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.

A Look at Comics History: Golden Age to the Bronze Age

I know I've been quiet on the blog for a while, but things are rolling along quite well on other projects and that's taken some slight priority. But here I am again, ready to tackle something rather insane. My real goal here, and this may take a few posts beyond just this one, is to talk about where the comic medium might be going in the future, in terms of form (digital vs. print vs. beamed into the brain), genre, style, etc. But to get down to all of that, it helps to have a quick run through of how the medium has evolved over the years.

So first, some history. As I'm mainly focusing on the American comic form, the best place to start is with what is referred to as the Golden Age. This began, well, is generally agreed upon to have begun, with the release of Action Comics #1 in 1938. This was, of course, the debut of Superman, a character that is ingrained in culture today very firmly outside comics. The Golden Age saw the birth of many of the most famous superhero characters: Batman, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and the Human Torch to name a few. But this era also saw a large amount of genre diversity, too, as Westerns and Romance titles were very strong sellers at that time. As a whole, though, through the Golden Age, superheroes were king.

There are a great many big names in regards to creators of this time, the people working to define the language and style of what American comics would eventually grow to become. Will Eisner, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster,  Jack Kirby, and Milton Caniff are just a few.

But as World War II ended, the popularity of superheroes faded somewhat, and it left room for other genres to begin to grow. War stories, Scifi, Western, Romance, and Horror began to grow in strength and popularity, and many superhero books of the time were ended to make room for these new genres. Around 1954, the comics medium came under fire from certain people in the US Government as causes of juvenile delinquency and other problems. It is a trouble that has happened to many forms of entertainment that young people latch onto, from rock and roll to video games, and is not likely to go away in the future. But the result of this was the creation of the Comics Code Authority, a regulatory board that made sure all comics were 'safe' for children. This was a death sentence for many of the popular titles of the early to mid-1950s, as crime books and horror books were especially targeted. Thus, publishers turned back to superheroes.

In 1956, the Silver Age was born with the release of Showcase #4, the first appearance of the new Flash. At the time, the only surviving superhero books were Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, and none of them were doing well. The Flash revitalized the genre and captured an entire new generation of kids. Soon, Golden Age favorites returned in new form, with a new Justice League, Green Lantern, and others. A few years after this rebirth of the genre that was kicked off by DC Comics, a young Marvel Comics got in on the same genre. With Marvel came the birth of even more well known characters: The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Hulk, Thor, Daredevil, The Avengers, and the return of the Golden Age hero, Captain America.

The Silver Age is very much the birth of what we see today as modern superhero comics. Flaws and problems became vital to the characters, and the stories began to grow more complex as the medium developed and grew. But even more, this is the era of many of the defining creators in American Comics: Jack Kirby, Carmine Infantino, Curt Swan, Gene Colan, Steve Ditko, Joe Kurbert, Neal Adams, and Jim Steranko, to name just a few. Steranko, in particular, helped to push the art into a new direction, with his art on Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. moving from what one expected from comic stories into surrealism.

Around 1970, the Silver Age came to an end. This gave way to the appropriately named Bronze Age, an era of comics that is generally defined by the darker stories and tones that began to creep into comics. Leading up to this era, many of the creators that had been in comics for decades moved on, retired, or were promoted to editorial and less directly creative positions in the various comics companies. This time also saw the beginnings of the shift in audience of comics, moving away from children to a smaller, more specific market of fans.

But for all the negativity that last paragraph implies, there were many interesting developments during the Bronze Age, such as a slight widening of genres being made available again. This mostly began with Marvel Comics release of Conan the Barbarian, which eventually lead to various other pulp books such as John Carter of Mars, Red Sonja, and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. The horror genre also began to regain footing in the Bronze Age, thanks to books like Ghost Rider and Tomb of Dracula.

These books were generally well received and successful, but still, superheroes were king. The Bronze Age saw the death of Spider-Man's longtime girlfriend, Gwen Stacy,  and the death of Aquaman's infant son. Both of these came at the hands of villains in the books, and it was a strong turn towards much darker villains in comics. The book Green Lantern/Green Arrow tackled issues such as drug addiction and racial inequality, and Batman received a resurgence after the years of camp due to the Adam West TV Show of the 1960s. The Bronze Age also saw the growth of racial diversity in comics, with the creation of Luke Cage, Storm, Blade, a new Green Lantern, John Stewart, and others. 

On the art end, House Styles dominated the two major companies of the time, though not without some diversity. DC's general style emulated Neal Adams, while Marvel's a slightly more realistic take on the classic Jack Kirby style. This does not mean art was at all restricted, as this was the era of great artists like George Perez, John Buscema, John Byrne, Frank Miller, and Walter Simonson. Especially important for creators is this era brought the beginnings of a creator's rights movement, with artists and writers getting more open credit for their work and pencillers being allowed to keep their original pages.

Next I'll hit on the Modern Age and then get into where things could be going and where I think they should. Reading that, its quite an egotistical statement on its own, but hey, this is my blog and I mean it for the best.

The Superhero Genre

When the word 'comics' comes up, in many cases, its shorthand for 'superhero comics'. Comics are, as I've addressed a few times and is fairly easy to see looking beyond the surface, a medium and not a genre, but that's neither here nor there. In many ways, American comics ARE superheroes. There are a multitude of reasons for this, but one of the main ones being that, as comics struggled through the 50s and 60s, almost all the other genres that were popular at the time (romance, horror, scifi comics, etc) just didn't survive while superhero books did. A complicated history led to all of this, but right now I want to focus on the genre itself rather than the why.

But before going further, a clarification is important to make here. Superheroes are a genre, yes, but not as specific as something like science fiction. The superhero genre really is a larger, overarching idea that can and does encompass practically any genre one could want. There's science fiction (Fantastic Four, Green Lantern), horror (Hellboy, Ghost Rider), crime/noir (Batman), and various others depending on exactly how you want to nail things down. But while the specifics can alter based on these sub-genres of the superhero idea, the base is there.

And really, the idea of a superhero is pretty simple. So simple that most everyone understands the concept and the genre itself without needing any explanation. Yet superheroes are generally considered childish fantasies or something only for a fringe group of older fans of the characters. This is so extreme that it goes to the point where superheroes alone are the main reason why many people never give comics a chance as a medium, thinking its all ridiculous stories about people fighting crime while wearing tights. Its hard to fault this point of view, but it brings me to a thought that has been on my mind for a while now that I wanted to address.

It has been said many times by people much smarter than I that Superman, Spider-Man, and all the other heroes are the modern equivalents of the classic mythical heroes like Hercules and Perseus. That singular, powerful hero with abilities beyond the normal human, be it in intelligence or actual powers, who comes to save the day for the mortals. While the dressings are different, the core is the same. These classic stories aren't just for kids or some select group, and neither should superheroes. Sure, kids SHOULD have comics for them, and that's a problem all in its own, but the very idea isn't exclusively limited to an age group.

In fact, there is another modern equivalence to all of this that really only removes the tights from the equation: the action hero. Die Hard, Rambo, Predator, the James Bond movies, the Indiana Jones movies, and countless more present characters that are, essentially, superheroes. They are idealized humans in various ways that, in almost all cases, at the very least have the power to take insane punishments and keep fighting. Strip away many of the dressings and here, again, we have mythical heroes of a modern time.

All of these characters, from Hercules to Spider-Man to James Bond, are ingrained in our culture at a very deep level. But if there is so much similarity here, is it really something as simple as tights and powers that hold superheroes back still?

Maybe.

But then again, maybe not.

All of these archetypes of heroes have their own specific uniforms, just some are more innocuous than others. James Bond has his tuxedo and gadgets, Indiana Jones his fedora and bullwhip, Perseus has his polished shield and helm of darkness, and Batman his tights and utility belt. Signature identifying pieces of all these characters and they all tend to share a great deal with one another. But these days, we tend to accept the action hero with normal clothes and a gun, with the amazing power to never be shot unless its dramatically appropriate, over someone with bulletproof skin, saying that the latter is somehow more of a childish fantasy.

It isn't, of course. They're both equally ridiculous, and that's really what I've been working my way around constantly here. Not only that, but it isn't necessarily something that will always remain so. Trends and cultural ideas have a habit of changing, and the rise of superheroes in movies seems to be pushing them into a more accepted cultural place. Obviously, I think this is a very good thing. There is much more to many superheroes than the fact that they just punch bad guys, a strong contrast to most modern action heroes that...well, just shoot bad guys.

The real hope I have behind all of this, which I think is the hope of most any sane person that enjoys superheroes, is that the rise of superhero movies does help turn more to the comics. There is something for everyone in the medium, kids and adults alike, and even if a person swears they hate superheroes...there's a chance they might just not have found the right one yet.

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.