The Ages of Comics

Friend of the blog Man of the Atom pens a learned essay on the origins and ages of American comic books:

What about the stories? Where did they originate? Like any good writers, the comic authors typically went to the literature of the times as well as the recent past and stole whatever they could. Meaning — pulp magazines, novels, movies, fairy tales and folk tales, Western literature, religion, and et cetera. You also couldn’t count the number of big publishers on just one hand as today in the 21st Century. Take a look at this list. As you can see, comic books were significantly more than just “Marvel & DC” in the Golden Age of Comics.

“The Golden Age of Comics”. You hear that bandied about, but what does it mean? To answer that, let’s take a look at the Bible, shall we?

The Ages of Comic Books
The ages of comic books are similar to the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar, which was interpreted by the prophet Daniel (see Daniel, Chapter 2, in your Bible edition of choice). The King dreamed of a giant statue with a head of gold, chest and arms of silver, abdomen and upper thighs of brass (or bronze), legs of iron, and feet and toes made up of a mixture of iron and loose clay. Daniel interpreted those sections to be the various kingdoms of the world through time. Gold being the one that Nebuchadnezzar ruled, then successive kingdoms that would follow his, each generally lesser as one moved downward on the statue (through time).

Those successive sections of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, oddly enough, also describe what is often referred to as the Ages of Comic Books. There is some discussion about how many ages there are, and where the break points occur–especially after 1985, and those details are not well defined by various people discussing the Ages. My breaks may or may not match with other people, but I will offer my thoughts on the Ages here, and that subsequent discussion and debate will be for another time and another post.

One age is occasionally added to represent the period before what we commonly regard as the beginning of the Golden Age of Comics. That is sometimes referred to as the Pre-Golden Age or the Platinum Age. This is the age of Pulp Magazines in their heyday, when what might be termed a comic book was almost exclusively comic strip reprints, humorous stories, and in-house humor comics.

Discover MotA’s dating of the ages of comics, and many more pearls of comic book lore, at the link.

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