A Look at Comics History: The Modern Age (Part 1)

With my last post, I got into a very brief run through of the history of American comics from the Golden Age to the Bronze Age, roughly 1938 to 1985. So in one long post, I hit on about fifty years of comics. A great deal was skimmed over to keep things somewhat brief, and later I'll remedy that by making more detailed posts about the eras in particular to flesh things out. Right now, I'm going to focus on what is referred to as the Modern Age of comics, running from 1985 or so until we decide something significant has changed in the industry, which is likely coming soon with the advent of digital comics. Maybe then we'll name it something better than "Modern Age" because the last thing we need is a Post-Modern and Post-Post Modern Age. Art History classifies enough in ambiguous ways already.

This will be a fair bit more detailed than the last post, since I'm only focusing on one period of time, and also might come across as more negative in some places. I do my best to keep things positive and not start screaming about the end of comics and all that, but there will be some hyperbole coming that I likely just can't avoid...so I apologize in advance. And anyone I end up saying negative things about, I feel the need to say that I'm not judging these people personally, but only the work.

It should also be noted that this is going to be divided up into multiple posts, as there are many points to get across. This time in comics has seen quite a lot happening, and many of the effects are still with the industry, for good and for ill, so I'm going to arbitrarily divide these up and try to hit as much as I can.

Okay, that out of the way, let's get into this.

As we're technically still in it, really setting a true start on the Modern Age of Comics is a bit hard to do. In some ways, it was much more of a general shifting of things instead of a very dramatic change, such as what occurred from the Golden Age to the Silver Age. Many things that started in the Bronze Age would carry on into the Modern Age, especially in the early years, and become a defining piece of what we consider comics today. The metric I tend to use to define the beginning of the Modern Age is the DC event, Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Crisis on Infinite Earths is a very important series when it comes to how comics have developed, so I'm going to spend a bit of time on it, specifically. The series was a 12-issue stand alone title, written by Marv Wolfman and pencilled by George Perez, that started in 1985, the goal of which was to simplify the DC universe. Until this point, DC had employed the idea of the Multiverse to explain different versions of the same character. This meant there were a handful of Earths with various numbers assigned to them on which different heroes lived. For obvious reasons, this created a bit of a quagmire when it came to story, and so the idea came to wipe it all away and start over. This series essentially ended the DC universe up until that point, killing a great deal of characters, most notably Supergirl and Barry Allen, the Flash that kicked off the Silver Age. The long-running comics Superman, The Flash, and Wonder Woman were all ended and, after the series, relaunched with new origin stories to fit into this new world.

What makes Crisis on Infinite Earths significant is the literal divide between the past and the present. DC removed the old to start over, as they've done just recently again. Almost more importantly, though, is that this series, combined with Marvel's Secret Wars in 1984, began the long running tradition of the so-called Event Comic. These are major stories that take all the heroes from the respective publishers and throw them together in one huge, supposedly game-changing story. Its a practice that has, in the past few years, become a near annual tradition for both Marvel and DC, and something that many decry as harming the industry as a whole.

But there is, obviously, more to the start of the Modern Age than literal breaks in history and events. The rise of anti-heroes and darker stories, something that started in the Bronze Age, came to a head in the mid-80s. There are two defining books for modern comics, especially when it comes to darker themes: Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and Batman: Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. Both books were unlike anything that had come before.  

Watchmen took a very hard look at superheroes, turning from the usual positive portrayal and instead seeing the characters as mentally damaged in some way or another. There really are no heroes in the book, and the focus is entirely on a more realistic portrayal of the world and what kind of person would put on a costume to right wrongs. Rape, murder, extreme violence, and genocide are all there in the open, and while the book handles them well, many creators influenced by it would seemingly miss the point: These characters are not to be cheered for the horrible things they do. This is an important point, as many creators instead decided to embrace the violence and negativity, something that many fans of the time also happily accepted.

Dark Knight Returns is similar in some ways to Watchmen, but altogether different at the same time. The story is about Bruce Wayne coming back from retirement to fight crime again, now an old, bitter man. There is an air of negativity and distrust in the book that fuels the main themes and drive. Gotham City hates Batman and nearly all other heroes are no longer around, save for Superman who is just a pawn for the US Government. The violence here is, again, very heavy, and the themes of darkness and oppression really do reflect the time.

The reason I highlight these two titles, specifically, is the dramatic shift in tone of comics that they represent. Regardless of one's opinion on the books themselves, they were both monumental influences on everything that came after. It quickly became necessary to have dark, violent stories with anti-heroes in stories just to have them sell. Wolverine's rise to popularity is a testament to this, but he was not alone. Other characters were also created, or grew into, this need for darkness and harder themes: Spawn, Cable, Deadpool, and Venom to throw some names out there.

Along a similar vein, major characters were killed or replaced in the early 1990s. In 1992, DC killed Superman. Batman had his back broken and was replaced for a time. Captain America was fired. Long-time Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, was turned into a villain and then replaced by Kyle Rayner. Stories seemed designed only to shake things up and get quick sales, with another even more dangerous trend evolving.

Specifically, I'm referring to the comic book speculator's market. Around the late 80s and early 90s, the idea began to go around that comics were really worth quite a lot of money. This was perpetuated by the sale of classic comics, Action Comics #1 and other major landmarks from decades ago, at extremely high prices. Now, the reason these old comics sold for so much was for the simple fact that they hadn't been in print for decades and were, and this is important, actually rare. Somehow, though, publishers and speculators missed this. People with no interest in the stories would buy comics hoping to send their kids to college by selling it. Publishers started to create gimmicks like foil covers, glow-in-the-dark covers, and other ridiculous ideas simple because they sold.

The problem here is simple, though. The reason the comics did sell was because all the people speculating expected them to be worth tons of money. But the publishers printed metric tons of them, meaning they weren't at all rare and weren't worth a damned thing. Unsurprisingly to anyone with any sense of how these things work, the comic market crashed. Everything tanked, with Marvel filing for bankruptcy in 1996 and the entire market for comic books nearly drying up entirely.

It has been around 15 years and the industry still hasn't completely recovered from this crash.

The Ideal of the Hero

This is going to be a bit of a shorter post than I tend to do, but its a smaller, more concentrated subject that I at least want to hit in some small way. Before I dive into it, though, I feel the need to mention one thing.

I'm thinking the way I'll be doing the more detailed talks on specific artists, such as the Chris Samnee post from a few days ago, is to try and do them once a week. Possibly more in a week, but I don't want to rush them and would prefer to give the artists I talk about a good run through, so once a week seems a safe aim. Admittedly, any schedules I set for this blog are flexible, but hey, worth mentioning.

So with that out of the way, let me get on with this.

I was listening to the wonderful podcast, Word Balloon, hosted by the amazingly entertaining John Suintres, as he did a very long conversation spread over parts with Martin Pasko, a long-time comics creator who has worked since the 70s and also done quite a large amount of television work through the years. The great part about the interviews with Mr. Pasko is his first-hand experience with a great deal of the goings-on at DC through the 70s, which can shine a light on a very interesting period of time for comics, especially for someone my age that wasn't even born yet.

As the discussion rolled around various subjects, it eventually turned to a subject that has struck me far more than I thought it would. The idea of what our heroes should be. Specifically, Mr. Pasko brought this up in regards to the idea that characters like Superman would never have killed back then, whereas today that kind of action is more acceptable.

Now, I was born in the mid-80s, and I've grown up with entertainment in various forms that have created the idea that killing is just normal for many styles of dramatic fiction. This extends from the general faceless deaths from the likes of Stormtroopers in Star Wars to the deaths of major villains to the deaths of heroes themselves. Its just a normal part of storytelling to me, and in fact something I handle without thinking in my own work. People fight, eventually someone dies, the story moves on.

Before I go further, I want to make one point clear. I don't think any of this means that I'm some warped, horrible human being that doesn't see death as a real thing, or any of those other hilariously bad arguments against video game and entertainment violence. I'm speaking strictly in the form of storytelling, and specifically with how it relates to the idea of a hero.

So, now I dive into that. For a very, very long time in comics, death was a very rare, very serious thing. Uncle Ben's death is why Peter Parker is who he is as Spider-Man, and even moreso after the death of Gwen Stacy. The death of Bruce Wayne's parents shapes his need to fight crime so the same thing doesn't happen to others...and probably out of some twisted sense of revenge, depending on your interpretation of how crazy Bruce Wayne might be. But, on the whole, the heroes themselves didn't kill. Punch? Yes. Kick? Yes. But the use of lethal force was mostly restricted to WW2 era comics.

This changed fairly dramatically, as it did in quite a few forms of entertainment, somewhere in the 70s and 80s and grew from there. For comics, the 80s were a definite era of change on the whole. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's Daredevil: Born Again, and X-Men's Dark Phoenix Saga from Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, and John Byrne are just a few examples of ways that comics seriously changed in the 80s. The more upbeat comics of the previous few decades began to give way to grittier, angrier, and more cynical stories that tended to have more strongly portrayed violence than before.

Again, this doesn't make them bad. In fact, those stories are all still some of the best comics has to offer, and those are just super hero books, I'm not even getting into indie stuff from the time. But this gave way to the slow move into the stereotype of 90s comics, with giant guns, ultra-violence, and generally an over-the-top atmosphere that I'd be willing to argue is one of the many reasons the entire comic market nearly collapsed.

But comics survived, as they tend to, even if things are smaller now. Still, we now live in an era where the stories in comics are more grounded and real. There's still a certain hardness to many titles, though the overall feel of a heavy darkness and cynical feel is mostly gone. The heroes aren't necessarily as dark as they were, but on the whole, we definitely don't have a return to some of the lighter, older days. In some ways, this is probably for the better, as comics today are full of absolutely amazing stories and artists doing things that wouldn't be possible anytime before.

And this ideal of a hero sits in my mind and I wonder how that has changed. While we still have characters like Superman, Captain America, Spider-Man, and Batman that vow not to kill, it can and does happen. Sometimes for dramatic purposes, sometimes in the more simplistic idea of the last Captain America carrying a gun. There was nothing wrong with it, what with Bucky carrying the mantle and having fought in the war, he'd definitely use a gun and that's fine, but there's no way he didn't kill a few bad guys with it. Otherwise, why use a gun?

The others, too, have all killed in some form through the years. Partly just due to the nature of an ongoing character over decades and decades. New stories are necessary and death and killing are definitely ripe for drama. And I wouldn't say this diminishes the characters in any way either, if anything it could round them out and make them more multi-faceted when handled by a good writer.

But in general, it seems that the idea of the hero that kills is normal today. Think for a moment about a hero of some kind, they don't even have to have superpowers. Is it greater to solve a dangerous situation by finding a peaceful way to save all lives or are some evils just too evil? We seem to definitely be in the age of the latter, and for obvious reasons. But in some ways, it can be hard to look at the opposite, the hero that never takes a life and never lets someone die, as naive and childish.

Is it?

I don't think it is. I think, at the purest form, a hero is better than the rest of us. That's the point. They stand above the masses and do what everyone else can't. They find a way to make the impossible possible. So in this time where it is fairly widely accepted that some people are just too evil to live, isn't a person that can stand above that and say "No, there is another way." and then find that other way, a true hero above us all?

The ability to forgive, unconditionally is somewhere in most of the major religious beliefs of the world, but usually its above the level of the normal man. Isn't that where a hero is? So instead of it being naive, can't this be a great thing?

Clearly, I think there's something to this idea. I do honestly believe that, especially in times like we live in, the heroes that can defy conventional wisdom and save everyone may be what we need in our fiction and entertainment. At the same time, I don't think this should be everything. There's room for everything, but it seems that today, the truly good hero barely exists anymore. I think its time someone found the right way to bring it back, and while I don't claim to know how, with the current crop of writers and creators amongst comics and the entertainment industry as a whole, someone out there is smart enough.