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Post by Slam_Bradley on Sept 21, 2014 13:05:10 GMT -5
I'm considering a project and as such I'm thinking about when the Bronze Age began. I'm leaning pretty heavily toward 1970. It's a nice number, puts the Silver Age at just over 15 years, and there are definitely idicia of change. O'Neill/Adams starts working in Batman and Detective and Green Arrow. Conan makes his debut at the end of the year. Kirby moves to DC. Captain Stacy bites it in Spider-Man.
Then we have what I consider proto-Bronze books. Adams on Brave & Bold and X-Men. Steranko's SHIELD and Cap. Probably the Warren magazines, but I think that is beyond where I personally want to go.
So tell me comic nuts...am I too early? Too late. All wet. What Silver Age books have a Bronze Age aesthetic, if there is such a thing.
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Post by Hoosier X on Sept 21, 2014 13:53:10 GMT -5
I go with 1970 as well. You start the year with Dick Grayson going off to college and Bruce Wayne moving out of Wayne Manor and into the Wayne Tower (or whatever it's called). Then the first Neal Adams story in Detective Comics. Pretty soon, you have Green Lantern/Green Arrow, the first Conan, Kirby's last Fantastic Four, Man-Bat and the death of Captain Stacy.
When I read the Essential Marvel reprint collections, I try to pinpoint the exact moment the Bronze Age began for each character. It's a fun little exercise. My favorite is the Hulk. He's just sort of roaming around, doing the Silver Age thing, fighting the Glob, the Leader, the Rhino, the Absorbing Man, then BAM, he hits Hulk #126 and suddenly it's the Bronze Age.
The supernatural setting of the cult of the Nameless Ones is a lot closer to a Satanic cult than Marvel had been writing up to this point. It's the first appearance of the Norrises, and Barbara especially would be a frequent Hulk associate in the Bronze Age when she became Valkyrie. And then there's the Dr. Strange appearance. I don't think they had even met before this, but this association would be common for both of them (all three if you count Valkyrie) as they meet as The Defenders in the Bronze Age.
It's just a fun (for me) thing I do with comics from 1970.
(And it fails miserably with Wonder Woman! Is mod Wonder Woman a Silver Age thing, or a Bronze Age thing? It starts in 1968, and I feel really weird pointing to mod Wonder Woman as some innovative concept that started a new age! And it doesn't end until 1972. So I just consider mod Wonder Woman to be a separate age, the Mod Age, from Silver Age or Bronze Age Wonder Woman. (But keep in mind, the Mod Age only applies to Wonder Woman!))
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Post by Deleted on Sept 21, 2014 13:53:49 GMT -5
1970 is the year I see cited most frequently, and I think it fits. I've mostly read early Silver and late Bronze, so I'm not really familiar with 1970 or the years immediately preceding or following but what I have read has a very different feel to the Silver Age stuff.
Out of curiosity, what are you using as the end of the Bronze Age?
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Post by Action Ace on Sept 21, 2014 14:01:22 GMT -5
That's the year I go with, at least from the DC point of view. Superman makes his changeover with #233 in November of that year as Weisinger is replaced by Schwartz. The new era of Batman starts in late 1969. Adams/ O'Neil start on Green Lantern. Teen Titans switch over to the Mr. Jupiter era. World's Finest has Superman team up with someone other than Batman. Silver Age superheroes like Aquaman, Atom ,Hawkman, Adam Strange, Metal Men and the Challengers of the Unknown have either already disappeared or on their last legs.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Sept 21, 2014 14:07:44 GMT -5
1985. Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns and Crisis make a pretty clear demarcation.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 21, 2014 18:16:46 GMT -5
1970-1985.
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Post by Pharozonk on Sept 21, 2014 18:43:38 GMT -5
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Post by hondobrode on Sept 21, 2014 19:58:38 GMT -5
Yes to 1970 but wasn't it 1986 when TDKR, Watchmen and COIE hit ?
EDIT : Duh. That would mark the beginning of the next age, hence, 1985 being the end of the Bronze Age.
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Post by Prince Hal on Sept 21, 2014 20:22:56 GMT -5
Slam, I think you're right about 1970, but I think you're also right about that twilit period between the Silver and Bronze Ages when the horror books started to become popular, the old heroes were struggling, and the new breed of artists (Adams, Aparo, Steranko, Wrightson) and writers (Friedrich, O'Neil, Skeates) were making their marks and remaking DC (And don't forget about Dick Giordano!)
I always saw the switch to 15-cent comics as one indicator of the end of the Silver Age.
At DC, that penultimate month of 12-centers (March 1969) included...
the JLA story that, however poorly, explained J'onn J'onnz' absence and sent him packing;
the final issue of Adventure with the Legion;
the last issue of The Spectre, by which time one of the most ballyhooed returns of the Silver Age had been reduced to the level of Cain and Abel in the two House books.
By that time...
The "team" books like DP and Challengers were all gone or almost gone;
House of Mystery was about a year into its reincarnation as the first of the soon-to-be-many horror anthologies: Unexpected had followed suit and Witching Hour #3 and Phantom Stranger #1 came out;
Atom and Hawkman's titles had each been canceled, and their combined title was three issues from the same fate;
DC was throwing all kinds of stuff against the wall as superhero comics were taking that same kind of beating as they had back in the late 40s, with titles like Anthro, Bat Lash, Creeper, Angel and the Ape, Captain Action, etc.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 21, 2014 20:36:52 GMT -5
For me one of the harbingers of the Bronze Age that occurred in the late Silver Age ('68) was the end of the split books at Marvel. When ToS became Iron Man and Captain America solo titles, TTA became Hulk and Sub-Mariner, and Strange Tales became Nick Fury and Doc Strange. The story content and tone began to morph then for me, and move from the Silver Age zeitgesit to the Bronze Age one. Those last 2 years of the 60's were a transistional period that set the stage, so that by '70 the Bronze Age was mostly in full bloom, though there were still a few stragglers lingering in the Silver Age mode for a bit of the 70s. It was Marvel getting it's feet firmly underneath them and expanding their line now that they had emerged from the distribution shadow of DC's control, setting the stage for the explosion of new books that characterized Marvel's 70's output.
As for the end, 1986 was characterized as the year of the DC Renaissance, so the nadir of the Bronze Age looks good at 1985, but just like the end of the Silver Age, there were harbingers of the end of the Bronze prior to that-the advent of the mini-series in the early 80s changing the way stories were told with preset numbers of issues rather than everything being ongoings being one of them, but others included the decline of Charlton, the rise of publishers like First, Eclipse and others, the Epic imprint offering creator owned opportunities at the mainstream level, Moore's Swamp Thing, Kirby's move to Pacific Comics, etc. etc. so that by the end of 1985 while COIE is in full swing and Watchmen and BKR are on the horizon, the Bronze Age zeitgest had fallen by the wayside, though it too may have lingered here and there a bit in places.
-M
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Sept 21, 2014 20:54:18 GMT -5
Kirby moving to DC at that point in time felt like an end of an era
The debut of Conan also seemed like a new direction for comics
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Post by tolworthy on Sept 22, 2014 0:56:47 GMT -5
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Post by Deleted on Sept 22, 2014 1:17:45 GMT -5
The debut of Conan also seemed like a new direction for comics New directions for comics is always what I take into consideration. New artist on this or that, what impact does that have on the industry as a whole though? So and so got a new costume, so the entire age of comics has changed. I don't have a set date either. Of course these things are a style and a feel and a tradition of comics. One will be on board with the Bronze Age before another and so on. I think of the mags from Marvel to be definite Bronze Age products. I also think of the undergrounds. Batman when the goofy covers stop. I can see an argument for the price points being a defining factor even though it's not connected to content. It's a clean marker of change. I just never thought all the ages are defined by the same handful of Marvel and DC comics. When does the Golden Age end? I'd say right around the Comics Code being introduced and EC folding. That seems more significant overall than the Flash teaming up with Superboy or whatever. I do think super heroes start the Golden Age with Action #1 (Absolutely no denying that has had a major impact on the industry as a whole), and ending the Copper Age with the various death-and-resurrection of major heroes as well as the founding of Image (which was basically a super hero publisher at the time) and Maliby being bought out by Marvel. Of course these things span a few years, but they're all indicators of the era to me. Same as the Silver Age spanning a while. To me, the Golden Age ends in the mid 1950's, but the Silver Age truly starts when Marvel launches Fantastic Four #1 (and their shared universe soon after). So to me sometimes superhero comics are the driving force of an era, sometimes they are not. The Copper Age to me is mostly about small press, self publishing, mail order, graphic novels, ect. Not big two monthly floppies. Of course those things exist in the era, but they don't seem to be the catalyst to me. I think the black and white comics probably influenced the mainstream more than viceversa at the time. While in the Bronze Age I'd say the mainstream was influencing pretty much everything but maybe a handful of undergrounds. At the time "mainstream" covered sword and sorcery, horror, romance, Saturday Morning Cartoons, as well as superheroes. The barbarian themed undergrounds to me were often time homages to Conan. I think if you weren't Bode or Crumb, you may have had a touch of house style in your illustration, even if you were self publishing a comic about an Aardvark. So there's some give and take and back and fourth going on. |
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Post by Cei-U! on Sept 22, 2014 7:00:45 GMT -5
As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I'm not terribly fond of the whole Gold/Silver/Bronze paradigm, partly because it's so genre-centric but mostly because it tries to pigeonhole and label comics that weren't being created with "Ages" in mind. When I look at DC from, say, 1955 through 1985, I don't see Silver and Bronze, I see Donenfeld, Infantino, and Kahn. Many of the biggest editorial redirections occurred when someone new sat in the publisher's chair. Similarly, at Marvel, I divvy it up by EIC into the Lee era, the multi-ed interregnum, and the Shooter era. Even these are arbitrary, of course, but they're more reflective of reality and, because they apply only to the Big Two, it frees other publishers and genres to be analyzed on their own terms. Really, the only reason I use the Ages at all is to facilitate conversation with everyone else who does.
Cei-U!
I summon the alternate POV!
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Post by berkley on Sept 23, 2014 19:15:26 GMT -5
My feelings are much like Cei-U's. I've never really gotten a handle on the whole silver/bronze/etc terminology in regard to comics, but if we're talking strictly about Marvel I think Kirby's departure and the Stan's move away from writing to more of an editing/marketing role certainly marks a change of eras for that company.
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