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

[vaillant]

On 3/2/2019 at 11:28 PM, KirbyJack said:

Well, to answer the OP’s question; the Bronze Age is the 1970s. 

You can try to come up with an different answer, one that might actually bear scrutiny, but you’ll just be spinning your tires. I used to try to change people’s minds to a pet theory, but I’ve let that go. 

The Bronze Age of Comics is the 1970s.

Agreed. It pretty much coincides with the 1970s, although in many cases I’d go back to 1968 (at least for Marvel) and yes… in some cases 1980 is already "out".

[Zonker]

Every now and then I'll come across something cool that pertains to the themes in this old thread, and I'll post it here.  Found this one on the Jack Kirby Museum Website and it touches a couple of the bases already mentioned here:  Kirby's ambitions for his Fourth World series and the value DC publisher Carmine Infantino saw in the  perceived "prestige"  of the Green Lantern / Green Arrow series, even if the sales were not all that great!  Enjoy!

Originally published in the fanzine Comic & Crypt from 1971

===================================================================================================================================

C&C: What led you into becoming Editorial Director?

Infantino: An accident. I was drawing here. I think I was drawing the BATMAN and DEADMAN. It was during that story that the second guy at MARVEL was slaughtering NATIONAL. I think his name was Kirby or something, and the gentleman who happened to be in charge at the time asked me if I would care to stop in and help re-organize. We discussed it and I finally did. I thought it would be interesting.

C&C: Well you tried the new trend books. They failed but I had them all and I thought they had possibilities, especially BATLASH. 

Infantino: In BATLASH what bothered me the most was that I wrote it. I plotted every one of them and Sergio took it from there and wrote them down. Then Denny would dialogue them later.

 C&C: When a friend of mine met Mr. Weisinger, he was told by him not to go into comics; that it was a dying field. He told him rather to go into painting, and to get out of comics. (This was about five years ago – MS)

 Kirby: You should have told him not I’m to knock anything he hasn’t tried.

 C&C: Was that the type of attitude that was around then?

Infantino: No. I think it was a personal attitude.

 C&C: Has the atmosphere changed? Are new ideas welcome?

 Kirby: It’s a different company today. If a company feels that there is an essential need somewhere they get the right executive to fill that need. In other words, to expedite that need. You use that need to revitalize the company. Comics are in a transition, as far as I see it. I think this is the most interesting time for comics.

 C&C: How long have you had the idea for the NEW GODS?

 Kirby: Well, I guess for several years it’s probably been in the back of my mind, but I’ve never sat down and worked it out though I’ve always known it’s been there.

 C&C: Do FOREVER PEOPLE come from the same place as the NEW GODS?

 Kirby: Yes, but they don’t call the things you see the same things that I do. In other words, I would say great or swell, and you guys would say cool. It’s not New Genesis to them, it’s Supertown. That’s how they see it. There is, though, a lot more to it than that and I think you guys are going to find it pretty interesting.

 C&C: According to the sales, the superhero book is on the rocks.

 Kirby: I pay attention to the sales occasionally only because I plot the books, and sometimes the sales are my only link with the fans. I feel that the superhero surf is going somewhere. What I’m trying to do is follow its exact trail; that’s my job. I want to entertain you guys and find something new for you – if not just for you, for myself – the challenge of my job is to keep me from getting bored. I feel that if I would want to buy my own book, I have met that challenge.

 C&C: The themes in NEW GODS and FOREVER PEOPLE are expansions of the old themes from MARVEL. It seems that you had more ideas, but they wouldn’t let you continue with them.

 Kirby: That’s more or less true. It’s not that I was cramped, but there were limitations which stopped me from going on. Over here I have the chance to go beyond them; I feel. that whatever story there is to this “gods” business, the “new” Gods or the “old” Gods, I feel. that there is a story to them. I feel that there was an actual replacement of the “old” Gods by new ones which are relevant to what we see and hear. In other words, Thor may have been great in medieval times, but I feel, somehow, that we have transcended. Once it had a certain glamour, but now we need a new kind of glamour. Not that it isn’t fantastic, but we don’t see it in the same light anymore. I think we see things differently, the same things with an altered interpretation. You know what Thor looked like, what Mercury looked like, what Zeus looked like, and all the rest of them. It’s like everything that’s done and seen. What I’m trying to do is show the things that haven’t been done or seen.

 Kirby: We have our “new” GOD today – technology. A new way at looking at things that I have got to represent. How do I represent that new technology? I’ve got Metron. How do I represent the kind of feelings we have today? Maybe some of us are analyzing ourselves, trying to find out why we’re a violent society and how we could be nonviolent, so we all become Orion. Why do these feelings live like that inside of us? Not only do we associate ourselves with them, but these are conflicts. But why do we have conflicts like that inside of us? So we try to analyze it, just like Orion does. That’s what the GODS are. They are just representations of ourselves. At that time, you take a crummy Viking, remove the glamour, and what the heck was he? Some poor guy in bear skins, who never took a bath. He had a beard with lice in it and he says: “Look at me, I’m a really cruddy object.” And I felt the same way. The GIs feel the same way sometimes when they’re sitting in some hole but suddenly he says: “What the heck am I doing? What am I a symbol of?” And then he begins to idealize the version of all the bravery that goes into the fight. Maybe he begins to see himself as Thor and his captain as Odin. Then he sees what he’s fighting for. He sees why he’s in that hole, why he’s in the dirt, why he’s dressed in that stupid uniform. It’s not only functional – it’s symbolic of what he is; he comes into a whole new world and he feels pretty good about it. That’s what it’s all about. To make everything we see and know around and in us, and give it some meaning.

 Kirby:  And the GODS are nothing more than that. They are making us see some value in us and we have ­ we have that value. So in order to express that value, we make “new” GODS. We can’t be Thor. We can’t be Odin, anymore. We’re not a bunch of guys running around in bear skins; we’re guys that wear spacesuits and surgeon’s masks. A surgeon is godlike because he handles life and death. If you want to idealize him that’s the way to do it. A nuclear physicist is Metron. A mathematician is Metron. A guy who works a projection booth in a theater is Metron. He’s involved in technology. We’re trying to know everything and we’ve got the equipment to do it. That’s where Metron’s chair comes in. It’s one of our gadgets. That damn chair can do anything!

 C&C: There is so much meaning in the strip. I read it and I enjoyed it but I couldn’t place all these things into it, but it’s there.

 Kirby: It’s there because I’m trying to interpret us. Nothing more than that. I’m trying to interpret what we’re in. What kind of times we live in. And we should have these versions. I can see this guy in a spacesuit. There is no reason why he shouldn’t be able to go to Mars. Maybe in ’75. Because we can do it. The materials are there. They’ll be common. And to put it all in one word that’s Metron. And New Genesis. You name it. That’s New York or Chicago; just an idealized version of that. It’s the city.

 C&C: Did you ever mention this to MARVEL?

 Kirby: No. I was involved in what I was doing there and I feel that this would never have fit into what they were doing. This is a whole new interpretation and it cannot be told with shields and swords; it must be done with what we know and deal with what we worry about.

 C&C: So was THOR; when it came out as a mythology in the olden times it was relevant and real to the people then, because people were using the same things: swords, shields, etc.

 Kirby: Yes, THOR was very real to the guy in the middle ages and not only that if you think about it; THOR was a religion as well. THOR is not a comic book story – Norse mythology was a religion, just as Greek mythology was. I was being superficial when I did THOR and if I showed it to a guy who was really involved with it he would tell me it wasn’t good enough.

 C&C: Why?

 Kirby: Suppose I was to make an interpretation of things you really believed in. It would be weak because those things are on such a grandiose scale, I can’t draw them.

=============================================================================

C&C: Who got the idea for the Neal Adams GREEN LANTERN book? The sales are dropping. I know they went up and now they’re dropping a little bit. I don’t know how true it is.

 Infantino: Who said that?

 C&C: Neal Adams. I heard that you are keeping it for prestige. I’d like to know how it got started.

 Infantino: The GREEN LANTERN was ready to be turned out when we were told to drop it. Even though I wanted a few more issues. I said to Julie: “There’s something you wanted to try.” I want this book as different as you could possibly make it. We sat down with Denny and came out with it. The book was slowly rising. It went real high at one point. Then it sagged off again. If this book can give to us the public relations, if it can take this business and give us the solid citizen reputation it should have not been considered junk, as it used to be. It will be worth everything we are putting into it.

 

 

[Zonker]

I thought it was an unfortunate mistake that DC chose not to reprint Jack Kirby's editorial pages in the Fourth World Omnibus reprint editions.  The one pasted below from Jimmy Olsen #135  from 1971 gets to a lot of what Kirby was attempting in his Fourth World series, and that level of ambition to Say Something Important, to my way of thinking, is very Bronze Age-y.

• In the text below, Kirby is talking on one level about the Hairies, who are the characters he recently introduced to the Jimmy Olsen strip: products of the secret DNA Project, they are genetically manipulated super mutants.
• But clearly the Hairies are stand-ins for the then-current (or recently-current) Hippies of the Woodstock Nation.   As are the Forever People, another of Jack's creations from this same timeframe.
• Reading the below, you can see Jack debating with himself-- the WWII veteran versus the late-middle-aged dad trying to make sense of the 1960s counter culture.  A similar debate happens in New Gods #6 "Glory Boat" where Kirby explores and ultimately rejects pacifism as a response to the evil represented by Darkseid.  Indeed  you can read the New Gods as the soldiers fighting the enemy head on, responding to force with force.  And the Hairies and the Forever People are perhaps trying to win the hearts & minds, to use a Vietnam-era phrase. 
• I had never thought of this before, but maybe the Fourth World trilogy is showing us 3 responses to the Vietnam conflict:  Join the Army (the New Gods), support the counter-culture (the Forever People), or escape to Canada! (Mister Miracle) 
• In any case, the below text piece I think says a lot about Kirby wrestling with these questions.  See what you think:

[jools&jim]

On 2/2/2020 at 5:52 PM, Zonker said:

I thought it was an unfortunate mistake that DC chose not to reprint Jack Kirby's editorial pages in the Fourth World Omnibus reprint editions.  The one pasted below from Jimmy Olsen #135  from 1971 gets to a lot of what Kirby was attempting in his Fourth World series, and that level of ambition to Say Something Important, to my way of thinking, is very Bronze Age-y.

• In the text below, Kirby is talking on one level about the Hairies, who are the characters he recently introduced to the Jimmy Olsen strip: products of the secret DNA Project, they are genetically manipulated super mutants.
• But clearly the Hairies are stand-ins for the then-current (or recently-current) Hippies of the Woodstock Nation.   As are the Forever People, another of Jack's creations from this same timeframe.
• Reading the below, you can see Jack debating with himself-- the WWII veteran versus the late-middle-aged dad trying to make sense of the 1960s counter culture.  A similar debate happens in New Gods #6 "Glory Boat" where Kirby explores and ultimately rejects pacifism as a response to the evil represented by Darkseid.  Indeed  you can read the New Gods as the soldiers fighting the enemy head on, responding to force with force.  And the Hairies and the Forever People are perhaps trying to win the hearts & minds, to use a Vietnam-era phrase. 
• I had never thought of this before, but maybe the Fourth World trilogy is showing us 3 responses to the Vietnam conflict:  Join the Army (the New Gods), support the counter-culture (the Forever People), or escape to Canada! (Mister Miracle) 
• In any case, the below text piece I think says a lot about Kirby wrestling with these questions.  See what you think:

  Great stuff, Zonk, combined with your insightful analysis, as always.

I very much agree, as you suggest, that Kirby's "Fourth World" books tapped into the late '60s/early '70s zeitgeist, and are in some sense an intuitive or instinctive meditation on it from the position of age and wisdom.  But his canvas, obviously, was bigger than the daily news, and his broad, mythological strokes cut deeper, and in more lasting ways, than, say, O'Neil and Adams did in their Green Lantern run, which farmed the same turf, but was merely topical, and now embarrassingly dated. 

Visionary artists (& poets/composers/etc.) aren't always able to easily articulate, in plain language, what their work makes us feel or think about (William Blake, whose letters to friends/colleagues/detractors are sometimes impenetrable, is a good example).  This may be one reason why Kirby's somewhat clunky and meandering text pieces were omitted from the Omnibus. 

But the more essential quality in the main body of his work -- a vaulting and powerfully elegant imagination combined with an innate ability make us feel or think about something important in new or unexpected ways -- is what separates simple entertainment (which has its time and place) from true art (which is eternal).

Jack was clearly at his best and most ambitious during the BA: he often did both simultaneously, and (while it lasted!) in the mainstream of popular culture, which is no small thing...

Edited February 5, 2020 by jools&jim

[Zonker]

On 1/9/2014 at 11:02 PM, Zonker said:

Bridwell said the new emphasis in comic books was begun by the senior editor of the firm he works for, Julie Schwartz. His new socially oriented comic books have caught on throughout the comic book publishing field, Brldwell sail. The new comic books are not aimed at youngsters. They are aimed at adolescents, Bridwell said, and adolescents are the biggest customers of the new comic books. National Periodical Publications is the firm that has Julie Schwartz, and Nelson E. Bridwell working for it. National Periodical is one of lite biggest publishers in the field, selling millions of comic books each month.

 

It’s easy to see that the comic book publishers have not decided to go easy on the new fad. If you pick up the latest issue of “House of Secrets” comic books vou will be treated to a discussion of three major modern social issues — the place of religion in the world today, pollution and man versus the machine. 

 

*****************************************

 

Wonder what issue of HoS they're talking about?

Gratuitous, years-late   to say that thanks to the MCS website, it is now clear that the author is talking about House of Secrets #90.cover dated March 1971.

Quote

Cover art by Neal Adams. "The Distant Dome," -script by Steve Skeates, art by George Tuska; In the future, the remaining humans that live on Earth survive under domes due to pollution. "The Symbionts," -script by Marv Wolfman, pencils by Rich Buckler, inks by Neal Adams; A man is left on a prison planet for ten years and when his sentence is up the computer that was assigned to keep him alive tells him it loves him and doesn't want to let him go; Since the men who have come to pick him up have brought a female prisoner to leave behind, the computer absorbs the man and adopts his personality to care for the woman. "Jedediah," -script by Mike Friedrich, art by Gray Morrow; A prophet of God feels the call to preach on a planet that has no fear of death, but when he arrives he is told no one will listen to him since they discovered a substance they call Char-ite which they mine; The prophet wishes to see the mines and is warned they are dangerous, but he disregards the warning; When he enters the mine, a blast is set off and he is killed, but finds himself conversing with one of the locals.

 

[sfcityduck]

On 11/28/2009 at 6:45 AM, Zonker said:

And maybe the origin of the Bronze Age terminology was just an attempt by some dealers to move their 1970s books-- I can't really remember when I first started hearing the term, and in what context.

 

Spot on!  I first heard the term in the late 70s and early 80s and it was developed not to move 70s books but to make the 60s books more desirable. The selling point of the term was that it distinguished the much desired and loved books of the later 1950s and 1960s from the drek that was coming out in the 1970s. Creating a segregated "Silver Age" allowed dealers to keep the books of the 1950s and 1960s from being tainted by associations with or comparisons to the books of the 70s. The SA books were being presented as in a different (higher) class as a collectible than the stuff that came later. My own view is that Bronze Age was a meaningless term when invented, with no real point of demarcation that folks agreed upon or could provide a convincing case for.  And the subsequent creation of the copper and modern ages just offers more support for that view.  The whole ages thing is pretty useless at this point. The only starting points that make an ounce of comic history sense are Action 1 and Showcase 4 -- and even then everyone argues about the ending points. Angles on the head of a pin.

[Lazyboy]

On 8/23/2023 at 5:59 PM, sfcityduck said:

On 11/28/2009 at 8:45 AM, Zonker said:

And maybe the origin of the Bronze Age terminology was just an attempt by some dealers to move their 1970s books-- I can't really remember when I first started hearing the term, and in what context.

 

Spot on!  I first heard the term in the late 70s and early 80s and it was developed not to move 70s books but to make the 60s books more desirable. The selling point of the term was that it distinguished the much desired and loved books of the later 1950s and 1960s from the drek that was coming out in the 1970s. Creating a segregated "Silver Age" allowed dealers to keep the books of the 1950s and 1960s from being tainted by associations with or comparisons to the books of the 70s. The SA books were being presented as in a different (higher) class as a collectible than the stuff that came later. My own view is that Bronze Age was a meaningless term when invented, with no real point of demarcation that folks agreed upon or could provide a convincing case for.  And the subsequent creation of the copper and modern ages just offers more support for that view.  The whole ages thing is pretty useless at this point. The only starting points that make an ounce of comic history sense are Action 1 and Showcase 4 -- and even then everyone argues about the ending points. Angles on the head of a pin.

The Bronze Age was shorter than the length of time it took you to respond to this post.

[sfcityduck]

On 8/23/2023 at 5:49 PM, Lazyboy said:

The Bronze Age was shorter than the length of time it took you to respond to this post.

It was over before anyone agreed it existed!