Why is it called the Golden Age if most of the stories were actually not very good?

Why is it called the Golden Age if most of the stories were actually not very good?

The first age. Sold morebthan other ages too. Created all genres of comics.

The ages are named after a concept from Greek mythology, in a chronological order.

"Golden Age" means the peak of a medium, the most successful, most mainstream period.

If we surpass the golden age in terms of success, do we become the new golden age or do we ascend even further beyond?

What age are we in now?

>the most successful, most mainstream period.
I believe that's silver age.

You deserve to spend the rest of your life without eyesight.

Digital age

Nope. Comics in the Golden Age sold far and away more than in any other era.

"Modern age" because you can't name an age until after it's passed, stupid.

>Comics in the Golden Age sold far and away more than in any other era.

Yeah, in the Golden Age comics had little to no social stigma against them. People of all ages bought comics. The moral crusade against comics and the Comic Code Authority pretty much killed the idea that comics were for anyone but children, at least in the mainstream.


Also worth mentioning that it was a widely available and cheap form of mass entertainment well before it was common to have a tv in the home

If we accepting Greek poets' chronology - Iron Age.
>"Modern age" because you can't name an age until after it's passed, stupid.
Hesiod would disagree.

>it was a widely available and cheap

Yeah and also much less convoluted and dense. You could buy Action Comics and get a nice fat book of comics featuring action, and read it on your way home or something.

Truly the Golden Age.

Not every era is an "Age". Golden, Silver, and sometimes Bronze. After that it stops applying.

The idea is already emerging amongst comic historians that the previous age ended in/around 2011. Whether that was the end of the Dark Age, or a separate age afterwards is still up for debate, but it definitely ended then. 2011 marked a rather massive shift in the comics market, though it is mostly an expression of things that had been brewing for a while. No, it's not just diversity shit, but that is a small part of it.

I should also mention that it is no coincidence that when DC reboots, a new comics age ALWAYS begins. It's happened 3 times now, and it's likely to happen again in the future.

My mentor personally categorizes comics into:
Antiquity (20's and before)
Golden Age (30's and 40's roughly)
Silver Age (50's and 60's roughly)
Bronze Age (70's and early 80's roughly)
Dark Age (80's to ~2004)
______ Age (~2005 to 2011) [he has suggested the "Digital Age" or the "Indie Age"]
and of course the new Modern Age, from 2011 to the present

There are two books I know of that are coming out within the next 2 years that will begin to codify something like this, so it's kind of a fun time. It's always a great feeling when you finally get far away enough from history to observe its truths.

>DC reboots always mark ages
>Infinite Crisis, a half-reboot, happened around the turn from Dark Age to Digital Age, a half-transition

hypercrisis?

no

>modern age
>can't name it until it ends.
I hope modern art gets called Shite art after the fad passes.

The Shit Age

retard

>I should also mention that it is no coincidence that when DC reboots, a new comics age ALWAYS begins.

This has no basis in reality.

You can't compare what readers find epic now with what they did back in the day. If you're that stupid then maybe you shouldn't be reading comics in the first place.

I didn't say it was necessarily causational. But it's also not a coincidence. It was just an interesting note.

Silver Age reboot happened around the start of the Silver Age. Silver Age. Crisis happened around the start of the Dark Age. And New 52 happened at the start of the current age. That's all.

You seem like you're reading something I probably didn't write.

Not to mention the fact that back in the good old days you'd get a far bigger bang for your buck. If you bought Action Comics of Detective Comics for example you'd get a ton of stories in them, similar to the way Japan does things. Nowadays you have to pay for individual stories, which is really annoying.

>calls the 90's the dark age
That's wrong this is the dark age. 90's comics are way better than the shit we have now

That's not why it's called the dark age you FUCKING IDIOT

I know if we are going by Mythology your right but I can't see the 80s to early 2000s as the dark ages. Maybe in tone but when it comes to Sales and mass appeal it hasn't been topped since

It's called the dark age BECAUSE of the subject matter though, not sales. Dark Age is all about the influence of Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and many others. Their imitators (good and bad) defined a very distinct era of comics until the reconstructionist works of Busiek and Waid, which paved the way for the Digital Age.

Shouldn't the Dark Age start at '85? Crisis on Infinite Earths, Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and Superman killing Zod all happened so close together.

That's basically what I said?

What would have been considered an average sales number for a Golden Age comic?

The notion of the Bronze Age starting in the 70s is pretty recent. Just a few years ago the agreed upon end of the Silver Age was the mid-80s with the Bronze age only lasting to the mid-to-late 90s.

>My mentor
What the fuck?
>______ Age (~2005 to 2011) [he has suggested the >"Digital Age" or the "Indie Age"] and of course the new Modern Age, from 2011 to the present

I'd say these are all one age, the film age. Because that's the only thing having to do with comics most people give a shit about.

The 90's are not about dark subject matter. They were notable because of comics like Youngblood and Spawn selling a shitload. Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and American Flagg are bronze age comics

Iron Age is often used for what is also called the Dark Age, I guess because they don't want to have the negative connotation that the Dark Age carries.

Comics literally sold in the millions back then. Today a comic is a smash hit if it sells 100k.

The Bronze Age has become a more popular concept because for a long time many people didn't recognize the lasting contributions of people like Denny O'Neil, since they were overshadowed by the British invasion later on. However, most people cannot comfortably lump 70's comics into the same age as 90's comics. The Dark Age was not a continuation of the Bronze Age, but it certainly built upon it. The Dark Age marked a completely different era of comics driven by the collector market, a huge wave of fresh talent, a very distinct stylistic theme across the board, the retirement/deaths of many of the top silver age talent, the rise in non-superhero stuff like Sandman, the rise of several new companies to rival the Big Two, and many other things. There's simply no logical reason to lump that into the Bronze Age, and there's no reason to lump O'Neil into the Dark Age. They are distinct eras historically.

I don't think you understand how this works.

The three historians I am in contact with all say they prefer the term Iron Age, but once something sticks there's no point in trying to overrule it. Language is a bitch.

>doesn't have a comics mentor
How will you gain more power? Don't you have anyone to train with?

Bronze age was marked by a slight decline in Cape comics, so Marvel and DC had to experiment with horror, war, martial arts and other genres. So we had Swamp Thing, Man Thing, weird war tales, house of mystery etc.

>fad
You do know like Picasso paintings and shit are well over a century old at this point right?

Golden age supes was way better than silver age supes. In the golden age he was stopping innocent women from getting executed and fighting wife beaters. In the silver age he got turned into a complete buffoon/douchebag, one issue he's cursed by magic that makes him fat or whatever, another he's turning Jimmy/Lois' life into a living hell to teach them some lesson.

>______ Age (~2005 to 2011) [he has suggested the "Digital Age" or the "Indie Age"]
The Event Age

He really did start out as a pretty straightforward power fantasy, basically "wouldn't it be nice if some sort of superman could just kick the shit out of all the assholes in the world?" Shockingly that character was a lot more popular than perfect space Jesus

>Bronze age was marked by a slight decline in Cape comics
>slight decline
>slight

DC nearly went out of business (TWICE!) and most retailers stopped carrying comics altogether due to rising cover prices. It was an IMPLOSION.

The Bronze Age was basically carried by MAD Magazine, Archie, Conan, and Spider-Man.

You understand that Picasso was a technical master, right?

hmm yes,, very interesting, You seem to be quite educated in the field of retarded bullshit.

I'm not sure what your point is

>The idea is already emerging amongst comic historians that the previous age ended in/around 2011. Whether that was the end of the Dark Age

More like the beginning.

What about the period when Zero Hour came out? Like the early to mid 90's? That kind of era would be a part of an even Darker Age with Marvel filing for bankrupcy.

I disagree with terming the 80's to early 2000's a Dark Age. Tons of fantastic work like Hellboy, Sandman, etc. came out, there was a mass exploration of new ideas and it birthed an incredible array of new talent.

I get its reffering to tone, but it gives the wrong impression of stagnation and poor quality about what was really a sort of Renaissance for the medium.

Why are they called "comics" when not all of them are funny?

Dark Age as in Things got dark, bro! not dark as in bad quality. Watchman, V for Vendetta, Dark Knight Returns, Daredevil, etc all were popular seminal works from this period that were grim and gritty.

From what I understood the stories you mentioned were what the Dark Age writers imitated on superficial level, thus creating a lot of dark style with no substance, i.e. Spawn and shit.

Dark Age is an unfortunate name, yes, but we can't really change it. Once a word makes itself known, it can't be un-known. I prefer Iron Age for neutrality's sake, but we don't get to choose how words and phrases emerge and which ones take root.

Seriously? Batman and Question were so cool in the Bronze Age. Did nobody care about them at the time?

There was no Bronze Age Question. And Batman sold fine.

It was unnecessary weird shit like Kobra that fucked DC.

>Spawn
>no substance

The early Spawn comics had plenty of substance.
Good writing. Good Art.

It did go down hill after a while though.

>zap! Kapow! Comics aren't just for kids any more.
It's hard to appreciate now what a huge shift in public public perception happened in the mid 80s.

I've also hear the period of the mid 90's to early 2000s referred to as the chromium age due to the increasing reliance on marketing gimmicks

Chromium Age never really solidified because a comic Age must have a ton of very stark and era-specific qualities from the preceding and following ages. Chromium relies on a single factor, a factor which is very flimsy at best. The Silver Age was almost ENTIRELY reliant on marketing gimmicks (e.g. SUPERMAN FUCKS JIMMY OLSEN UP THE ASS, NOT AN IMAGINARY STORY!!!).

Yes, the Dark Age had its own set of gimmicks, but they have a lot more to do with crossovers or the collector market, which are both important elements of the Dark Age as a whole. Chromium just doesn't make sense to most historians.

Sup Forums is so stupid, why is this board so dumb? What happened with the nerds ate smart meme?

> my mentor

Please explain

Fuck Mort Weisinger, Wertham and the CCA tbqh

Morrison delivers a very interesting analysis of this period in Supergods, he proposes it actually backfired on DCs editorial intentions. They were trying to make the most milquetoast comic possible but ended up delivering a deleuzian lysergic nightmare on the minds of the young readers.

I would call the age we're in now the Cinematic Age.

He's saying that contemporary art (what we're referring to as "modern" art even though that was a movement in of itself) mimics the works of Picasso and other cubist/dadaists without knowing and/ without nay sort of regard for technical fundamentals.

>the nerds ate smart meme?
I think those are zombies, or nutriologists I dunno know.

I've studied under a comics historian for the past two and a half years. Originally I was there for a research paper, but I've since graduated and became a pupil of sorts. Comics history is a lot more complex than people think, and there's so much information that can't be simply written down. It has to be understood. So I study under him so that when he dies, the knowledge is preserved and hopefully elucidated.

I know it sounds old fashioned but I've learned that literary apprenticeship is surprisingly common. It's not my job or anything (I don't get paid) but as far as I'm concerned, it is my legacy.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised people take this so seriously on an academic level.

That's not really true. The post-Bronze Age period is pretty commonly referred to as the Dark Age. The current era hasn't been named yet because you usually don't give a name to the time you're in.

Its the Dark Age because of tone, not quality.

I've heard Copper Age tossed around. What was that? Another proposed name for the post Bronze Age era?

Yeah, just another name for Dark Age.

What really fucked DC was a snowstorm that made it so that no comics could be delivered.

>I've also hear the period of the mid 90's to early 2000s referred to as the chromium age due to the increasing reliance on marketing gimmicks

Oooh, I like that.

I miss holofoil covers.

>there's so much information that can't be simply written down

Is it possible to give an example of that?
Which, I understand, involves writing it down by typing it up for us.
But I'm really curious as to what you mean.

Well, part of understanding the history of comics means understanding comics itself. Scott McCloud obviously has several books on how they work in the practical sense, but even deeper than that are the fundamentals of how people perceive comics.

One example is the way in which text and images relay information to each other repeatedly in a very small timeframe (a few seconds) despite being perceived as two separate but cooperating entities. Like I said, it's hard to write without providing ample visual aids, but think about the way you faintly perceive the image in a panel while you're reading the text. You're always seeing that image out of the corner of your eye, and with each new word you read, the image may change in very slight ways (or vice versa, as looking over an image more closely may reveal a nuance to the text). That process is happening dozens of times per second when you read a comic.

But the thing is, that process has been utilized very differently by different creators throughout comic history. In fact, most popular comics in any age didn't understand or even think about this concept. Despite that, we can track the changes in its use over time.

Comics, despite being one of the oldest artforms, is still in its infancy in terms of understanding all the modes of expression due to decades of stunted growth due to a variety of factors most here are probably familiar with. Compare that to cinema which is only about a century old, but it's had such accelerated growth because of its economic fortitude granting access to the most productive minds and audiences. But even though comics is stunted, these kinds of concepts are always there, even if they're rarely being used. This is just one example of hundreds.

What does mentor man think of BvS?

Honestly I don't know. He never really said anything about it. I'm not even sure he's seen it.

Huh. Thank you for taking the time to explain that.

Wanna know how I know you're a capefag?

Wanna know how I know you haven't been reading comics for very long?

>Why is it called the Golden Age if most of the stories were actually not very good?

It's not called the GOODen age, dum-dum.

>______ Age (~2005 to 2011) [he has suggested the "Digital Age" or the "Indie Age"]
Not that it's off-base necessarily, but doesn't a six-year span seem like an oddly short period by which to define an age?

Indeed it does, which is quite interesting. But that's what happens when you have so much social change in so small of a time period. The internet changed comics a ton (as well as intense fractionalization), but the new age we're in is quite distinct in both content and production.