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American Comic Books: The Bronze Age Golden Age

When people ask me why I dedicated my site Steve Does Comics to Bronze Age comics and not to the more celebrated Silver or Golden Ages, I say the answer's simple. It's because, for me, the Bronze Age was the Golden Age of comics.

Admittedly, this may have something to do with my own vintage. I grew up in that self-same Bronze Age. However, thanks to Marvel UK's weekly reprints, I also grew up reading Silver Age mags and, thanks to DC's 100 page comics, Golden Age tales were always to hand.

It's true the Golden Age may have seen the peak of comic sales, with titles like Captain Marvel selling over a million copies a month, and super-heroes like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman hitting the shelves for the first time.

The Silver Age may have been the form's renaissance, with the Marvel Age giving us the likes of Spider-Man, X-Men, Hulk and the Fantastic Four, as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby reinvented the form.

But, for me the true Golden Age of the American Comic Book fell between 1968 and 1978. Now, some may argue with those as the dates for the Bronze Age and I can understand that. It's always been a tricky time to tie down but I've always felt Marvel's expansion of 1968 and DC's implosion of 1978 are natural bookmarks to an era. It's a time when both Marvel and DC took the energy of their 1960s' revolutions and ran with it, taking comics into whole new directions. Jack Kirby and Stan Lee may have opened up new vistas in story telling but they were still operating with a relatively narrow palette.

It was in the Bronze Age when that palette widened. Suddenly, thanks to Roy Thomas, we had licensed characters like Conan the Barbarian, and, freed from the over-regulation of the Comics Code, Marvel saw the emergence of horror-based titles like Tomb of Dracula, Frankenstein and Werewolf by Night, not to mention their Black and White mags like Savage Sword of Conan, Tales of the Zombie and Monsters Unleashed.

Never ones to be left out, DC did horror too, with the likes of Weird War Tales, The Witching Hour, The Unexpected and House of Mystery. Some of these titles were launched before 1968 but there was always a sense the Bronze Age was their natural home.

Speaking of horror, we shouldn't forget those boys from Derby, Charlton Comics, still going strong in the Bronze Age and even giving us a bit extra with the likes of E-Man and John Byrne's Rog (2000).

But Charlton weren't the only independents around. We still had the likes of Dell, Gold Key, Skywald and - in the UK - Alan Class to choose from. In 1975, Marvel founder Martin Goodman even gave us a brand new comics company, by the name of Atlas. It might not've lasted long but, in its brief time in our world, it gave us yet another publisher whose titles we could collect.

1975 was clearly a special year as, besides the launch of Atlas, we saw the re-launch of The X-Men, an act that would have profound impact on the comics industry for decades to come. Following a couple of years on from The Amazing Spider-Man's Death of Gwen Stacy and a year after the intro of the Punisher, things were changing forever. As if to rub it in, we also got (1974)'s creation of Wolverine, (1976)'s epoch-making cross-over Superman vs Spider-Man, the afore-mentioned Tomb of Dracula, Jack Kirby's Kamandi, Michael Fleisher's Spectre and even Art Saaf's less ground-breaking but still-pleasing reinvention of Supergirl. And have there really been many comics better than Steve Gerber's Defenders, a saga of super-heroes who just didn't fit in?

So, when people say, "Steve, what's the big fuss about the Bronze Age when you could be celebrating the Silver or Golden Ages?" I have no hesitation in telling them that, sometimes, if you scratch away a surface of bronze, beneath it, what you find might be purest gold.

About the Author

Hi, I gave the world the blogs Steve Does Comics and Steve Does Everything, not to mention the novels Danny Yates Must Die and Mr Landen Has No Brain (still available from all good online bookstores), plus various other crimes against humanity that are too numerous and shameful to mention.

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