit more understandable how they would green-light titles like Strange Sports Stories, Prez, or Brother Power the Geek, doesn't it?

 

Don't forget the stellar 4th World line of drek as well.

[Zonker]

Makes it a bit more understandable how they would green-light titles like Strange Sports Stories, Prez, or Brother Power the Geek, doesn't it?

 

Don't forget the stellar 4th World line of drek as well.

 

 

 

...must...not...launch...flame...war...in...own...thread...

 

[Flee-Marquette]

Excellent posts! (thumbs u

[jjonahjameson1]

Makes it a bit more understandable how they would green-light titles like Strange Sports Stories, Prez, or Brother Power the Geek, doesn't it?

 

Don't forget the stellar 4th World line of drek as well.

 

 

 

...must...not...launch...flame...war...in...own...thread...

 

 

It was *HUGE* drek. So huge that DC had to create a New Universe for it. Oh wait, that was Marvel.

[kimik]

Makes it a bit more understandable how they would green-light titles like Strange Sports Stories, Prez, or Brother Power the Geek, doesn't it?

 

Don't forget the stellar 4th World line of drek as well.

 

 

 

...must...not...launch...flame...war...in...own...thread...

 

 

Sorry.

[chrisco37]

As usual, great job Z.

 

An insightful well thought out post(s).

 

 

[Zonker]

Thanks guys! It was fun to do... The previous generation wrote letters to the editor-- but we get to nerd out on the message boards.

[VK]

Damn, I figured this thread would lead to some good discussion.

 

I am disappointed in my fellow collectors for not participating.

 

Again, I commend you, Z. Great job!

[joe_collector]

Damn, I figured this thread would lead to some good discussion. I am disappointed in my fellow collectors for not participating.

 

Personally I am much too tired to give this thread the attention it deserves. If I got into this, I'd never get out.

[Zonker]

Damn, I figured this thread would lead to some good discussion.

 

I am disappointed in my fellow collectors for not participating.

 

Again, I commend you, Z. Great job!

 

I think the buzz kill came in my very first post in the thread:

 

independent of any consideration of what was first, what was the greatest, what was the most influential, what should receive the highest price when encased in plastic with a big number at top left

 

Instead, I should have said: "After the Marvel Spotlight #5 CGC 9.8 is pressed to a CGC 10.0, it will certainly kick GL #76 hass and be recognized as the first book of the Bronze Age"