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What is the next age of comics?
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48 posts in this topic

2 hours ago, valiantman said:

12 out of 20 is "most"... The first 100 issues of Spider-Man have more day-to-day market activity than all of 1950s DC.  ...and what is Showcase #3?  Golden Age?

Fine - say "late-1950s DC, 1960s everything" - and the people aren't asleep yet.  What's the first Silver Age Superman?  ...well, that depends on... and... snooze.

No one entering this hobby is going to be impressed by our pontificating on themes and pointing out how Sgt. Rock is a Silver Age character who fought in Golden Age wars but he wasn't around back then.  We might as well put on wizard hats and roll dodecahedrons when they ask a question like "What's the Bronze Age?"

Or... we could say "comics from the 1970s".  

I think what you're ignoring is that many comic enthusiasts *like* arguing about stuff like what the beginning and ends of ages are. Or whether certain periods deserved to be their own age or part of another. An argument about what comics were published in the '60s would put me to sleep. 

I happen to find comics history interesting. If people have an alternate opinion on the span of comic ages and a good reason for identifying those dates that isn't simply "eBay says so" then I'm up for hearing them out.

Edited by GeeksAreMyPeeps
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29 minutes ago, GeeksAreMyPeeps said:

I think what you're ignoring is that many comic enthusiasts *like* arguing about stuff like what the beginning and ends of ages are. Or whether certain periods deserved to be their own age or part of another. An argument about what comics were published in the '60s would put me to sleep. 

I happen to find comics history interesting. If people have an alternate opinion on the span of comic ages and a good reason for identifying those dates that isn't simply "eBay says so" then I'm up for hearing them out.

Sounds fine, as long as we can agree there will never be a final answer that everyone agrees on... except... comics from the 1960s are comics from the 1960s.  Comics from the 1970s are 1970s comics.  "Modern" is more and more wrong from the moment someone says it.  More ages past Golden, Silver, and Bronze are ridiculous because they don't correspond to any age system and there's nothing about paper comic books that has anything to do with copper... it's a dumb idea followed by a dumb argument about what years are the start and end of the dumb idea.  1980s comics are comics from the 1980s.  Copper is a metal, the primary component in bronze, and has nothing to do with comic books or any classical ages of mankind or olympic medals or whatever other weak reasoning is behind using the first three ages for funny books.

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3 hours ago, valiantman said:

Sounds fine, as long as we can agree there will never be a final answer that everyone agrees on... except... comics from the 1960s are comics from the 1960s.  Comics from the 1970s are 1970s comics.  "Modern" is more and more wrong from the moment someone says it.  More ages past Golden, Silver, and Bronze are ridiculous because they don't correspond to any age system and there's nothing about paper comic books that has anything to do with copper... it's a dumb idea followed by a dumb argument about what years are the start and end of the dumb idea.  1980s comics are comics from the 1980s.  Copper is a metal, the primary component in bronze, and has nothing to do with comic books or any classical ages of mankind or olympic medals or whatever other weak reasoning is behind using the first three ages for funny books.

I think "Modern" is a sort of catch-all until we see that there was a commonality amongst books that were published after the end of the most recent defined "age" that current books don't share. Then, a new age starts to take form. Of course, it will take years until the edges of that age become more defined. Just as it takes time for small particles sloshed about in liquid to settle on the bottom.

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I stopped reading in the mid 90’s and just started again last year. The comics from the 90’s don’t feel anything like today’s books to me. The cover layouts are different, the paper is different, the art and coloring are different. I have a hard time understanding the continuity between all the different volumes of the same books now. To me the copper and bronze age books feel a LOT more similar to each other than 90’s books do to today’s books.

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14 hours ago, BrooksR said:

I stopped reading in the mid 90’s and just started again last year. The comics from the 90’s don’t feel anything like today’s books to me. The cover layouts are different, the paper is different, the art and coloring are different. I have a hard time understanding the continuity between all the different volumes of the same books now. To me the copper and bronze age books feel a LOT more similar to each other than 90’s books do to today’s books.

Fair point.

Somewhere recently, FlyingDonut singled out Daredevil (vol. 2) # 1 (1998) as an incredibly important book and (possible) start to a new age. Why?

I can't speak for him, but to me it's key for several reasons (beyond the storyline, which is garbage because Smith killed Karen Page).

  • Major Marvel series re-numbering - a trend that would play out over and over again in the years and decades to come.
  • Began the trend of story decompression - a huge shift away from one-off single-issue stories to made-for-trade storylines. This continued over the next few years with Ultimate Spider-Men, Ultimate X-Men and (especially) Ultimate FF (which took 5 issues to tell what FF # 1 did in one); and again in Hulk # 34 and ASM (vol. 2) # 30.

The end result?

By 2002 most Marvel books, at least, were nearly unrecognizable from their 1997 counterparts -- which still felt like 1988 - or 1994 - comics. 2002 superhero books were nothing of the sort.

Edited by Gatsby77
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I think the Golden Age ended with the introduction of the comics code. Everything had to change from every continuing publisher immediately. And shortly thereafter are the DC silver age reboots, changes in titles, movement away from horror, etc. And Martian Manhunter gets included in SA instead of GA, which seems to fit him better to me. 

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