Toward a Consistent Nomenclature for the Ages of Comics

Looking from source to source in reading up on the comics industry and its history, you may note that a number of writers tend to throw around terms like "Silver Age," "Golden Age," and even "Bronze Age" and "Iron Age" without always letting the reader in on what defines these periods. In a previous column, I attempted to provide another definition of what constituted the Silver Age of Comics, since this period included some of the most important years of the formation of the medium.

However, this left a definition without a surrounding timeline. To correct this, the following scheme offers the meanings I intend when I use terms like "Golden Age," et al.

Note that this scheme may differ in some particulars from others you may encounter. For instance, Broadstreet has its own categories, with some similarity to my own. Their scheme may contain the influence of sales figures, which actually can provide good markers about when an age began and ended (their end of the Silver Age, for instance, dovetails nicely with the early end of the end dates I propose for the same period).

I intend mainly to establish clear criteria for differentiating comics "ages" and proliferating information about what traits characterize each of these periods, as well as clarifying my own use of definitions of periods that define comic books.

The Golden Age

In the Golden Age of Comics, he first costumed superheroes, especially those with fantastic abilities proscribed by known laws of physics, appeared. Conventionally the Golden Age began with the first appearance of DC's Superman, who has carried the title of "First Superhero" for long enough that the claim represents no attempt to deny due credit to the earlier Phantom (1936), who did not impact the medium in the same fashion.

Why call this the "Golden Age," especially if a later period produced materials of demonstrably greater quality? The term really comes from an ancient Greek model of history, which described a golden age of mankind before trouble came into the world - a period equivalent in many ways to the Biblical period before Adam and Eve received their eviction notice from the Garden of Eden. An untroubled life, a general absence of misery, and other traits that humanity never really has enjoyed in any period of history define the concept of the period. Alternately, in the Bible itself, the Book of Daniel posited a theory of ages; the dream of the great statue with the feet of clay delineates a historical model, with the various layers of the statue standing in for ages of gold, silver, iron, brass, and clay, with a clear degradation of quality implied with the passage of time.

Therefore, though sometimes the comics of the 1930s and 1940s contained material we could fairly describe as "weak" or "vapid," the period nonetheless fits the historical pattern, since the beginnings and innocence of the medium belong to it.

We should avoid a too-literal assignation of attributes from such historical models to comics, however, because comics do not adhere to a linear and teleogical model of history where things direct to some great or terrible end. Comics as a medium historically enjoy great ups and downs, rather than any great forward motion to a specific end, barring doom-laden scenarios based on unfortunate modern trends in the commercial comics market.

Superman can serve as the most characteristic creation of this period, though a great variety of superheroes followed immediately after his first appearance.

The Golden Age of Comics ended with the great contraction of the market following the end of World War Two, where many of the heroes of that period became unable to support their own titles. A combination of the aging of the market (back in a day when grownups sternly frowned on purportedly juvenile pursuits), the loss of military contracts to provide reading matter to soldiers (who would read but would not necessarily buy comics), and some exhaustion of the first generation of superhero concepts all contributed to the end of the Golden Age.

The First Tribulation

Here we have a difficult-to-define period because, although clear benchmarks confine it, some difficulty attaches to describing the complex of trends that occurred therein.

Some very fertile processes took place during the First Tribulation of comics. Many talents matured; many new talents pushed the aesthetic boundaries of the medium, particularly EC's remarkable stable of young cartoonists; many new forms of comics appeared, including the romance comic and science fiction comic.

Not all of this evolution occurred as the free exercise of imagination, however. One can look at it as more of a metaphorical natural selection process. As title after title failed at the passing of the Golden Age of Comics, cartoonists struggled to reinvent the form and business in order to sell enough product to keep their jobs.

Furthermore, comics fell under increasing public scrutiny during this period. The excesses of the comics of the day - lurid depictions of violence, overheated treatments of the female form, and occasional sneers at the conventional morals of the day - inclined a movement, personified by Dr. Frederick Wertham, to bring public attention to this business. One can place events like mass comic-burnings and the creation of the Comics Code Authority to this period.

The classic EC Comics of the early fifties can serve as the most defining pieces of the period. That these pieces did not remain in print past the reinvention of that company says much about the likely events of the day. To identify a most characteristic event, recall that Green Lantern disappeared from his own title, replaced by stories about a "wonder dog."

The Silver Age

During the Silver Age, the superhero concept ripened, though later works would continue to develop it and make it more mature, in various senses of the term. The superhero existed and had a history in this period; therefore, questions pertaining to the meaning of superheroes began to affect the approach to superhero comics. Changes in the basic superhero concept and the accompanying editorial model would flow outward from the pieces of this period, affecting the other genres.

From this point forward, superhero comics would begin to expand in market share to the point that they would reach in the modern day, where (in America), they dominate the medium. Both DC and Marvel incorporated innovations that would increasingly hook readers into comics, and, furthermore, allow a longer consumer lifespan; indeed, at this point one began to see long-term comics fans, folks who might read for ten years or longer, begin to appear.

DC captured readers by appeals to the imagination, particularly by infusing large portions of science fiction content. Julius Schwartz, for one, had a lifetime fascination with old-school science fiction which showed up in DC's Silver Age generation of heroes. Hawkman would no longer inherit a mystical Egyptian mantle and would, instead, belong to an extraterrestrial police force; Green Lantern would possess science-fantasy origins in his new incarnation; and the Atom would reappear as a superpowered adventurer whose powers derive from supposed properties of degenerate matter from a white dwarf.

On two fronts, two, DC would cultivate an appeal to nostalgia. Through one vector, the recreation of Golden Age heroes in Silver Age forms, DC would evoke the comics of not quite a generation previously. Thus the Flash would suggest both the old and the new superhero comics. More directly, DC would reintroduce the superheroes of the 1940s through the device of a parallel earth that had presumedly housed these characters.

Stan Lee, a party inheriting responsibility for the collapsing Atlas comics, duly noted the returning interest in superhero comics and decided to take a gamble, but did not do so with a complacent approach. He tinkered with the concept. He removed the hero somewhat from his iconic role, gaining new readers in direct proportion to the degree to which he undermined a character's formulaic stoicism and invested him with problems to which readers could relate. Furthermore, Lee tampered with the very comics editorial model itself, at least in part as a marketing gimmick that would have far-reaching consequences. Lee decided that the new superhero comics, pieces like Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man, would progress over time (evidenced by groundbreaking moves like allowing two of the principals to marry and have children); and that they would interconnect, with the events in one comic theoretically affecting the world in which the others moved. Lee had enabled comics-as-soap-opera and the controversial mechanism of continuity itself.

The new Marvel editorial model opened up possibilities with which an ambitious stable of talent could run further than they had before. Jack Kirby and (to a lesser degree) Steve Ditko would demonstrate explosive outpourings of creativity in this editorial environment, doing demonstrably better work than they had earlier in their careers (and, some observers would contend, than since).

Superhero comics, at this point, could reach a broader audience. The stories could move beyond fistfights with bank robbers and spies; characters could confront marriage (Sue Storm and Reed Richards) and even death (Captain America). Comics, from this point forward, could do a great deal more to approach the intentions of prose literature, an option generally foreclosed by the notion of completely self-contained stories that must complete in 5 or 10 or 20 pages. The superhero became more than a role model and vicarious vehicle for wish-fulfillment of power fantasies. He could think, feel, marry, spawn, and even die.

The years of experience in the business started to pay off for a number of creators who first worked on the early comics of the Golden Age; for instance, the journeymen of the forties would appear as Gil Kane, Gene Colan, Nick Cardy, and many others who now receive some of the adulation generally imparted to legendary talents.

Spider-Man (during Ditko's short tenure) represents a particularly pure example of the new Silver Age approach to superhero comics (and comics in general), as do the early Fantastic Four.

Bronze Age

The Bronze Age of Comics describes the period in which comics consolidated the advances of the Silver Age and somewhat passed the creative mantle onto younger talents, many of whom had come from comics fandom into the business. We could define the Bronze Age as the period from the expansion of the Marvel editorial model to superhero comics in general until the general collapse of the Silver Age edifice under its own weight in the eighties, when the burden of overused concepts and inherited continuity began seriously to clog the creative process.

To define it in terms of specific events, we might begin the Bronze Age with Jack Kirby's departure from Marvel Comics around 1970, and end it with DC's publication of Crisis on Infinite Earths, an admission that superhero comics had painted themselves into a serious corner even as an entire generation of comics talent hit their creative peaks.

In an earlier column about the Silver Age in specific, I described the events that bookend the Silver Age. The events that ended the Silver Age have the most relevance to defining the Bronze that followed; these include the moving and exodus of talent from title to title at Marvel, from Marvel to DC (in the case of Kirby and Ditko), and from Charlton to DC (in the case of the cell of talents including Jim Aparo, Dick Giordano, and others).

The Bronze Age didn't enjoy the kind of self-redefinition that defines the Silver Age. Instead, we see great progress in individual talents, who frequently moved beyond the notion of house styles to pursue highly individualized approaches to the depiction of superhero comics. The quirky styles of the likes of Al Weiss and William Sienkiewicz would develop from derivative explorations of signature styles of others into a new set of signature idiosyncrasies. Writers, too, would pursue more mature themes, including drug abuse (Green Lantern / Green Arrow and Amazing Spider-Man), death (X-Men), corruption and compromise (Warlock), and even rape themes and spousal abuse (Avengers).

One could observe, like a storm cloud on the horizon, the beginnings of troublesome developments as the Bronze Age progressed. Increasing numbers of comics stories would aim to maintain inherited continuity as a primary goal, rather than a secondary one; it became more and more difficult to tell a good story without continuity concerns becoming foremost.

Highlights of this period include the Cockrum / Wein and Byrne / Austin / Claremont X-Men and the Wolfman / Perez Teen Titans. Such pieces, however, would suffer from the exhaustion of Silver Age concepts even to the point of choking off some talents in the middle of their creative peaks (especially Roy Thomas). One also saw an increasing influx of talent with no training outside of comics. This portended other problems, because it meant the closing of the comics circle to outsiders: The folks who produced comics read comics, and couldn't necessarily understand how to attract new readers without the necessary background to understand the contemporary and self-referent form of the medium. Artists became less likely to cross into comics from other lines of work, meaning fewer talents with graphic arts credentials (like Neal Adams or Jim Steranko) broke into the business.

Pieces like The New Teen Titans and All-Star Squadron, which showed the creative peaks of talents (whose work would become obsolescent based on management and editorial decisions rather than on aesthetic ones), and the team-up books (such as Brave and the Bold, DC Comics Presents, Marvel Two-in-One and Marvel Team-Up), which provided a warehouse for increasing volumes of superfluous superheroes, define the period well.

The Iron Age

One might define the Iron Age of Comics as that period in which talents consciously sought to define a post-Silver Age comics model. New and unconventional storytellers would rise to prominence during this period, such as Grant Morrison and Alan Moore. Antiheroes would become more conventional in a conscious refutation of the purported nobility of Silver Age heroes. New themes and tones would appear in comics, such as the deconstructive hero story (Who Watches the Watchmen?), which showed heroes essentially as sick human beings who self-delude and mistreat each other the same way normal humans do; the consciously-adult and literary comic best represented by DC's Vertigo line of books; and attempts at creating a culture of independent, creator-owned comics (Jon Sable: Freelance; American Flagg; Sabre; Nexus; and many others).

Comics creators sought to leave behind elements of the old editorial model, elements of the old strictures (essentially the entirety of the demands of the Comics Code Authority), and constraints of the business side of comics (as represented by the inevitably draconian work-for-hire arrangements typical of talents who sometimes must find work for Marvel or DC).

Partially as a consequence of these other developments, and partially as a stylistic gimmick, comics increasingly explored morbidly gloomy territory. Mirthless, scowling heroes of no discernible virtue moved through ugly, dirty worlds performing thankless tasks in spite of a reality that did not allow sunshine to penetrate. Heroes would pursue absurdly self-obsessed demonstrations of angst and self-pity. Time travelers would expose the inevitable dooms of a future in which only the vile aspects of human nature seemed to prevail.

In many ways, comics seemed unable to "get it" during this period. Experimental talents realized the need to find a new synthesis and attempted to lay the foundations of a new approach for the future; less visionary talents would resort to cliche and express bafflement at the declining sales that set in during this period. Many great pieces appeared but failed to survive. Many lame pieces inflicted pointless suffering on a comics readership who didn't understand where the fun had gone.

Occasionally old formats reappeared during the Iron Age. Action Comics Weekly, for instance, attempted to explore the notion of an anthology comic of the sort that Superman had originally appeared in during a day when a comic had more pages and didn't attempt to focus on a single topic. Marvel, across the aisle, attempted to remarket the double-title approach in Strange Tales, which might double as a title for Dr. Strange, Cloak and Dagger, the Punisher, or other concepts not generally able to keep their own titles afloat.

One could, with some credibility, impugn this period as one frequently given to awfulness. Many titles drifted from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular. However, some experiments did become minor classics, even if they could not sustain themselves commercially.

For instance, the Giffen / De Matteis Justice League represents one of the more fondly-remembered and entertaining examples of Iron Age comics. It threw the Justice League formula out the window (albeit after that franchise had suffered greatly at the hands of the frequently-better Gerry Conway). Byrne's brief but entertaining stint on Avengers West Coast happened in the Iron Age, as did his (and Wolfman's) redefinition of the Superman franchise.

In many examples, though, the burdens attending the editorial models began to outweigh the ability of talent to transcend these restrictions. Even after Crisis, DC still had problems with inherited continuity; Marvel began to sag under a similar burden; house styles began to fail to work and individual talents began to matter more than the content of their work.

Reader loyalties began to attach much more to specific creators as consumers began to become indifferent to ongoing comics concepts presented indifferently.

DC's Vertigo line of books serves well as the most characteristic creation of the period. One might view talents such as Todd McFarlane, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, and Dave Gibbons as defining vectors of the Iron Age of Comics.

The Mica Age

It took some thought to find an appropriate name for the period that saw the rise of the "New Comics." In the tailings of the Iron Age, we saw a rise of celebrity talent; we saw an increasing prominence of collector-oriented gimmickry; we saw a great deal of flash, frequently in the absence of substance, in many pieces of the day. In keeping with mineral themes, I opted to call this period "The Mica Age" because glitter frequently contains little more than powdered, colored mica.

One could obviously begin this period with an event sardonically tagged the "X-Odus," when a number of young and upwardly mobile comics talents left Marvel, primarily from its X-books franchise, to form Image Comics. The Mica Age saw a number of new publishers appear on the comics scene, such as (of course) Image Comics, Valiant Comics, and Malibu Comics. These companies can also define the end of the Mica Age; Malibu no longer graces comics shelves, Valiant / Acclaim struggles to rise from the dead, and Image has fractured into various child companies such as Liefeld's Awesome Comics and Jim Lee's Wildstorm Comics (which, ironically, now belongs to DC - Time Warner - AOL).

Gimmicks have always existed in comics and often serve as the frosting on the cake, if one would rely on a descriptive cliche. However, in the comics of the Mica Age, buyers frequently found a product with frosting but no cake. Gimmicks abounded: multiple covers, chromium covers, embossed covers, #0 issues, inter-company crossovers, megacrossovers, collectors' cards, prebagged comics (packaged presumably to retain resale value dependent on condition), and even gimmicks of content.

Collectors might have enjoyed the bait; speculators doubtless enjoyed watching their selected pieces increase in value; but the reader in the street, whose interests might incline him to want more story, did not find much in this period to invite his attention. To this reader, the gimmickry seemed crassly manipulative. During crossover season, for instance, one had difficulty making sense out of the comics released during a particular month without completing a collection of the company's entire product line. Buyer and seller both knew that a reader would suffer the sanction of an incomplete story if he did not shell out the money to purchase books that ordinarily did not interest him.

Some gimmicks involved content more than marketing, though, and these also defined the period. Imagine comics louder, grittier, more violent, more lurid, less subtle in most particulars. If the talent had matched the adjustments to the volume knob, the Mica Age would have created a series of classics in the same way that the Silver Age had. Unfortunately, big guns, body armor, big epaulets, thongs, and explosions represented the main body of the "new" content of the "New Comics."

"Loud" did not mean good. Old-school fans might see the more brazen output of comics companies as ugly, crass, obnoxious, or dumbed-down. Furthermore, not everyone would buy twenty comics to understand one, and comics buyers increasingly went AWOL. Ultimately, a sales explosion became a sales implosion.

Comics sales figures, after a short spike, declined to figures lower than the depressing numbers that had ended the Iron Age. Speculators had made and lost small fortunes, celebrities had risen and faded, and some of the celebrities of the Mica Age had diversified their portfolios to the point that they hardly bothered creating comics at all any more - for instance, the prosperous Todd McFarlane.

The big two publishers, a bit too late, attempted to explore the commercial possibilities in appropriating the Image style (this column discusses this failed experiment). Marvel, in the throes of bankruptcy, halted its entire comics line and relaunched several central titles under the hands of Liefeld, Loeb, Churchill, and Jim Lee; but disappointing returns and missed deadlines helped make the Heroes Reborn experiment fail.

For exemplary gimmick pieces of the period, consider the "Death of Superman" a superior work which demonstrated that gimmickry need not necessarily preclude quality. The Valiant Comics / Image Comics crossover piece Deathmate demonstrates the period well; and Marvel's unfortunate "Heroes Reborn" line of books stands well as a swan song for the Mica Age.

The Second Tribulation

The glitter and flash of the comics of the Mica Age failed to hold the attention of consumers for long enough to create a long-term, sustainable recovery of the comics market. In fact, the speculators managed to create the textbook phenomenon of the "investor bubble," a bubble which burst.

The comics of this period frequently seemed particularly clueless - radical but pointless redesigns seemed to afflict some titles (such as Green Lantern), directionlessness beset others, and others attempted, too late, to promote themselves by appropriating the fading Image Comics' house style (Heroes Reborn, Manhunter 94, Extreme Justice, and others).

The failure of the Hip New Thing - represented this time by the Image generation of comics creators - suggested to many that comics had forgotten something, especially when readers might tint their memory of older comics with a nostalgia that made them seem twice as vital. Therefore one saw a great resurgence in the belief in a "good old days" of comics, which, in spite of the collapse of the Silver Age edifice in the eighties, turned backward precisely to that period.

Electroplate Age

Naming again becomes difficult with complex phenomena characterizing this period. However, the influence of early Silver Age material as an aesthetic definition became unmistakable after the collapse of the comics market in the mid-nineties. Attempts to create a new Silver Age in miniature suggested, therefore, that one might call this period the Electroplate Age, since the Silver Age elements frequently do not penetrate especially deeply, and something else entirely can live under the few microns of silver skin that show on the outside.

Catastrophe often evokes self-criticism, and some comics talent realized that the form in general and superhero comics in specific indeed did seem to have lost something since the heady sixties when Marvel Comics led the development of the form. Even before the crash, Image Comics had created a critical success with its never-completed "1963" project. Later, pieces like Superboy would pay homages to the strengths of the Silver Age, and items like Big Bang Comics would attempt almost to recreate them in situ.

Some talents recognize a kind of middle ground that recognizes the high era of superhero comics without necessarily resorting to blunt imitation - for instance, comics writers like Mark Waid, Alex Ross (more known for art than writing), and Jerry Ordway frequently play to themes of the iconic role of superheroes, a notion much withered by the experimentation of the Iron Age and frequently undermined by those who attach different meanings to the symbolism than did original creators.

Kingdom Come represents a high point of the Electroplate Age of Comics, even though it came at a very early point in the period. This age has some potent selling points, such as DC's surprising rediscovery of everything Kirbyesque. Comics become self-consciously and proactively self-referential rather than reactively formulaic.

At other points, though, one can note that some talents simply don't understand the Silver Age well enough. In Superman V. the Hulk, the Hulk portions of the story tried much harder to recapture the original feel of the book; but the Superman elements committed much more to post-Crisis revisionism than anything that defined Superman in the Silver Age. Similarly, DC's Silver Age Event only superficially referenced the period that gave the event its name. In almost no particular did the Silver Age Event sacrifice post-Crisis continuity in favor of authenticity, and could more plausibly have named those books "The Post-Crisis Revisionist Event."

One might view Ross' and Waid's Kingdom Come as a defining piece of the Electroplate Age.

The Next Age

Things haven't settled down yet, whatever future waits in store for the comics business. A backward-looking comics suggests an art form too much given to navel-gazing than to real creativity, in spite of the frequent excellence of pieces that draw upon and pay homage to the Silver Age of Comics.

If forced to predict what one might see next in comics, I would say one might expect them to begin to look outward rather than inward for source material. That a story thread from "Lois and Clark" could feed back to the comics themselves, resulting in the marriage of Lois Lane and Clark Kent, implies that comics may try to reach a wider audience by connecting more to outside media. If elements from the X-Men movie begin to feed back to the comics, we might proclaim such vectors credible.

The approach can work in other media. Prose works frequently evoke other arts and sciences for source material; for example, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum cast a story around the culture of historically documented religious esoterica. For another example, Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh strongly connected to the history of the Jewish community of India, especially as effected by the foundation of Israel. Such works may mostly appeal to pointy-heads with the necessary background to understand their contexts. What, though, can comics offer the outsider to bring him in? Should someone who hasn't read comics for the last thirty years care about a story that finally resolves some pointless plot thread from an unknown piece from a cancelled comic from the sixties? Or, more likely, will outsiders experiment with comics because something inside the books relates to interests brought in from the outside world?