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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 26, 2024 19:03:28 GMT -5
I think it's more useful to distinguish according to trends, which may be applicable only in specific genres and publishers, and which don't necessarily have clear dividing lines even within a genre or publisher. Some books can be identified as being a part of the "event trend", where most or all issues tied into a line-wide event, or part of the "franchise trend", where most or all issues were ancestors of a parent title, or the "limited series trend", where putatively ongoing titles would adopt a particular new premise or direction, then restart the following year with another new premise or direction. From what I gather, virtually all of the current Marvel super-hero line spans all three of these trends, while DC's spans the first two.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jan 27, 2024 21:10:09 GMT -5
I say eliminate the entire "ages" paradigm completely, for all the reasons cited above. The medium is too disparate and wide-ranging to pigeonhole it with an outdated, genre-centric terminology. Organizing its output by decade should be adequate for a general discussion. Cei-U! I summon the iconoclasm! Except, for example, that books published in 1953 are an entirely different animal from book published in 1955. Some outside events truly do change the climate of the comic book market: WWII, the rise of local comic retailers, the '90s investment bubble and Hero World debaucle. I think these events are more telling cut off dates than an arbitrary slice of ten years. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 27, 2024 23:04:47 GMT -5
I say eliminate the entire "ages" paradigm completely, for all the reasons cited above. The medium is too disparate and wide-ranging to pigeonhole it with an outdated, genre-centric terminology. Organizing its output by decade should be adequate for a general discussion. Cei-U! I summon the iconoclasm! Except, for example, that books published in 1953 are an entirely different animal from book published in 1955. Some are. But as you are well aware, many aren’t. Dell didn’t change an iota. DC barely did. Nor did Archie. That’s the three biggest publishers, with Fawcett going defunct. Quality didn’t change, though they weren’t long for the world. For every book that was effected by the CCA there was at least one that wasn’t. |
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jan 28, 2024 0:44:35 GMT -5
Except, for example, that books published in 1953 are an entirely different animal from book published in 1955. Some are. But as you are well aware, many aren’t. Dell didn’t change an iota. DC barely did. DC was actually the example I was thinking of. 1954 changed them quite a bit. I explored how it affected Batman here. And even if Dell and Archie didn't change in any obvious way, 1954 opened up the market to them by knocking out much of their competition. |
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Post by spoon on Jan 28, 2024 0:46:00 GMT -5
I think it's more useful to distinguish according to trends, which may be applicable only in specific genres and publishers, and which don't necessarily have clear dividing lines even within a genre or publisher. Some books can be identified as being a part of the "event trend", where most or all issues tied into a line-wide event, or part of the "franchise trend", where most or all issues were ancestors of a parent title, or the "limited series trend", where putatively ongoing titles would adopt a particular new premise or direction, then restart the following year with another new premise or direction. From what I gather, virtually all of the current Marvel super-hero line spans all three of these trends, while DC's spans the first two. Another aspect of trends could be the production of comics. I'm thinking of transitions from newsprint to other paper stock, changes in coloring processes, computer-aided "penciling" and "inking" and lettering, etc. Also, I feel writing for trades tends to define more recent time periods. There's a period in which arcs, sub-plots, etc. were much more variable in duration. Then we have periods where there's a more rigid formula in duration of arcs, including more often including the arc name in the cover or the title of the issue. |
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Post by zaku on Jan 28, 2024 2:14:09 GMT -5
Some are. But as you are well aware, many aren’t. Dell didn’t change an iota. DC barely did. DC was actually the example I was thinking of. 1954 changed them quite a bit. I explored how it affected Batman here. And even if Dell and Archie didn't change in any obvious way, 1954 opened up the market to them by knocking out much of their competition. And generally, I think, superhero comics published in the 1983 are quite different from the ones published in the 1987. Secret Wars, Crisis, DKR etc influenced the genre a lot! So saying "the 80s" is too much generic in this particular case. |
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Jan 28, 2024 3:51:08 GMT -5
My big sweeping generalizations for the ages of comics goes like this (and there's a lot of rambling scattershot thinking here as a lot of this is off the cuff and general impressions without me having done the due diligence to really dig in to this)
1) The All in Color for a Dime Era (with distinctions when necessary for pre-code and post-code)
Comics in general (with some exceptions) went up to 12 cents shortly after FF #1 came out in '61 and that serves fairly well as a general demarcation line. Throughout the 10 cent era there were a lot of line throughs that were consistent and serve to set borders/guidelines for defining the era, but the imposition of the code does alter a lot of that landscape. I just think there still more commonalities than differences pre/post code, so don't think there needs to be 2 eras there-though enough for there to be 2 phases within the era). The price increase to 12 cents may be a coincidental factor but it occurred when some seismic shifts in the industry were taking place, so it's useful as a landmark but not a defining characteristic of that shift.
The 60s and 70s each had a general zeitgeist that runs through much of pop culture, comic included, so...
2) The 60s: Comics of the 60s in many ways reflected the 60s zeitgeist as whole. Specific publishers had demarcations within them during this period (Marvel's '68 expansion for example), but overall there are enough common threads running through comics in the 60s regardless of genre or publisher that it can be its own distinct era.
3) The 70s: While the zeitgeist of the 60s and 70s are distinctly different (but do blur together a little in the '67-'72ish transition years) comics and pop culture as a whole had enough line throughs the decade that the decade can be used as another demarcation period. In fact comics chasing broader pop culture trends throughout the 70s may be one of the defining factors of that decade in comics as a whole.
Once we get to the 80s, we're into the demarcations I threw out earlier with the rise of the direct market becoming the defining characteristic of comics and into the churn that we're trying to sort into subdivisions of that "modern era"
While I don't think every decade works well as its own demarcation, I do think the 60s and 70s do, but the defining trends of the overall culture are reflected in comics defining those decades, not just the content on the comic pages. While it's true to some (lesser extent) extent of the 30s-50s, outside of the WWII era propaganda themes it didn't define the zeitgeist of comics in those decades as much as the 60s/70s. And the overall shift in culture between the early and the late 80s was vast, within comics itself the trends happening because of the rise to dominance of the direct market and the comic shop not the newsstand becoming the primary centerpiece of comics reaching market and being where people and comics intersected were unified enough to keep it a single era even if content shifts were happening like events and x-overs, but those were direct consequences of the growth of the direct market and wouldn't have been possible without the new paradigm of the comic shop becoming the center of comic culture and fandom.
From that point forward, it is the shifts in the direct market and distribution and the entropy of losing the discovery market of the newsstands to bring in a flow of new customers (and publishers attempts to sustain revenue streams in the face of that entropy) that define the demarcation points between the subdivisions of the modern era. Things like variants and relaunches don't happen unless the direct market becomes the primary path to market and the effects of losing the discovery market lead to the business losing more readers than it gains through simple attrition of customers aging out, dying off or experiencing life changes that lead them to lose interest or ability in keeping up with comics (all independent of the actual content of the books despite what many of the fringe doomsayers claim).
Somewhere in this rambling might be the seed of a coherent idea, but my thoughts on it are still too scattered and data too incomplete and reliant on unreliable sources for me to parse it into something more coherent yet. But I think the key to finding workable demarcations lies in looking at the market comics operates in and not in the content on the pages between the covers, the genres represented on the shelves, or the ideas of fanboys about continuity or things that "ruined" comics.
-M
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