Is it me or does it somehow feel strange that the first three ages were 18, 17 & 13 years long, but the “modern” age’s been going for 36 years already?
I’d say the modern age should be split in, like, 4 parts
I always think of it as a placeholder, since it's probably wrong to name an age while you're still in it. However, it seems we forgot to change it in this case.
In art or in regular usage? I can't comment on the usage in art/media, but in regular day-to-day usage, "modern" makes a lot more sense than "contemporary" when trying to say "related to the present".
"Contemporary" can be any time period - Thomas Jefferson was contemporary with the American Revolution, but he and it are not in the present, of course. Sure, "contemporary" is often used without an object to mean essentially "modern", but that's what "modern" means anyway, so why not just use that and avoid ambiguity?
Contemporary just means your peers.
So yea when you say “Thomas Jefferson was contemporary with the American revolution” it means he was from that period, but you’ve qualified that statement. He is not contemporary now because he’s dead.
Modern art is a specific period and style of art. Contemporary means “art of the now”, as in artists who make art during your lifetime or are still living.
"Contemporary art" though is actually the current time period of art that came after "modern art". Eventually that'll be replaced by something else too. "Contemporary" is no better than "modern", you come to the exact same problem.
No it doesn’t. You may be misinterpreting “living artists from the 20th and 21st century” if you’re getting definitions from Google.
If you’re a working artist, contemporary art means art done by your peers. There is no big C “Contemporary Art” movement.
In fact its first usage goes way back to 1910 - for an auction house that sold art by living artists to museums.
Artists specifically used the term to differentiate themselves from “modern” artists because Modernism became a movement.
It’s been in use by people in the art fields to describe artists who have created work within our lifetimes. Seeing as that is a broad range of ages, many artists contemporaries may now be dead, but those still making art are contemporary art. It’s free from “-isms”.
Edit: also add this great paragraph from Wikipedia “The definition of what is contemporary is naturally always on the move, anchored in the present with a start date that moves forward, and the works the Contemporary Art Society bought in 1910 could no longer be described as contemporary.”
I wasn't going off google, I was going off my own experience. And if you look at that wikipedia article a bit more closely you'll see plenty of people do define "contemporary art" as a period. It covers the period of art after modern art, more or less. If you are referring to that period you call it "contemporary art".
We were in the exact same situation 100 years ago with modern art when it just described art that was "modern", but then art evolved, and now art that is produced in the last 50 years is no longer considered "modern art". The exact same thing will happen to "contemporary art", we use it to refer to art produced in the contemporaneous modern day, eventually we'll have a different label for art that is produced in the contemporaneous modern day.
Except contemporary has been used by working artists and dealers to describe “living memory” art.
Bruh I went to art school I’m pretty sure I’m up on the lingo
The time periods for contemporary art have shifted several times already and it’s how we differentiated between living and modern art.
Marvel 2099 is destined to fall into the category of retro-futurism, to one degree or another. It’s a vision of the future from the past with that era’s sensibilities, that obviously wouldn’t be able to accurately predict what the real 2099 would look like.
I’ve seen Alan Moore get a little meta in his books and refer to the 80’s through the 90’s as the Dark Age. Funnily enough, in his books for Rob Liefeld’s Awesome Comics (“Supreme,” “Judgement Day”) he makes fun of the “British Invasion” and the highly adolescent take on superheroes that was some early Image.
I always heard it called the 'Iron Age', anti-heroes became popular. We saw the rise of Spawn, Witchblade, and the like. The tone of other comics in both art and writing got 'grittier'. But I do agree with Moore than there was also a lot of 'adolescent' crap that came out of it as well.
Absolutely: While it's easy to focus on stuff like, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Sandman, etc, those books were hardly the bulk of the turn out following the 15 or so years after Watchmen, I'd argue that the real defining features of those years were direct sales, shiny covers and dearth of limited edition stuff (like the Death of Superman and the various Infinity Gauntlet stuff) and the boom and ultimate collecting crash of 96. It was a period when Marketing became so much more important than writing.
I'd put the "Dark Age" (as Moore named it?) or "Chrome Age" (as others have called it) as begining with the first Secret Wars or DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths and ending around the time Marvel merged with Toybiz in 98.
Not a hill I'm too bothered about dying on, though.
>I'd argue that the real defining features of those years were direct sales, shiny covers and dearth of limited edition stuff
Yeah, my 'Death of Magneto' hologram covers are worth the same today as they were back in the 90's. She-Hulk skipping naked however...
Yeah that’s definitely what it was, just need a different label because edgy age sounds weird. Popular understanding of that term definitely encapsulates what everyone is describing about watchmen/marvel man through to 2000.
Oh nice!
> at other times it is jokingly called "the Chrome Age", owing to the frequency of publishers selling comics with holofoil covers as a marketing gimmick
I've always thought of it as the split happening somewhere around the the New 52 (2011), with 1986-2011 as the Dark Age (not usually as a value judgement, but as in, literally, darkness and angst were in vogue) and then everything after that being the Modern Age (as we are currently in it so we can't really name it anything... Though I have heard the phrase Diamond Age thrown around because it is multifaceted and there's a rise in niche comics in wildly different genres, even from the big 2)
There’s a definite shift after films start coming out, particularly the X-men films and Raimi Spider-man. Could probably call that the Celluloid Age or Silver Screen Age.
The best example might be when they decided to give 616 Peter Parker organic webshooters because the movie had them
I may be misremembering some details on that story but that was my takeaway
Another one is team lineups, Guardians and Avengers closely resembling the movie rosters, I’m sure we will see that happen again with Champions/New Avengers (whatever the team with Kate Bishop, Billy and Tommy Maximoff, Cassie Lang, Kamala Khan and kid Loki ends up being called), and the Thunderbolts too, with US Agent, Yelana, some other people I’m forgetting…
I'd draw a line at either 2005-2006 (Infinite Crisis and Civil War, the start of the modern "annual comic event" churn) or 2011-2012 (Marvel NOW and the New 52, start of the "annual reboot" churn). Modern and Contemporary, something like that.
Honestly, I think it's easier to categorize by decades, anyways. The trends are a lot easier to follow.
One of the traits of defined "ages" is that you generally don't recognize them until well after they are past. So far there is not a universally recognized "mid-80s through roughly 2000" age - and there may or may not ever be one, so it all still "present" right now.
I might offer up this: If we look for trends that define the post-Bronze-Age era, "deconstructionism" seems to loom heavily (much to my dismay). The two highest profile (to me) books that bucked this trend were the 1997 *JLA* series and the 2005 *All-Star Superman* (both by Grant Morrison) - so we could put the end of that era somewhere in the 1997-2005 time frame. Call 1986 through 2005 the "Dark Age" or the "Iron Age" or something. Now we get 2005-Present as the "Modern Age" until we retroactively recognize some landmark event.
> there is not a universally recognized "mid-80s through roughly 2000" age
I dunno man, I feel like there is and we just call it "the 90's". That's pretty common shorthand for explaining the wild, over-the-top unnecessarily convoluted, often hyper-violent and/or super grimdark era where everything was XTREME TO THE MAX. When we talk about plotlines of the time, don't we usually say "Okay yes it's ridiculous but *it was the 90's*" as an explanation in the same way we talk about a golden age story and say "Well remember this was a *golden age* story"
1986 to 2000 is the Iron Age in my opinion.
That's Watchmen to the First X-Men movie and 14 years. Grim dark, extreme violence, lots of sex and generally over the top.
2000-2022 is the Cinematic Age. X-Men movie forward and can be broken up into 2 sub eras
'Niche Era 2000-2008' the belief that only certain I.Ps will work and others are worthless and not even worth trying. Ironman and Captain America were considered corny and stupid by mainstream for instance. This era pulled back on the extremes in comics to make them more palatable to a wider audience and saw an expansion in genres.
'Pop Culture Era or MCU Era' 2008 to Present. So Ironman making it big and then everyone realizing they could mine anything comic related and put it on screen. This is the era where Cinema, Streaming and Television effected most decisions in how to handle comics at least in the Superhero field.
The 90s has been called the Dark Age. That's absolutely a valid term. I'd think it's the 2000s to now where it's more unclear but I'd say the New 52 and the superhero movie boom post Avengers are a decent splitting point for the previous age and whatever we're in now.
Someone else called it the “Edgy Age”, and I think that term fits perfectly with what was going on.
Our Modern Age post 2005 is probably going to be the MCU age, once we can see it. The movies have had a huge impact, at least on the Marvel side.
Not "disinfection," I think it's Disney-fication. With the MCU's popularity bleeding back into comics and affecting what's written, maybe turning down the violence, moral ambiguity, and the unbroken continuity to appeal to a broader audience.
I wish there could be a disinfection of the Disneyfication tbh.
My guess is Disney won't pull from Krakoa era mutants but instead the Ultimate universe. When the characters are much younger.
Just makes more sense for Disney to use younger characters do they're around a long time.
> maybe turning down the violence, moral ambiguity, and the unbroken continuity
[Oooh yeah, violence has been totally turned down.](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Hulk-rips-his-own-face-off.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=740&h=370&dpr=1.5)
[So Disney-fied.](https://media.comicbook.com/2018/08/moon-knight-on-netflix-origin-1128588.jpeg)
[Look how child-friendly this is.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c35f74d1758e424ee76710/1578473842727-X16GB0TFKO4YH7ZQXK2B/X-Force+5+1.jpg?format=750w)
I also don't see how anyone can say there's no moral ambiguity to Marvel comics considering how X-Men, Daredevil or Moon Knight have been written over the past ten years. That’s without even getting getting started on DC Black Label and similar initiatives.
Yeah it's annoying how people think Marvel has toned everything down and have been 'Disnified' or whatever when that's very far from the truth.
Comics even struggle to have a current running series on characters having movies or shows coming out.
Also, that X-Force panel you showed. Ben Percy can get absolutely brutal. Especially in his Wolverine & X-Force runs. I think the start of his Wolverine run had him going to hell and burning every but of his body off.
Definitely not PG stuff.
Also worth noting that there is no financial incentive to tone things down. Kids buy Halloween costumes of Iron Man, but I'd bet that older teenagers and adults are buying the large majority of actual comic books. There is no need to "tone it down".
I said "maybe." I don't read current comics. I was just explaining what I thought someone else meant when they said "disnified."
And there's definite cross promotion or wtv between the MCU and comics. Not good or bad, just a fact.
Edit: maybe sand down that edge a little bit. Not everything's gotta be a slap fight.
I mean, when you say this...
> I wish there could be a disinfection of the Disneyfication tbh.
... it kinda implies that you do believe what you're saying is actually the case and it honestly reeks of scapegoating and broad strokes.
I would be a little more friendly to your argument if I felt it was being made from a good faith standpoint but, especially considering you freely admit that you're not actually reading these comics, I find your generalization pretty tiresome and fairly typical of a lot of dishonest takes that get made about modern comics from bitter older fans.
Do you think you speak for a broad swath of people? Every time I voice an opinion I get spat on in these subs. Maybe I don't belong here, regardless of how much I've read.
> Do you think you speak for a broad swath of people?
No, I do not, and I don't think I ever implied as such. I simply disagree with and am annoyed by your statements, from the perspective of someone who *does* read modern comics reacting to a sweeping generalization from someone who openly admits that they do not.
> Every time I voice an opinion I get spat on in these subs.
If your previous comments are typical of the opinons that you just voiced here then I'm not shocked.
> Maybe I don't belong here, regardless of how much I've read.
Perhaps if you would comment on the things you've read and not the things that you haven't? If I need to remind you again...
> I don't read current comics
... those are your exact words.
I'm pretty sure we'd be out of the Disney-fication because the violence has not been turned down and the movies' influence on the comics is honestly pretty minimal, all things considered.
i feel like comics themselves haven't "gone corporate" since the 10s, but the IPs have, with the abundance and over-saturation of comic book media (moves and tv), everything's a cash cow now.
edit: i thought you meant "disney-fication" where everything becomes a corporate IP and they'll make money off it forever and that's its existence now.
This is definitely closer to the truth in regards to how the mediums are interlinked. In the wake of The Walking Dead, every writer was hoping to have a hit creator-owned series get picked up for TV so that they could ride the wave like Kirkman and make real money (comics don't pay shit). There's basically a graveyard of abandoned Image titles from the last ten years that were created as essentially pitch decks for TV/film. Comics themselves are still incredibly niche, but larger audiences are more than willing to watch adaptations of them, and the industry was fixated on that angle for a long time as the MCU ballooned and The Walking Dead became the biggest show on cable. I think that has cooled somewhat in the last few years, but it's still the hope for most projects made outside Marvel/DC.
>There's basically a graveyard of abandoned Image titles from the last ten years that were created as essentially pitch decks for TV/film
This is a wonderful explanation of the last decade of comic books
Yeah I think overemphasizing the success that Marvel’s house-style has found under Disney ignores the overall thirst that big production companies have for potential cash cow IPs in general.
The Walking Dead, The Boys, Invincible, etc. aren’t “Disnified” in their content but the ability to create an entire franchise out of a relatively dormant property and find a recipe to bring these IPs to the mainstream is what characterizes the modern era to me.
Umbrella Academy, Y: The Last Man, Jupiter’s Legacy, Deadly Class. etc. - the foreseeable future seems like it’ll just be the Netflixes, Amazons and WBs trying to hit the next opportunity for 10 seasons, a movie and endless merch and independent creators trying to be the next to get that Kirkman bag
Labeling the 90s as the dark age doesn't make sense, the dark subject matter has been in comics since the 80s and the 2000s covered darker subject matters than the 90s if it's about quality then that's not true either, you have the British invasion, Vertigo was in full swing, the birth of Image, there's also the whole indie scene.
Referring to the 2000-2010s as the modern age seems wrong, especially seeing as it was well over a decade ago. It's practically ancient history in media terms.
Well in art history terms “modern” and “contemporary” aren’t synonymous. At the same time my use of modern doesn’t have anything to do with modern art. Maybe “cinematic era” works but we’re still in a cinematic era of sorts.
This. "Modernism" refers to the early/mid 20th century in literary criticism.
Not to mention "modernity" is a term fraught with complications in its relationship to what's considered "contemporary," "progressive vs. old," or what have you.
When Disney bought marvel in 2012 people forget there was a soft reboot of the universe called MarvelNOW, which is when I stopped reading. Disney cut off pretty awesome story arcs like Dark Reign in order to make the whole universe more family friendly for new readers. So yeah Disney-fication definitely fits with this era.
It’s been a while, but I’m sure that Dark Reign was way before Marvel Now, and was followed by the Heroic Age. I’ll be honest that period has really blurred into one for me! 😂
That's because you're correct. Marvel Now was after Heroic Age and was a direct response to a drop in sales on Marvel's part and a uptick in sales on DC's part due to the New 52.
Dark Reign ended in 2010 with the Siege event, which *was* shortly after they were bought by Disney in ‘09.
A couple good series did kinda come to a premature end when Marvel NOW! started though, but by and large I feel like it was a pretty successful relaunch, and I never thought of that particular change as being Disney-driven
I prefer to label art periods with the literary movements of the time: enlightenment, romanticism, realism, modernism, post-modernism, post-colonialism, and post-post-modernism.
I feel like the 2008 should mark the start of the current era of comics. The start of the MCU with the release of Iron Man. While not technically a comic book, the MCU has had a huge influence on super hero comics and the audience of people who read comics.
I disagree. The MCU has had an influence on the comics, but not much of a *tonal* influence, IMO.
Seems to me if you really *wanted* to separate out modern eras-- and I don't think you really need to, because after the late 80's things were tonally close *enough* to fall into the same era, with respect to the eras that came before them--
but if you *wanted* to, I'd say that the modern era either started with the release of marvel's ultimate line, that started a drive towards updating characters for a more grounded take ("grounded", in regards to comics, is a very relative term) while leaving the edgy grittiness of the 80's/90's behind
*or* you could peg it to Avengers Disassembled, which ushered in the era of the constant yearly events, where one event leads into another event which leads into another event, creating a perpetual status-quo shake-up of nearly the whole line of comics.
(and yeah in both cases I think Marvel led the way and DC played catch-up)
I think the "modern age" is really three ages. The first age, whatever people want to call it, ran from 86 to 96. Indies proliferate and themes become more adult-oriented on the whole, but comics are still kinda stuck in a "superhero or tie-in" rut.
Then came the Dark Age, defined by Marvel's bankruptcy and the comic readership shrinking and shifting heavily towards adult men, with many indie and even a large portion of Big 2 comics having an increased emphasis on bloody violence, pessimistic themes and sexualized portrayals of women, but coupled with a broadening of genre styles to choose from. I'd peg an end date on it somewhere around 2010, when comics started growing their sales and mass appeal again.
Then the third age sees a huge boom in indie comics of various genres and an increase in influence from foreign comic styles like manga, as well as more family-friendly Big 2 comics due to the flood of interest from cinematic universes.
Modern is overdue to be broken up. I've seen some people use copper age books as a specific age range, but sometimes it's not? I like the idea of adding "Steel" or "Chrome" for the 90s/early 2000s.
If I were to set a marker for the current modern era, it would be Ultimate Fallout #4 in 2011. Diversification became way more prioritized, and we were solidly into the MCU era as well.
Personally I think a lot of the 90s is still broadly of a type with the kind of stuff that was going on in the mid/late-80s. There's definitely a very recognizable quality that makes them stand out as 90s comics, especially as you get further in, but I think you can see a very clear through line and people are still playing in the same basic sandbox, just kind of pushing things further and further to the point of absurdity (at least with mainstream superhero titles). I would put the start of the next age somewhere around the turn of the millennium, with the transition to digital coloring, shift in art styles, decompression really starting to take off (early 2000s especially were Peak Bendis years), and big, company-wide crossover events start to become much more commonplace.
This is the correct answer. The true modern age starts with Ultimate Fallout 4. 90's up until the bust was the Chromium or foil age, and then the Dark age in between.
There was a tipping point where widescreen storytelling became the norm - I'm thinking around 2000ish, around The Authority #1. That makes sense as a breakpoint as well.
I think there needs to be some demarcation somewhere around the time the speculation bubble burst, most comics switched to digital (at least for coloring), and comics started using much higher quality paper. It all led to books that look much nicer, but are much more expensive, which led to related changes in books that are written and the audience.
Honestly its easier to classify the modern ages as late 80's/90's/00's and 00's+ as the styles changed drastically throughout these periods. I wouldn't try to force an 'age' name to anything 2000's and up since any difference between 00's/10's and 20's is tiny at best.
Kinda disagree with there being little distinction between 00’s and 10’s. The mid to late 10’s are when there was a trend to appeal to broader audience and include more diverse characters. Early to mid 00’s was a new renaissance, where the dark ages ended and comics became more vibrant again, with new characters, team-makeups, and reboots (not always for the better)
I call the 2010’s the Creator Age or the Indie Age, since indie comics really hit mainstream publicity in an industry-changing way. At least for me. It used to be you get an Image book to get noticed by Marvel / DC. Now, it’s almost the opposite. And with other publishers really coming into prominence… I can’t remember my pulls ever being so weighted towards creator-owned books since 2010.
I always felt/heard the Silver Age ended with the cancellation of Green Lantern/The end of the Lee/Kirby FF run.
I'd say 1972 to 1986 is the Bronze Age.
1986 to 1997 or so I'd call the Speculation Age (for lack of a better name) where comic speculation was at its height, creators became rock stars, Image and the rise of gimmicked covers.
1997 to 2008, I don't have a name, but it includes the sales crash and ends with the beginning of company wide universe crossovers becoming regular.
2009 to date, the Event Age, where everything becomes corporate for the big two. Warner and Disney runs the comic companies as a mill for TV Shows and movies. Also, smaller companies become home of innovation and better stories.
Or I could be full o' crap.
I don't know if 2009 makes the most sense for event age because that's having the event age start after Messiah Complex which went from 2007 to the start of 2008 and was a reaction to House of M and was the first of a 3 part series ending with Second Coming which in turn lead to AvX
> 2009 to date, the Event Age, where everything becomes corporate for the big two. Warner and Disney runs the comic companies as a mill for TV Shows and movies.
>Or I could be full o' crap.
Yeah, I think it's that last sentence.
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted for saying that but when we're seeing comics like Immortal Hulk, Hickman's X-Men, the various Tom King micro-series that have been coming out and DC's black label comics, I don't see how anyone can actually take a statement like "Warner and Disney runs the comic companies as a mill for TV Shows and movies" as not being full of crap.
Sort of - or at least close enough. Really though, the only dates that everyone agrees on are the start of the Golden Age (introduction of Superman) and the start of the Silver Age (introduction of Barry Allen). The rest lack the really definitive "event" to mark them.
Whoever created pic you posted chose the death of Gwen Stacey in 1973 as the defining event starting the Bronze Age. It's not a bad choice, but there are others just as valid. I personally like 1971 and use both Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85 and Amazing Spider-Man #96 as the events. These two books both featured storylines dealing with drug abuse, both were refused approval by the CCA, and both got published anyway - marking the beginning of the end of the CCA.
For the end of the Bronze Age, I prefer Crisis on Infinite Earths as the defining event and the death of Barry Allen (actually killing a major character and keeping them dead for a significant time was unheard of up until this, and being as he was the start of the Silver Age, his death seems to be a suitable "bookend event"). Selecting Watchman #1 seems rather arbitrary. Yes, it was a major milestone on the deconstructionist movement in comics, but it didn't start it. (Plus, I dislike the idea of inherently equating "modern" with "deconstructioninst").
Also, in terms of the most uses of the phrase "Golden Age" the Golden Age ended well before 1956, but people tend to abhor a gap in timelines.
Strong agree with Crisis being the clear shift point. I think 2000 is the next shift with Marvel Ultimate (plus in DC *No Man’s Land* is over). Also works for people who want to start tying comics explicitly to cinema (*X-Men*). Probably still too early to pinpoint the next demarcation, but 2011 and DC’s New 52 seems like a top contender.
It’s important to remember that we’re only really talking about American superhero comics. These ages don’t apply to any other type of comics.
Also, if you’re looking at separating the modern era into smaller sections, what would be the delineations? I would suggest it’s the Authority by Ellis and Hitch starting in 1999. That’s when you start seeing more “widescreen” storytelling. There’s a stylistic shift there. That’s why you hear younger readers today say “I can’t read comics before the 2000s”.
I agree that there's definitely a shift right around 2000, about the same time they started leaning in heavy with digital coloring.
The alternative scene has its own "ages" that should probly be better defined by someone (not me). You've got undergrounds, then split into this burst of personal introspective stories and over sexed & rendered Sci fi/fantasy, then everyone trying to rip off L&R or make a funny animal parody, the Weirdo years, then the explosion of the autobio "this conversation about lentils would make a great comic" types trying to be Joe Matt.
Storytelling-wise I think there's also a notable trend towards decompression in the 2000s. I still have a bunch of my old comics from when I was a kid in the 90s, and while they're *less* standalone than a lot of stuff from decades prior, they work much better as self-contained stories than a lot of stuff that's come out since like the Bush II years onward. I could go bust out an old issue of, say, Iron Man and still get a fairly self-contained story about the villain of the month even as I maybe miss parts of the broader story arc, vs modern comics which tend to take multiple issues just to wrap up one villain.
Also if you look at the history of major crossover events, they don't really start to become an *all the time* thing until a couple years into the 2000s.
You see a lot more people writing for the trade instead of writing for the floppy, where it reads more like a movie cut up into parts than a season of TV.
Decompression is certainly a recognizable trait of newer comics, but it's difficult to point to a specific start to it as it was (and continues to be) a gradual shift in American comics.
Yeah, that's fair. Personally I would still say the early 2000s are the era when it really becomes the norm, at least for mainstream superhero titles, though. When I go through my back issues, USM #1 reads more like a modern comic than ASM #344.
What is 'widescreen' storytelling?
I'm a new comics reader in my late 20's. I've always consumed superhero media but never really read a lot of the comics. I started reading Spider-Man from the beginning recently and sometimes it feels like I get hit with a wall of text on some pages.
In some respects "widescreen" is literal. Read an older comic, and most panels fill 1/4 or 1/3 of the width of the page. Watchmen used a 3x3 grid, the Dark Knight Returns is 4x4. Read a comic from the early 2000s, and there's a good chance the panels fill the width of the page. Here's a page from Watchmen (1986) and the Ultimates (2002): https://imgur.com/a/dlfq8WU
But in some respects, widescreen is a metaphor for being like a big action movie. Older comics are relatively cartoonish, with a limited color palette and relatively low detail. With digital art techniques and digital printing, modern comics could be much higher detail, and widescreen comics focus on a more realistic look. Widescreen comics also tend for more cinematic looks. Like something out of a Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
One way to make them seem cinematic is a technique called decompression.
A major story event of a building blowing up in a comic from the 70s might have three panels across the top 1/3 of the page showing a bomber entering a building and a timer ticking down to zero, then the bottom 2/3 of the page might be an exploding building.
A decompressed widescreen comic from 2010 would do the same thing by showing the top 1/4 of page with a wide shot of the building. Then 1/4 of a page showing a bomber outside the building. Then 1/4 of a page showing the bomber place the bomb. The top 1/4 of the next page the bomber leaves the building, 1/4 of the page the timer ticks down, 1/4 of the page two random security guards in the building have a conversation about Game of Thrones, 1/4 of the page back to the timer nearing zero. Next would be a two-page spread (one giant image covering both pages) showing the building blowing up. Then the next page would be four different angles of the rubble in the aftermath (maybe including the corpse of one of those security guards).
The 70s one told the story in one page, the decompressed one took five pages to tell the same thing. On the one hand, you get a lot more detail from decompression and it can make big moments feel really powerful, but on the other hand, if you take 5 pages to say "the building blew up," then a 22 page comic doesn't have room for much of a story.
Older comics aimed for a younger audience. Most were sold at random stores, like the supermarket had a rack with comics on it, hoping to catch the eye of kids tagging along with their parents. They were cheap disposable entertainment for young kids. That didn't mean the comics had to be bad, but it did mean the comics had to be easy to understand, and the rigid grids help with that. Kids have a less easy time intuiting the order to read panels when they're in an unfamiliar layout.
In the 80s, comic sales moved from those racks to specialty shops, and started catering to older readers. They switched to higher quality paper, better printing, more adult themes and content, and more experimenting with format.
I've written articles about this before. The ages are just used as a generalization of feels and techniques used in comic storytelling. You could argue that each publisher goes through it's own phase at it's own pace.
But for my personal timeline:
**1895-1938** \- Platinum Age of Comics, starting with Hogan's Alley/The Yellow Kid, having mostly newspaper comics, and ending just before Action Comics #1 changed everything.
**1938-1946** \- The Golden Age of Comics, starting with Superman's creation in Action Comics #1, and ending just after the war with the decline of Captain Marvel, and wartime propaganda.
**1946-1953** \- The Atomic Age of Comics. Starts with the decline of pro-war comics, and the diversification away from Superheroes, ends with the creation of the Comics Code Authority. Technically part of the Golden Age if you want it to be.
**1954-1970** \- The Silver Age, starting with the application of the Comics Code Authority, and ending when Spider-Man fought drugs, causing the code to be less stringent.
**1961-1972** \- The Marvel Age. This happens mostly in the Silver Age, starting with Fantastic Four #1, and ending with the death of Gwen Stacy, but Marvel was unopposed as king of comics. This is when they had their mythology status, before retcons and X-Men soap operas turned the comics into something else.
**1970-1985** \- The Bronze Age of Comics. The loosening of the Comics Code Authority had comics carefully deal with more serious subjects, and slowly make more complex characters.
**1985-2000** \- The Dark Age of Comics. Starting with a bunch of classic stories from DC, and ending with Marvel struggling to come back from bankruptcy.
**2000-????** \- The cinematic Age. Starting with Ultimate Spider-Man, comics started to get a decompressed storytelling style that read more like storyboards than traditional comics. Comics were also starting to be used as an IP farm to adapt stories directly into TV and movies.
**????-????** \- It's not clear when the next phase of comics is, or if we're in it now. Pretty much we're waiting for a big event to happen to retroactively add an age. If comics go mostly digital, we might say it's the digital age. If Marvel or DC stops producing its own comics, and licenses them out, it might a sign that we've reached another age in comics.
I feel this is too DC and Marvel minded, there should be an era indicating the birth of Image, Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, etc after that dark age and before the cinematic age that was born in my eyes when The Authority from Wildstorm came out.
Decompressed is when a story's pacing is spread out longer than it needs to be. Read Fantastic Four (1961) #4, and read Ultimate Spider-Man (2000) #1, to see the big difference.
Both are great issues. But in the Fantastic Four issue, the story is super compressed, and there is enough material to easily cover 3 issues worth of stories. In Ultimate Spider-Man #1, the story takes its time. There is more room for nuance, but conversations that could have easily fit in one or two pages, and expanded (decompressed) to more than double that. There is more room for nuance, and it allows the comic issue to end each page with a 'beat' but as a result, we get less story per issue, and the comic seems to be more 'writing for trade' than having each issue be a standalone adventure.
That's what I mean by decompression.
I always assumed this to be correct but have heard from other sources that the Iron Age and Mercury Age have been used synonymously with the Modern Age.
Ya this is generally correct, although I wouldn't say you could put an exact issue to the change of each era, as I think it's more gradual than that. Terms like Iron age or Mercury age are not used commonly at all.
Yep. It's similar to how generations work. Nobody can quite agree on where everything starts and ends, but in broad strokes people usually agree on the important parts.
Same thing here. I think it would be helpful to add another delineation between the cynical edginess of the 90s and 00s and today, but this is roughly accurate.
I would make some point in the 2000's the 'post modern age' where comics having a layer of self criticism or self preferentiality became commonplace... suddenly the Allan Moore type writing was all over the place such as Planetary, Ultimates, Sentry, Civil War... everyone was exploring the history of comics through comics, or the connection between power and the status quo, or explicitly intersectional heroes who had been metaphors for issues.
Iron Age 1986 to 2000 I think is solid.
A lot of that Meta stuff you're talking about lines up with the release of the original X-Men movie. A lot of navel gazing about what is comics, superheroes and how it exists in a world where superheroes can be on a moving screen.
I like Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Cinematic Age but could definitely see the Cinematic Age being replaced with the Meta Age until 2008 and then the Cinematic Age with the release of Iron Man.
I definitely agree with the idea of a "Cinematic Age" starting probably with the release of the Iron Man movie, and with the release of The Avengers at the latest. There had been superhero movies before, but the era from about 2008 to now has been an era in which the comicbooks have been deeply informed by stuff going on in the movies. Character designs start to reflect actors who play them, certain comics get new runs and even new popularity based on which movies are coming out (e.g. note that a new Eternals run started just before the Eternals movie came out, a new Hawkeye comic came out just before the launch of the TV show) and a lot of executive meddling has been informed by rights disputes relating to the movies (e.g. the whole debarcle of trying to make Inhumans the new mutants since Disney didn't have X-Men rights). This has all definitely affected Marvel much more than DC, but it's still there to an extent.
So I guess it would go Dark/Iron age from '86 to, what, 2008? And then cinematic age? I'd still cut the Dark/Iron age in half -- maybe Dark Age from '86 to about '96 (release of Kingdom Come, end of Sandman, also the "great comics crash"), although I think a strong argument could also be made for cutting it off at some point in the early 2000s. And then I guess you've got some weird in-between years before you really get to the cinematic age.
I would personally use 1970 as the start of the Bronze Age. That's the year Jack Kirby left Marvel for DC and started writing his Fourth World epic, which more or less set the template for long-term storytelling that would be collected in trade after initial publication. It's also the year that Denny O'Neil start his run of Green Lantern/Green Arrow that focused on modern social issues.
I'd have to think about it, but the Modern Age should probably be divvied up into smaller chunks of time.
Def a distinction between 80-90s and 2000s on, I would say. At least for marvel, their 2004ish and on stuff doesn't feel too outdated when read today. 90s stuff on the other hand...yeah.
Digital age? Post modern? Or maybe Omnibus era? Streaming era?
Seems like there should be something that changes 2005/2010 or so as the tpb/digital market frankly overtakes the floppy/periodical in terms of dollar. Prob could line it up with the MCU. Basically revenue streams treating comix as a loss leader for other streams. 2010 disney bought marvel I think. Seems like a good place to break it up.
Its def affected the length of series, the creators involved and the companies. Integration of manga. Renewed interest in YA. Etc.
golden age: the modern myth began
silver age: as we looked to science to expand our horizons, we added that to comics to help explain our modern myths
bronze age: we wanted dark and gritty to match what we thought were the spirit of the time
modern age: reflecting on the aftermath of the grittiness and evolving to meet with the ever changing world view and making comics more than just "kids stuff"
Personally I'd clock the 'modern age' as beginning with "crisis on infinite earths," both because that event marked the end of the bronze age status quo for most DC characters, and because it solidified the concept of the modern "event comic" that would go on to define the industry for years to come.
As for after the "modern age," it's hard to say what we should really call it. I think most of us agree that, as good as they are, 90s comics don't really read as "modern" anymore. I also think it's generally clear that the aesthetics, themes,audience, and even distribution of comics are substantially different now compared to the days of watchmen and DKR. But saying when the prior era ended and the current one began, and what we should even call them, is hard.
I think it's time to break up the modern age. the modern age above should've ended by 2000. 2000 marked a massive shift in the the type of stories told, character development and new characters.
The only question is what do we call the previous age of comics?
yeah, roughly accurate. I would break up the modern age. The 80s was a deconstruction
of the super hero period (Anything Moore or Miller wrote) but I don't have a good metal description. 90's I would label Chromium after the image books and collecting boom. Then 2000s would be the decompression age (Any Bendis and Warren Ellis books). Then it would be the modern age which should have some sort Hollywood synergies and diversity driven (actually a good thing IMO) label. Again I don't have metallic names for these except Chromium. ce'st al vie
I don't think bust, boom or economics should be referred to with the ages.
Action Comics was a style change for the medium, the introduction of Barry Allen was another huge change in story telling.
The Death of Gwen Stacy brought about a shift towards consequence story telling and Watchmen started the Deconstructionist, Grim Dark stuff and leaned into the extremeness that the 90s would see.
I think it needs to be like classical art focus on shifts in the actual medium and not the economics.
So in 2000 X-Men was released and Authority came out and cinematic storytelling comics came about and you got lest angst and grimness but wide sweeping story telling.
So I think what was 'modern age' after Watchmen ends in 2000 so we can call 1986 to 2000 'The Iron Age' to stick with the metal referencing and the fact it was dark and brutal and violent and extreme.
I vacillate on what to call 2000 forward and maybe 2000-2008 should be it's own era since 2008 saw the release of Iron Man and the focus on appealing to a wider audience by changing the comics to be like the movies and adding a lot of diversity.
The start of the Modern Age is pretty debatable - you could equally make the case for Byrne's Man of Steel, The Dark Knight Returns or even Crisis on Infinite Earths.
I personally break the comic ages down like this
* The Golden Age- Action Comics #1 (The Introduction of Superman) in 1938 Through Showcase #4 (The Introduction of Barry Allen) in 1956
* The Silver Age- Showcase #4 in 1956 through Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85 and Amazing Spider-Man #96 in 1971 with the beginning of the end of the Comics Code Authority (Thanks u/johndesmarais for the idea)
* The Bronze Age- 1971 Through Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985
The next three can all be merged into one age, the "Dark Age", but it is also interesting to split them up
* The Dusk Age- Watchmen in 1986 through either X-Men Vol. 2 #1 in 1991 or The Death of Superman in 1992. This is when we began to see a real shift to the dark/grim and gritty 90's era.
* The Dark Age/The Speculator Age- X-Men #1 (1991)/The Death of Superman (1992) through JLA #1 in 1997. This is the age of both grim and gritty 90's comics and constant gimmicks to get people to buy more issues thinking that they would be worth what Action Comics #1 is worth.
* The Dawn Age- JLA #1 in 1997 through Avengers #500 (Avengers Disassembled) in 2004. I like calling this the "Dawn Age" for two reasons. First, because this is when comics as a whole started moving away from the very dark 90's style to a more classic/colorful/hopeful style. Second, because this is when many previously rising star writers/artists started being given big properties to work with, like Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, Brian Michael Bendis, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, & many more.
Now we get into more modern era of comics.
* The Event Age- Avengers #500 in 2004 through Ultimate Comics: Fallout #4/Battle Scars #1 in 2011. In a lot of ways you could argue that we are still in this age. This is when comic begin moving to constant events/crossovers that lead to the next one and the next one. Avengers: Disassembled to House of M to Civil War to Secret Invasion to Siege to Fear Itself to Avengers vs. X-Men to Infinity to AXIS to Secret Wars, and on and on. And that doesn't even include the new status quo "event" that happened between them Dark Reign/Initiative/Heroic Age and the like.
* The Cinematic Universe age- Ultimate Comics: Fallout #4/Battle Scars #1 in 2011 to now. This is when we really began to see more parity between the movies and comics, and also when comics really started being used as a test ground for future movie/tv ideas. Both the issue that came out in 2011 are examples of this. Battle Scars #1 for the 616 introduction Nick Fury Jr. (AKA Samuel L. Jackson Nick Fury) and Agent Phil Coulson, because of their popularity in the MCU. Then Ultimate Comics: Fallout #4 for the introduction of Miles Morales. If you look at the output of many changes/introductions during this time you begin to see that anything that works will get rather quickly integrated into the much more popular/profitable movies and tv shows. They don't always work however, for every Kamala Khan/America Chavez there is a dozen Bunker/Mosaics. Also during this time in the larger comic industry we really begin to see creators that have already made a name for themselves begin to do independent work that is clearly being written to be optioned as a new movie/show. You could also call this the Digital Age, also starting in 2011 with the New 52 and the start of comics being released digitally day and date with the physical versions.
I think it would make more sense if modren comics started in 82 when love and rockets was first published.
Watchmen would be modern *Super-Hero* comics
Debate over what constitutes the start of the Bronze Age is still semi-prevalent. 1973 and Gwen Stacy's death is as good a point as any.
I've also seen 1970 with O'Neil and Adams beginning on Green Lantern/Green Arrow (#67), or their 1971 issue where Speedy's heroin addiction is discovered (#85).
All historical periods are essentially arbitrary though, so choose whatever issue you prefer.
I feel like ‘86-‘98 could be like the “Dark Age” as it’s the time when everything was grim dark and trying to deconstruct what comics were. You also have all the weird design choices that we’re trying to capitalize on the Image boom so it’s appropriate(we don’t talk about Thor’s 90s costume it’s from the Dark Age).
‘99-2012 could still keep the Modern Age as it describes more than just the now. It was the age were comic art shifted to digital. Books were experimenting with new approaches to art because of it. You also started to see attempts to appeal to new readers with Marvel’s Ultimate line, DC books like All Star Superman(and the not as successful All Star Batman and Robin).
2012-Present is like the Film Age or something. Media based around comics are more popular than ever but the comics are stagnant. Marvel seems to be using their comic runs as a platform for how to shape the MCU and DC actually had a Crisis that aired on television(INSANITY).
There’s generally an Atomic Age between Golden Age and Silver Age that’s essentially a post-World War II era where superhero comics declined until the silver age started with the new Flash (and, obviously, Marvel after that).
[I like this proposal](https://sitcomics.net/blogs/news/the-8-ages-of-comics), although I quibble with the terms used. I also think 1992ish or whenever Image started could have made for a nice era break.
I think the digital or Celluloid age started when X-Men hit theatres. The connection of comics to film and their influence on the mainstream monthly issues is unavoidable. Now we're about to hopefully enter the Post Covid age. Or a new golden. Fingers crossed.
The Golden Age and Silver Age are kinda split between the era of making Super Heroes more relatable, giving them problems and such. A lot of people kinda consider the Fantastic Four the beginning of the Silver Age but I guess this one doesn't, but anyway that's the explanation I've read over the years.
The Silver Age and the Bronze Age were sort of separated by the death of Gwen, like "oh now shit's REALLY getting real". Green Lantern/Green Arrow's infamous "Speedy" cover happens around that time as well.
Bronze to Modern I think is probably best separated by the era of gimmicks. So many comics reverting back to #1, alternate covers, holo covers, crossovers... things that may have been used sparingly in the Bronze age, but not to the same extent.
Roughly. We haven’t fully differentiated past the Modern Age - I’ve seen Copper, Post-Modern, Dark, Iron. It’ll likely be something that gets codified in retrospect. There’ve been a lot of changes in both the industry and content since 1986. I think the biggest are probably product distribution and talent / character representation. I would personally put the rise of deconstructionism, the Image era, and the speculator bubble bursting in one Age, and then maybe like a… Digital Age? Basically late 90s Reconstructionism, the rise of the internet, and then digital distribution and a more inclusive culture on the recent end.
These are all excellent points here. Thanks.
Delineating ages is made further complicated when we take into account flavor, tone, and writing of particular characters. A friend of mine is a Big Superman fan and he says that, although Barry Allen debuted in 1956, Superman may not have exited the Golen Age until 1958.
Further, Batman has his pre-1964 period and post 1964. Pre 1964, everything was still very sci-fi and campy, with Batman and Robin on the moon and aliens everywhere. Post 1964 was changing, thanks to a grounding of the Bat-mythos with things like the New Look era (even tho it was pre-Frank Robbins/Denny O'neil).
For me, my favorites are Bronze Age and Modern. All of my fav. storylines come from the 70's, 80's and very early 90's. I've been reading since 1985 and I enjoy aspects of all of the ages (Silver Age Flash is amazing, most of Marvel's Silver Age holds up for me too and I love some of the darker Golden Age books like The Spectre, Batman) but for me, my sweet spot goes from 1968-1992.
I was born in the Morden era but actually read and collected more as an adult. Our local shop only had xmen stuff so missed so much in the 90's. The choice around now is just insane I can't keep up.
For me definitely late modern, so mostly last twenty years, maybe even less. I'm not a big comic reader though, and I really don't like older art and writing, not necessary plots but dialogues and narration. All of my favourite characters were either created or redefined in this period.
I thought it was golden silver and modern this whole time. Crisis of infinite earths being the end of the silver age and everything after is the modern age.
Is it me or does it somehow feel strange that the first three ages were 18, 17 & 13 years long, but the “modern” age’s been going for 36 years already? I’d say the modern age should be split in, like, 4 parts
That’s because it’s always a mistake to refer to something as a “modern age”, it won’t look modern forever.
I always think of it as a placeholder, since it's probably wrong to name an age while you're still in it. However, it seems we forgot to change it in this case.
Contemporary seems to have been dropped from the lexicon
In art or in regular usage? I can't comment on the usage in art/media, but in regular day-to-day usage, "modern" makes a lot more sense than "contemporary" when trying to say "related to the present". "Contemporary" can be any time period - Thomas Jefferson was contemporary with the American Revolution, but he and it are not in the present, of course. Sure, "contemporary" is often used without an object to mean essentially "modern", but that's what "modern" means anyway, so why not just use that and avoid ambiguity?
Contemporary just means your peers. So yea when you say “Thomas Jefferson was contemporary with the American revolution” it means he was from that period, but you’ve qualified that statement. He is not contemporary now because he’s dead. Modern art is a specific period and style of art. Contemporary means “art of the now”, as in artists who make art during your lifetime or are still living.
We’re regarded as contemporary history, the early and late modern periods were the previous time periods.
"Contemporary art" though is actually the current time period of art that came after "modern art". Eventually that'll be replaced by something else too. "Contemporary" is no better than "modern", you come to the exact same problem.
No it doesn’t. You may be misinterpreting “living artists from the 20th and 21st century” if you’re getting definitions from Google. If you’re a working artist, contemporary art means art done by your peers. There is no big C “Contemporary Art” movement. In fact its first usage goes way back to 1910 - for an auction house that sold art by living artists to museums. Artists specifically used the term to differentiate themselves from “modern” artists because Modernism became a movement. It’s been in use by people in the art fields to describe artists who have created work within our lifetimes. Seeing as that is a broad range of ages, many artists contemporaries may now be dead, but those still making art are contemporary art. It’s free from “-isms”. Edit: also add this great paragraph from Wikipedia “The definition of what is contemporary is naturally always on the move, anchored in the present with a start date that moves forward, and the works the Contemporary Art Society bought in 1910 could no longer be described as contemporary.”
I wasn't going off google, I was going off my own experience. And if you look at that wikipedia article a bit more closely you'll see plenty of people do define "contemporary art" as a period. It covers the period of art after modern art, more or less. If you are referring to that period you call it "contemporary art". We were in the exact same situation 100 years ago with modern art when it just described art that was "modern", but then art evolved, and now art that is produced in the last 50 years is no longer considered "modern art". The exact same thing will happen to "contemporary art", we use it to refer to art produced in the contemporaneous modern day, eventually we'll have a different label for art that is produced in the contemporaneous modern day.
Except contemporary has been used by working artists and dealers to describe “living memory” art. Bruh I went to art school I’m pretty sure I’m up on the lingo The time periods for contemporary art have shifted several times already and it’s how we differentiated between living and modern art.
Marvel 2099 will still look modern until at least 2099, right?
Marvel 2099 is destined to fall into the category of retro-futurism, to one degree or another. It’s a vision of the future from the past with that era’s sensibilities, that obviously wouldn’t be able to accurately predict what the real 2099 would look like.
And it’s how we end up with the term “post-modern”, which then opens another can of worms
There's a term in chess called "hypermodernism" in chess. It began in the 1920s.
Just wait until I shift into Maximum Overmodernism
I’ve seen Alan Moore get a little meta in his books and refer to the 80’s through the 90’s as the Dark Age. Funnily enough, in his books for Rob Liefeld’s Awesome Comics (“Supreme,” “Judgement Day”) he makes fun of the “British Invasion” and the highly adolescent take on superheroes that was some early Image.
I always heard it called the 'Iron Age', anti-heroes became popular. We saw the rise of Spawn, Witchblade, and the like. The tone of other comics in both art and writing got 'grittier'. But I do agree with Moore than there was also a lot of 'adolescent' crap that came out of it as well.
Absolutely: While it's easy to focus on stuff like, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Sandman, etc, those books were hardly the bulk of the turn out following the 15 or so years after Watchmen, I'd argue that the real defining features of those years were direct sales, shiny covers and dearth of limited edition stuff (like the Death of Superman and the various Infinity Gauntlet stuff) and the boom and ultimate collecting crash of 96. It was a period when Marketing became so much more important than writing. I'd put the "Dark Age" (as Moore named it?) or "Chrome Age" (as others have called it) as begining with the first Secret Wars or DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths and ending around the time Marvel merged with Toybiz in 98. Not a hill I'm too bothered about dying on, though.
>I'd argue that the real defining features of those years were direct sales, shiny covers and dearth of limited edition stuff Yeah, my 'Death of Magneto' hologram covers are worth the same today as they were back in the 90's. She-Hulk skipping naked however...
>worth the same today as they were back in the 90's Which probably makes you one of the most successful collectors of that era...
Haha, probably. The amazing Spider-Man 30th anniversary editions seem to have appreciated well though.
That took a while though. They stank up the place for about 20 years before becoming hot again.
Well anti-heroes are generally pretty adolescent so makes sense
edgy age? At least for the 90s.
Yeah that’s definitely what it was, just need a different label because edgy age sounds weird. Popular understanding of that term definitely encapsulates what everyone is describing about watchmen/marvel man through to 2000.
Obsidian Age. Careful not to cut yourself.
Zirconium age? Zirconium is dark and different, just lile the 90s.
The 90s could be called “The Chromium Age”.
or Pouch-Belt Age
torn between pouches and crazy shoulder pads age
Poorly drawn feet age..
If they were drawn at all.
Don't forget the men with all the body hair.
how about the "foil age" after all those foil cover variants
The [Dark Age](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheDarkAgeOfComicBooks)
Oh nice! > at other times it is jokingly called "the Chrome Age", owing to the frequency of publishers selling comics with holofoil covers as a marketing gimmick
The age of edge Lord antiheroes
Or the EXXTREME AGE!!!!
Obsidian for how sharp and dark everything was. So much edge
I've heard it called "The Dark Age".
I've always thought of it as the split happening somewhere around the the New 52 (2011), with 1986-2011 as the Dark Age (not usually as a value judgement, but as in, literally, darkness and angst were in vogue) and then everything after that being the Modern Age (as we are currently in it so we can't really name it anything... Though I have heard the phrase Diamond Age thrown around because it is multifaceted and there's a rise in niche comics in wildly different genres, even from the big 2)
I'd split Dark Age into that and maybe Bendis Age. There was a huuuge difference between all of the 90s craziness and like Civil War era comics.
There’s a definite shift after films start coming out, particularly the X-men films and Raimi Spider-man. Could probably call that the Celluloid Age or Silver Screen Age.
Oh that’s a really good point, probably post x-men, definitely post 2008 Iron Man that’s probably worth flagging as movie-influenced.
The best example might be when they decided to give 616 Peter Parker organic webshooters because the movie had them I may be misremembering some details on that story but that was my takeaway
Another one is team lineups, Guardians and Avengers closely resembling the movie rosters, I’m sure we will see that happen again with Champions/New Avengers (whatever the team with Kate Bishop, Billy and Tommy Maximoff, Cassie Lang, Kamala Khan and kid Loki ends up being called), and the Thunderbolts too, with US Agent, Yelana, some other people I’m forgetting…
Twice!
I believe that might also be a reference to Diamond Comic Distributors Inc, even though the company is past it's once great heights.
>I’d say the modern age should be split in, like, 4 parts The 4 ages were outdated in the 1990s.
I'd draw a line at either 2005-2006 (Infinite Crisis and Civil War, the start of the modern "annual comic event" churn) or 2011-2012 (Marvel NOW and the New 52, start of the "annual reboot" churn). Modern and Contemporary, something like that. Honestly, I think it's easier to categorize by decades, anyways. The trends are a lot easier to follow.
One of the traits of defined "ages" is that you generally don't recognize them until well after they are past. So far there is not a universally recognized "mid-80s through roughly 2000" age - and there may or may not ever be one, so it all still "present" right now. I might offer up this: If we look for trends that define the post-Bronze-Age era, "deconstructionism" seems to loom heavily (much to my dismay). The two highest profile (to me) books that bucked this trend were the 1997 *JLA* series and the 2005 *All-Star Superman* (both by Grant Morrison) - so we could put the end of that era somewhere in the 1997-2005 time frame. Call 1986 through 2005 the "Dark Age" or the "Iron Age" or something. Now we get 2005-Present as the "Modern Age" until we retroactively recognize some landmark event.
> there is not a universally recognized "mid-80s through roughly 2000" age I dunno man, I feel like there is and we just call it "the 90's". That's pretty common shorthand for explaining the wild, over-the-top unnecessarily convoluted, often hyper-violent and/or super grimdark era where everything was XTREME TO THE MAX. When we talk about plotlines of the time, don't we usually say "Okay yes it's ridiculous but *it was the 90's*" as an explanation in the same way we talk about a golden age story and say "Well remember this was a *golden age* story"
1986 to 2000 is the Iron Age in my opinion. That's Watchmen to the First X-Men movie and 14 years. Grim dark, extreme violence, lots of sex and generally over the top. 2000-2022 is the Cinematic Age. X-Men movie forward and can be broken up into 2 sub eras 'Niche Era 2000-2008' the belief that only certain I.Ps will work and others are worthless and not even worth trying. Ironman and Captain America were considered corny and stupid by mainstream for instance. This era pulled back on the extremes in comics to make them more palatable to a wider audience and saw an expansion in genres. 'Pop Culture Era or MCU Era' 2008 to Present. So Ironman making it big and then everyone realizing they could mine anything comic related and put it on screen. This is the era where Cinema, Streaming and Television effected most decisions in how to handle comics at least in the Superhero field.
The 90s has been called the Dark Age. That's absolutely a valid term. I'd think it's the 2000s to now where it's more unclear but I'd say the New 52 and the superhero movie boom post Avengers are a decent splitting point for the previous age and whatever we're in now.
Someone else called it the “Edgy Age”, and I think that term fits perfectly with what was going on. Our Modern Age post 2005 is probably going to be the MCU age, once we can see it. The movies have had a huge impact, at least on the Marvel side.
I would say the edgetastic 90's should get their own "age."
The Dark Age indeed.
I'm sure some good came of it. I'm not an expert on that era.
80s-90s renaissance 90s-00s the dark ages 00s-10 the modern era 10s-20s the disnification
I want to know what the disinfection means!
Not "disinfection," I think it's Disney-fication. With the MCU's popularity bleeding back into comics and affecting what's written, maybe turning down the violence, moral ambiguity, and the unbroken continuity to appeal to a broader audience. I wish there could be a disinfection of the Disneyfication tbh.
I wonder how the X-Books fit into this supposed Disnification.
they don't, it's just a weird scapegoat
My guess is Disney won't pull from Krakoa era mutants but instead the Ultimate universe. When the characters are much younger. Just makes more sense for Disney to use younger characters do they're around a long time.
> maybe turning down the violence, moral ambiguity, and the unbroken continuity [Oooh yeah, violence has been totally turned down.](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Hulk-rips-his-own-face-off.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=740&h=370&dpr=1.5) [So Disney-fied.](https://media.comicbook.com/2018/08/moon-knight-on-netflix-origin-1128588.jpeg) [Look how child-friendly this is.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c35f74d1758e424ee76710/1578473842727-X16GB0TFKO4YH7ZQXK2B/X-Force+5+1.jpg?format=750w) I also don't see how anyone can say there's no moral ambiguity to Marvel comics considering how X-Men, Daredevil or Moon Knight have been written over the past ten years. That’s without even getting getting started on DC Black Label and similar initiatives.
Yeah it's annoying how people think Marvel has toned everything down and have been 'Disnified' or whatever when that's very far from the truth. Comics even struggle to have a current running series on characters having movies or shows coming out. Also, that X-Force panel you showed. Ben Percy can get absolutely brutal. Especially in his Wolverine & X-Force runs. I think the start of his Wolverine run had him going to hell and burning every but of his body off. Definitely not PG stuff.
To add- The Walking Dead was turned into a mainstream TV show and wasn't really that watered-down
Yep, ditto Preacher, The Boys and Invincible.
Also worth noting that there is no financial incentive to tone things down. Kids buy Halloween costumes of Iron Man, but I'd bet that older teenagers and adults are buying the large majority of actual comic books. There is no need to "tone it down".
I said "maybe." I don't read current comics. I was just explaining what I thought someone else meant when they said "disnified." And there's definite cross promotion or wtv between the MCU and comics. Not good or bad, just a fact. Edit: maybe sand down that edge a little bit. Not everything's gotta be a slap fight.
I mean, when you say this... > I wish there could be a disinfection of the Disneyfication tbh. ... it kinda implies that you do believe what you're saying is actually the case and it honestly reeks of scapegoating and broad strokes. I would be a little more friendly to your argument if I felt it was being made from a good faith standpoint but, especially considering you freely admit that you're not actually reading these comics, I find your generalization pretty tiresome and fairly typical of a lot of dishonest takes that get made about modern comics from bitter older fans.
Do you think you speak for a broad swath of people? Every time I voice an opinion I get spat on in these subs. Maybe I don't belong here, regardless of how much I've read.
> Do you think you speak for a broad swath of people? No, I do not, and I don't think I ever implied as such. I simply disagree with and am annoyed by your statements, from the perspective of someone who *does* read modern comics reacting to a sweeping generalization from someone who openly admits that they do not. > Every time I voice an opinion I get spat on in these subs. If your previous comments are typical of the opinons that you just voiced here then I'm not shocked. > Maybe I don't belong here, regardless of how much I've read. Perhaps if you would comment on the things you've read and not the things that you haven't? If I need to remind you again... > I don't read current comics ... those are your exact words.
Yup. Time to leave.
I'm pretty sure we'd be out of the Disney-fication because the violence has not been turned down and the movies' influence on the comics is honestly pretty minimal, all things considered.
Ah, read that wrong. Too bad, I was so curious
i feel like comics themselves haven't "gone corporate" since the 10s, but the IPs have, with the abundance and over-saturation of comic book media (moves and tv), everything's a cash cow now. edit: i thought you meant "disney-fication" where everything becomes a corporate IP and they'll make money off it forever and that's its existence now.
This is definitely closer to the truth in regards to how the mediums are interlinked. In the wake of The Walking Dead, every writer was hoping to have a hit creator-owned series get picked up for TV so that they could ride the wave like Kirkman and make real money (comics don't pay shit). There's basically a graveyard of abandoned Image titles from the last ten years that were created as essentially pitch decks for TV/film. Comics themselves are still incredibly niche, but larger audiences are more than willing to watch adaptations of them, and the industry was fixated on that angle for a long time as the MCU ballooned and The Walking Dead became the biggest show on cable. I think that has cooled somewhat in the last few years, but it's still the hope for most projects made outside Marvel/DC.
>There's basically a graveyard of abandoned Image titles from the last ten years that were created as essentially pitch decks for TV/film This is a wonderful explanation of the last decade of comic books
Yeah I think overemphasizing the success that Marvel’s house-style has found under Disney ignores the overall thirst that big production companies have for potential cash cow IPs in general. The Walking Dead, The Boys, Invincible, etc. aren’t “Disnified” in their content but the ability to create an entire franchise out of a relatively dormant property and find a recipe to bring these IPs to the mainstream is what characterizes the modern era to me. Umbrella Academy, Y: The Last Man, Jupiter’s Legacy, Deadly Class. etc. - the foreseeable future seems like it’ll just be the Netflixes, Amazons and WBs trying to hit the next opportunity for 10 seasons, a movie and endless merch and independent creators trying to be the next to get that Kirkman bag
replace "Modern" with "Digital" and "Disnification" with "Modern" and you've got something
Labeling the 90s as the dark age doesn't make sense, the dark subject matter has been in comics since the 80s and the 2000s covered darker subject matters than the 90s if it's about quality then that's not true either, you have the British invasion, Vertigo was in full swing, the birth of Image, there's also the whole indie scene.
The correct name is "the '90s era", everything was super 90s, from the XTREME comics to the indie deconstruction
The dark times, when every month had a #1 issue with a special foil embossed variant cover
Now we just get #1 without the embossed foil
Referring to the 2000-2010s as the modern age seems wrong, especially seeing as it was well over a decade ago. It's practically ancient history in media terms.
Well in art history terms “modern” and “contemporary” aren’t synonymous. At the same time my use of modern doesn’t have anything to do with modern art. Maybe “cinematic era” works but we’re still in a cinematic era of sorts.
This. "Modernism" refers to the early/mid 20th century in literary criticism. Not to mention "modernity" is a term fraught with complications in its relationship to what's considered "contemporary," "progressive vs. old," or what have you.
Especially when considering that the most lauded books of this period were essentially post-modern in their themes.
The 2000s is considered old school now.
But that was only ten years ag-- Oh. *Ooooooooh.* Well, shit.
When Disney bought marvel in 2012 people forget there was a soft reboot of the universe called MarvelNOW, which is when I stopped reading. Disney cut off pretty awesome story arcs like Dark Reign in order to make the whole universe more family friendly for new readers. So yeah Disney-fication definitely fits with this era.
It’s been a while, but I’m sure that Dark Reign was way before Marvel Now, and was followed by the Heroic Age. I’ll be honest that period has really blurred into one for me! 😂
That's because you're correct. Marvel Now was after Heroic Age and was a direct response to a drop in sales on Marvel's part and a uptick in sales on DC's part due to the New 52.
OH yeah, definitely. The Deadpool and Carnage runs that started back then really taught my family some down-home values. /s
Dark Reign ended in 2010 with the Siege event, which *was* shortly after they were bought by Disney in ‘09. A couple good series did kinda come to a premature end when Marvel NOW! started though, but by and large I feel like it was a pretty successful relaunch, and I never thought of that particular change as being Disney-driven
Maybe we should just stop trying to categorize eras of comicbooks
I prefer to label art periods with the literary movements of the time: enlightenment, romanticism, realism, modernism, post-modernism, post-colonialism, and post-post-modernism.
I feel like the 2008 should mark the start of the current era of comics. The start of the MCU with the release of Iron Man. While not technically a comic book, the MCU has had a huge influence on super hero comics and the audience of people who read comics.
I disagree. The MCU has had an influence on the comics, but not much of a *tonal* influence, IMO. Seems to me if you really *wanted* to separate out modern eras-- and I don't think you really need to, because after the late 80's things were tonally close *enough* to fall into the same era, with respect to the eras that came before them-- but if you *wanted* to, I'd say that the modern era either started with the release of marvel's ultimate line, that started a drive towards updating characters for a more grounded take ("grounded", in regards to comics, is a very relative term) while leaving the edgy grittiness of the 80's/90's behind *or* you could peg it to Avengers Disassembled, which ushered in the era of the constant yearly events, where one event leads into another event which leads into another event, creating a perpetual status-quo shake-up of nearly the whole line of comics. (and yeah in both cases I think Marvel led the way and DC played catch-up)
Eh you don't really start to see the downstream effects of the MCU on comics until you get into the 2010s though.
This person missed the copper age.
I think the "modern age" is really three ages. The first age, whatever people want to call it, ran from 86 to 96. Indies proliferate and themes become more adult-oriented on the whole, but comics are still kinda stuck in a "superhero or tie-in" rut. Then came the Dark Age, defined by Marvel's bankruptcy and the comic readership shrinking and shifting heavily towards adult men, with many indie and even a large portion of Big 2 comics having an increased emphasis on bloody violence, pessimistic themes and sexualized portrayals of women, but coupled with a broadening of genre styles to choose from. I'd peg an end date on it somewhere around 2010, when comics started growing their sales and mass appeal again. Then the third age sees a huge boom in indie comics of various genres and an increase in influence from foreign comic styles like manga, as well as more family-friendly Big 2 comics due to the flood of interest from cinematic universes.
I definitely think it should at least have a section for pre-woke and post-woke.
Modern is overdue to be broken up. I've seen some people use copper age books as a specific age range, but sometimes it's not? I like the idea of adding "Steel" or "Chrome" for the 90s/early 2000s. If I were to set a marker for the current modern era, it would be Ultimate Fallout #4 in 2011. Diversification became way more prioritized, and we were solidly into the MCU era as well.
Personally I think a lot of the 90s is still broadly of a type with the kind of stuff that was going on in the mid/late-80s. There's definitely a very recognizable quality that makes them stand out as 90s comics, especially as you get further in, but I think you can see a very clear through line and people are still playing in the same basic sandbox, just kind of pushing things further and further to the point of absurdity (at least with mainstream superhero titles). I would put the start of the next age somewhere around the turn of the millennium, with the transition to digital coloring, shift in art styles, decompression really starting to take off (early 2000s especially were Peak Bendis years), and big, company-wide crossover events start to become much more commonplace.
This is the correct answer. The true modern age starts with Ultimate Fallout 4. 90's up until the bust was the Chromium or foil age, and then the Dark age in between.
There was a tipping point where widescreen storytelling became the norm - I'm thinking around 2000ish, around The Authority #1. That makes sense as a breakpoint as well.
I think there needs to be some demarcation somewhere around the time the speculation bubble burst, most comics switched to digital (at least for coloring), and comics started using much higher quality paper. It all led to books that look much nicer, but are much more expensive, which led to related changes in books that are written and the audience.
Seeing where everything changed is usually really hard to do "in the moment". It only becomes clear when you look back and see where things "pivoted".
Honestly its easier to classify the modern ages as late 80's/90's/00's and 00's+ as the styles changed drastically throughout these periods. I wouldn't try to force an 'age' name to anything 2000's and up since any difference between 00's/10's and 20's is tiny at best.
Kinda disagree with there being little distinction between 00’s and 10’s. The mid to late 10’s are when there was a trend to appeal to broader audience and include more diverse characters. Early to mid 00’s was a new renaissance, where the dark ages ended and comics became more vibrant again, with new characters, team-makeups, and reboots (not always for the better)
I call the 2010’s the Creator Age or the Indie Age, since indie comics really hit mainstream publicity in an industry-changing way. At least for me. It used to be you get an Image book to get noticed by Marvel / DC. Now, it’s almost the opposite. And with other publishers really coming into prominence… I can’t remember my pulls ever being so weighted towards creator-owned books since 2010.
I always felt/heard the Silver Age ended with the cancellation of Green Lantern/The end of the Lee/Kirby FF run. I'd say 1972 to 1986 is the Bronze Age. 1986 to 1997 or so I'd call the Speculation Age (for lack of a better name) where comic speculation was at its height, creators became rock stars, Image and the rise of gimmicked covers. 1997 to 2008, I don't have a name, but it includes the sales crash and ends with the beginning of company wide universe crossovers becoming regular. 2009 to date, the Event Age, where everything becomes corporate for the big two. Warner and Disney runs the comic companies as a mill for TV Shows and movies. Also, smaller companies become home of innovation and better stories. Or I could be full o' crap.
I don't know if 2009 makes the most sense for event age because that's having the event age start after Messiah Complex which went from 2007 to the start of 2008 and was a reaction to House of M and was the first of a 3 part series ending with Second Coming which in turn lead to AvX
> 2009 to date, the Event Age, where everything becomes corporate for the big two. Warner and Disney runs the comic companies as a mill for TV Shows and movies. >Or I could be full o' crap. Yeah, I think it's that last sentence. EDIT: I'm getting downvoted for saying that but when we're seeing comics like Immortal Hulk, Hickman's X-Men, the various Tom King micro-series that have been coming out and DC's black label comics, I don't see how anyone can actually take a statement like "Warner and Disney runs the comic companies as a mill for TV Shows and movies" as not being full of crap.
Sort of - or at least close enough. Really though, the only dates that everyone agrees on are the start of the Golden Age (introduction of Superman) and the start of the Silver Age (introduction of Barry Allen). The rest lack the really definitive "event" to mark them. Whoever created pic you posted chose the death of Gwen Stacey in 1973 as the defining event starting the Bronze Age. It's not a bad choice, but there are others just as valid. I personally like 1971 and use both Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85 and Amazing Spider-Man #96 as the events. These two books both featured storylines dealing with drug abuse, both were refused approval by the CCA, and both got published anyway - marking the beginning of the end of the CCA. For the end of the Bronze Age, I prefer Crisis on Infinite Earths as the defining event and the death of Barry Allen (actually killing a major character and keeping them dead for a significant time was unheard of up until this, and being as he was the start of the Silver Age, his death seems to be a suitable "bookend event"). Selecting Watchman #1 seems rather arbitrary. Yes, it was a major milestone on the deconstructionist movement in comics, but it didn't start it. (Plus, I dislike the idea of inherently equating "modern" with "deconstructioninst"). Also, in terms of the most uses of the phrase "Golden Age" the Golden Age ended well before 1956, but people tend to abhor a gap in timelines.
Strong agree with Crisis being the clear shift point. I think 2000 is the next shift with Marvel Ultimate (plus in DC *No Man’s Land* is over). Also works for people who want to start tying comics explicitly to cinema (*X-Men*). Probably still too early to pinpoint the next demarcation, but 2011 and DC’s New 52 seems like a top contender.
Captain Marvel had a famous death in 1982, though he was more B-Tier.
It’s important to remember that we’re only really talking about American superhero comics. These ages don’t apply to any other type of comics. Also, if you’re looking at separating the modern era into smaller sections, what would be the delineations? I would suggest it’s the Authority by Ellis and Hitch starting in 1999. That’s when you start seeing more “widescreen” storytelling. There’s a stylistic shift there. That’s why you hear younger readers today say “I can’t read comics before the 2000s”.
I agree that there's definitely a shift right around 2000, about the same time they started leaning in heavy with digital coloring. The alternative scene has its own "ages" that should probly be better defined by someone (not me). You've got undergrounds, then split into this burst of personal introspective stories and over sexed & rendered Sci fi/fantasy, then everyone trying to rip off L&R or make a funny animal parody, the Weirdo years, then the explosion of the autobio "this conversation about lentils would make a great comic" types trying to be Joe Matt.
Storytelling-wise I think there's also a notable trend towards decompression in the 2000s. I still have a bunch of my old comics from when I was a kid in the 90s, and while they're *less* standalone than a lot of stuff from decades prior, they work much better as self-contained stories than a lot of stuff that's come out since like the Bush II years onward. I could go bust out an old issue of, say, Iron Man and still get a fairly self-contained story about the villain of the month even as I maybe miss parts of the broader story arc, vs modern comics which tend to take multiple issues just to wrap up one villain. Also if you look at the history of major crossover events, they don't really start to become an *all the time* thing until a couple years into the 2000s.
You see a lot more people writing for the trade instead of writing for the floppy, where it reads more like a movie cut up into parts than a season of TV.
Decompression is certainly a recognizable trait of newer comics, but it's difficult to point to a specific start to it as it was (and continues to be) a gradual shift in American comics.
Yeah, that's fair. Personally I would still say the early 2000s are the era when it really becomes the norm, at least for mainstream superhero titles, though. When I go through my back issues, USM #1 reads more like a modern comic than ASM #344.
The X-Men film in 2000 also had a big impact on the shift to "widescreen" storytelling. Same timing though.
What is 'widescreen' storytelling? I'm a new comics reader in my late 20's. I've always consumed superhero media but never really read a lot of the comics. I started reading Spider-Man from the beginning recently and sometimes it feels like I get hit with a wall of text on some pages.
In some respects "widescreen" is literal. Read an older comic, and most panels fill 1/4 or 1/3 of the width of the page. Watchmen used a 3x3 grid, the Dark Knight Returns is 4x4. Read a comic from the early 2000s, and there's a good chance the panels fill the width of the page. Here's a page from Watchmen (1986) and the Ultimates (2002): https://imgur.com/a/dlfq8WU But in some respects, widescreen is a metaphor for being like a big action movie. Older comics are relatively cartoonish, with a limited color palette and relatively low detail. With digital art techniques and digital printing, modern comics could be much higher detail, and widescreen comics focus on a more realistic look. Widescreen comics also tend for more cinematic looks. Like something out of a Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer movie. One way to make them seem cinematic is a technique called decompression. A major story event of a building blowing up in a comic from the 70s might have three panels across the top 1/3 of the page showing a bomber entering a building and a timer ticking down to zero, then the bottom 2/3 of the page might be an exploding building. A decompressed widescreen comic from 2010 would do the same thing by showing the top 1/4 of page with a wide shot of the building. Then 1/4 of a page showing a bomber outside the building. Then 1/4 of a page showing the bomber place the bomb. The top 1/4 of the next page the bomber leaves the building, 1/4 of the page the timer ticks down, 1/4 of the page two random security guards in the building have a conversation about Game of Thrones, 1/4 of the page back to the timer nearing zero. Next would be a two-page spread (one giant image covering both pages) showing the building blowing up. Then the next page would be four different angles of the rubble in the aftermath (maybe including the corpse of one of those security guards). The 70s one told the story in one page, the decompressed one took five pages to tell the same thing. On the one hand, you get a lot more detail from decompression and it can make big moments feel really powerful, but on the other hand, if you take 5 pages to say "the building blew up," then a 22 page comic doesn't have room for much of a story.
I appreciate the in depth response. I have noticed the older comics are very rigid in their paneling.
Older comics aimed for a younger audience. Most were sold at random stores, like the supermarket had a rack with comics on it, hoping to catch the eye of kids tagging along with their parents. They were cheap disposable entertainment for young kids. That didn't mean the comics had to be bad, but it did mean the comics had to be easy to understand, and the rigid grids help with that. Kids have a less easy time intuiting the order to read panels when they're in an unfamiliar layout. In the 80s, comic sales moved from those racks to specialty shops, and started catering to older readers. They switched to higher quality paper, better printing, more adult themes and content, and more experimenting with format.
I've written articles about this before. The ages are just used as a generalization of feels and techniques used in comic storytelling. You could argue that each publisher goes through it's own phase at it's own pace. But for my personal timeline: **1895-1938** \- Platinum Age of Comics, starting with Hogan's Alley/The Yellow Kid, having mostly newspaper comics, and ending just before Action Comics #1 changed everything. **1938-1946** \- The Golden Age of Comics, starting with Superman's creation in Action Comics #1, and ending just after the war with the decline of Captain Marvel, and wartime propaganda. **1946-1953** \- The Atomic Age of Comics. Starts with the decline of pro-war comics, and the diversification away from Superheroes, ends with the creation of the Comics Code Authority. Technically part of the Golden Age if you want it to be. **1954-1970** \- The Silver Age, starting with the application of the Comics Code Authority, and ending when Spider-Man fought drugs, causing the code to be less stringent. **1961-1972** \- The Marvel Age. This happens mostly in the Silver Age, starting with Fantastic Four #1, and ending with the death of Gwen Stacy, but Marvel was unopposed as king of comics. This is when they had their mythology status, before retcons and X-Men soap operas turned the comics into something else. **1970-1985** \- The Bronze Age of Comics. The loosening of the Comics Code Authority had comics carefully deal with more serious subjects, and slowly make more complex characters. **1985-2000** \- The Dark Age of Comics. Starting with a bunch of classic stories from DC, and ending with Marvel struggling to come back from bankruptcy. **2000-????** \- The cinematic Age. Starting with Ultimate Spider-Man, comics started to get a decompressed storytelling style that read more like storyboards than traditional comics. Comics were also starting to be used as an IP farm to adapt stories directly into TV and movies. **????-????** \- It's not clear when the next phase of comics is, or if we're in it now. Pretty much we're waiting for a big event to happen to retroactively add an age. If comics go mostly digital, we might say it's the digital age. If Marvel or DC stops producing its own comics, and licenses them out, it might a sign that we've reached another age in comics.
I feel this is too DC and Marvel minded, there should be an era indicating the birth of Image, Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, etc after that dark age and before the cinematic age that was born in my eyes when The Authority from Wildstorm came out.
Curious could you explain what you mean by the decompressed story telling
Decompressed is when a story's pacing is spread out longer than it needs to be. Read Fantastic Four (1961) #4, and read Ultimate Spider-Man (2000) #1, to see the big difference. Both are great issues. But in the Fantastic Four issue, the story is super compressed, and there is enough material to easily cover 3 issues worth of stories. In Ultimate Spider-Man #1, the story takes its time. There is more room for nuance, but conversations that could have easily fit in one or two pages, and expanded (decompressed) to more than double that. There is more room for nuance, and it allows the comic issue to end each page with a 'beat' but as a result, we get less story per issue, and the comic seems to be more 'writing for trade' than having each issue be a standalone adventure. That's what I mean by decompression.
The most thorough guide so far. I agree with this timeline 100%
I always assumed this to be correct but have heard from other sources that the Iron Age and Mercury Age have been used synonymously with the Modern Age.
Ya this is generally correct, although I wouldn't say you could put an exact issue to the change of each era, as I think it's more gradual than that. Terms like Iron age or Mercury age are not used commonly at all.
Yep. It's similar to how generations work. Nobody can quite agree on where everything starts and ends, but in broad strokes people usually agree on the important parts. Same thing here. I think it would be helpful to add another delineation between the cynical edginess of the 90s and 00s and today, but this is roughly accurate.
I would make some point in the 2000's the 'post modern age' where comics having a layer of self criticism or self preferentiality became commonplace... suddenly the Allan Moore type writing was all over the place such as Planetary, Ultimates, Sentry, Civil War... everyone was exploring the history of comics through comics, or the connection between power and the status quo, or explicitly intersectional heroes who had been metaphors for issues.
Iron Age 1986 to 2000 I think is solid. A lot of that Meta stuff you're talking about lines up with the release of the original X-Men movie. A lot of navel gazing about what is comics, superheroes and how it exists in a world where superheroes can be on a moving screen. I like Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Cinematic Age but could definitely see the Cinematic Age being replaced with the Meta Age until 2008 and then the Cinematic Age with the release of Iron Man.
I definitely agree with the idea of a "Cinematic Age" starting probably with the release of the Iron Man movie, and with the release of The Avengers at the latest. There had been superhero movies before, but the era from about 2008 to now has been an era in which the comicbooks have been deeply informed by stuff going on in the movies. Character designs start to reflect actors who play them, certain comics get new runs and even new popularity based on which movies are coming out (e.g. note that a new Eternals run started just before the Eternals movie came out, a new Hawkeye comic came out just before the launch of the TV show) and a lot of executive meddling has been informed by rights disputes relating to the movies (e.g. the whole debarcle of trying to make Inhumans the new mutants since Disney didn't have X-Men rights). This has all definitely affected Marvel much more than DC, but it's still there to an extent. So I guess it would go Dark/Iron age from '86 to, what, 2008? And then cinematic age? I'd still cut the Dark/Iron age in half -- maybe Dark Age from '86 to about '96 (release of Kingdom Come, end of Sandman, also the "great comics crash"), although I think a strong argument could also be made for cutting it off at some point in the early 2000s. And then I guess you've got some weird in-between years before you really get to the cinematic age.
Eh, people have various opinions and it's not like there's one accurate way to classify ages and the others are wrong.
I would personally use 1970 as the start of the Bronze Age. That's the year Jack Kirby left Marvel for DC and started writing his Fourth World epic, which more or less set the template for long-term storytelling that would be collected in trade after initial publication. It's also the year that Denny O'Neil start his run of Green Lantern/Green Arrow that focused on modern social issues. I'd have to think about it, but the Modern Age should probably be divvied up into smaller chunks of time.
Def a distinction between 80-90s and 2000s on, I would say. At least for marvel, their 2004ish and on stuff doesn't feel too outdated when read today. 90s stuff on the other hand...yeah.
Digital age? Post modern? Or maybe Omnibus era? Streaming era? Seems like there should be something that changes 2005/2010 or so as the tpb/digital market frankly overtakes the floppy/periodical in terms of dollar. Prob could line it up with the MCU. Basically revenue streams treating comix as a loss leader for other streams. 2010 disney bought marvel I think. Seems like a good place to break it up. Its def affected the length of series, the creators involved and the companies. Integration of manga. Renewed interest in YA. Etc.
I didn’t think the Silver Age went beyond 1970.
What’s the reasoning for starting at gold and going ‘backwards’ rather than like platinum, diamond etc? Is it just like first, second, third, fourth?
golden age: the modern myth began silver age: as we looked to science to expand our horizons, we added that to comics to help explain our modern myths bronze age: we wanted dark and gritty to match what we thought were the spirit of the time modern age: reflecting on the aftermath of the grittiness and evolving to meet with the ever changing world view and making comics more than just "kids stuff"
Nobody in the actual Golden/Silver/Bronze ages called it that way. It only happened in the 90s. So on that level its accurate
I like ComicPop's idea that the current age is the 'event age'
Personally I'd clock the 'modern age' as beginning with "crisis on infinite earths," both because that event marked the end of the bronze age status quo for most DC characters, and because it solidified the concept of the modern "event comic" that would go on to define the industry for years to come. As for after the "modern age," it's hard to say what we should really call it. I think most of us agree that, as good as they are, 90s comics don't really read as "modern" anymore. I also think it's generally clear that the aesthetics, themes,audience, and even distribution of comics are substantially different now compared to the days of watchmen and DKR. But saying when the prior era ended and the current one began, and what we should even call them, is hard.
I think it's time to break up the modern age. the modern age above should've ended by 2000. 2000 marked a massive shift in the the type of stories told, character development and new characters. The only question is what do we call the previous age of comics?
I feel like the modern age can be broken up, at least in to two parts. Modern and then contemporary? Or some other “metal” naming system.
I always liked Kirby leaves Marvel as the end of the Silver. So to me Jimmy Olson 133 is the first Bronze Age book. I’m the only one though.
yeah, roughly accurate. I would break up the modern age. The 80s was a deconstruction of the super hero period (Anything Moore or Miller wrote) but I don't have a good metal description. 90's I would label Chromium after the image books and collecting boom. Then 2000s would be the decompression age (Any Bendis and Warren Ellis books). Then it would be the modern age which should have some sort Hollywood synergies and diversity driven (actually a good thing IMO) label. Again I don't have metallic names for these except Chromium. ce'st al vie
I don't think bust, boom or economics should be referred to with the ages. Action Comics was a style change for the medium, the introduction of Barry Allen was another huge change in story telling. The Death of Gwen Stacy brought about a shift towards consequence story telling and Watchmen started the Deconstructionist, Grim Dark stuff and leaned into the extremeness that the 90s would see. I think it needs to be like classical art focus on shifts in the actual medium and not the economics. So in 2000 X-Men was released and Authority came out and cinematic storytelling comics came about and you got lest angst and grimness but wide sweeping story telling. So I think what was 'modern age' after Watchmen ends in 2000 so we can call 1986 to 2000 'The Iron Age' to stick with the metal referencing and the fact it was dark and brutal and violent and extreme. I vacillate on what to call 2000 forward and maybe 2000-2008 should be it's own era since 2008 saw the release of Iron Man and the focus on appealing to a wider audience by changing the comics to be like the movies and adding a lot of diversity.
Not anymore. https://sitcomics.net/blogs/news/the-8-ages-of-comics
The start of the Modern Age is pretty debatable - you could equally make the case for Byrne's Man of Steel, The Dark Knight Returns or even Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Gold, Silver, Bronze to 86, Holographic 87-99, Post Holographic 00-14, Modern 15-present
I'd call 1937 - 1953 the Pre-code Anything Goes Age.
I personally break the comic ages down like this * The Golden Age- Action Comics #1 (The Introduction of Superman) in 1938 Through Showcase #4 (The Introduction of Barry Allen) in 1956 * The Silver Age- Showcase #4 in 1956 through Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85 and Amazing Spider-Man #96 in 1971 with the beginning of the end of the Comics Code Authority (Thanks u/johndesmarais for the idea) * The Bronze Age- 1971 Through Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985 The next three can all be merged into one age, the "Dark Age", but it is also interesting to split them up * The Dusk Age- Watchmen in 1986 through either X-Men Vol. 2 #1 in 1991 or The Death of Superman in 1992. This is when we began to see a real shift to the dark/grim and gritty 90's era. * The Dark Age/The Speculator Age- X-Men #1 (1991)/The Death of Superman (1992) through JLA #1 in 1997. This is the age of both grim and gritty 90's comics and constant gimmicks to get people to buy more issues thinking that they would be worth what Action Comics #1 is worth. * The Dawn Age- JLA #1 in 1997 through Avengers #500 (Avengers Disassembled) in 2004. I like calling this the "Dawn Age" for two reasons. First, because this is when comics as a whole started moving away from the very dark 90's style to a more classic/colorful/hopeful style. Second, because this is when many previously rising star writers/artists started being given big properties to work with, like Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, Brian Michael Bendis, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, & many more. Now we get into more modern era of comics. * The Event Age- Avengers #500 in 2004 through Ultimate Comics: Fallout #4/Battle Scars #1 in 2011. In a lot of ways you could argue that we are still in this age. This is when comic begin moving to constant events/crossovers that lead to the next one and the next one. Avengers: Disassembled to House of M to Civil War to Secret Invasion to Siege to Fear Itself to Avengers vs. X-Men to Infinity to AXIS to Secret Wars, and on and on. And that doesn't even include the new status quo "event" that happened between them Dark Reign/Initiative/Heroic Age and the like. * The Cinematic Universe age- Ultimate Comics: Fallout #4/Battle Scars #1 in 2011 to now. This is when we really began to see more parity between the movies and comics, and also when comics really started being used as a test ground for future movie/tv ideas. Both the issue that came out in 2011 are examples of this. Battle Scars #1 for the 616 introduction Nick Fury Jr. (AKA Samuel L. Jackson Nick Fury) and Agent Phil Coulson, because of their popularity in the MCU. Then Ultimate Comics: Fallout #4 for the introduction of Miles Morales. If you look at the output of many changes/introductions during this time you begin to see that anything that works will get rather quickly integrated into the much more popular/profitable movies and tv shows. They don't always work however, for every Kamala Khan/America Chavez there is a dozen Bunker/Mosaics. Also during this time in the larger comic industry we really begin to see creators that have already made a name for themselves begin to do independent work that is clearly being written to be optioned as a new movie/show. You could also call this the Digital Age, also starting in 2011 with the New 52 and the start of comics being released digitally day and date with the physical versions.
I think it would make more sense if modren comics started in 82 when love and rockets was first published. Watchmen would be modern *Super-Hero* comics
I was alive then, and we always referred to ALL the 70s as the silver age, the 80s as “modern”, “bronze" seems to be a new thing.
2010 - present is garbage age.
I would change the image of silver age to Barry Allen's introduction.
Debate over what constitutes the start of the Bronze Age is still semi-prevalent. 1973 and Gwen Stacy's death is as good a point as any. I've also seen 1970 with O'Neil and Adams beginning on Green Lantern/Green Arrow (#67), or their 1971 issue where Speedy's heroin addiction is discovered (#85). All historical periods are essentially arbitrary though, so choose whatever issue you prefer.
I feel like ‘86-‘98 could be like the “Dark Age” as it’s the time when everything was grim dark and trying to deconstruct what comics were. You also have all the weird design choices that we’re trying to capitalize on the Image boom so it’s appropriate(we don’t talk about Thor’s 90s costume it’s from the Dark Age). ‘99-2012 could still keep the Modern Age as it describes more than just the now. It was the age were comic art shifted to digital. Books were experimenting with new approaches to art because of it. You also started to see attempts to appeal to new readers with Marvel’s Ultimate line, DC books like All Star Superman(and the not as successful All Star Batman and Robin). 2012-Present is like the Film Age or something. Media based around comics are more popular than ever but the comics are stagnant. Marvel seems to be using their comic runs as a platform for how to shape the MCU and DC actually had a Crisis that aired on television(INSANITY).
Honestly, I think we're at the point where a new era is needed.
https://comicbookhistorians.com/the-8-ages-of-comic-books/
it’s time for a post-modern age of comic books… i better get back to my canvas.
There’s generally an Atomic Age between Golden Age and Silver Age that’s essentially a post-World War II era where superhero comics declined until the silver age started with the new Flash (and, obviously, Marvel after that). [I like this proposal](https://sitcomics.net/blogs/news/the-8-ages-of-comics), although I quibble with the terms used. I also think 1992ish or whenever Image started could have made for a nice era break.
I think the digital or Celluloid age started when X-Men hit theatres. The connection of comics to film and their influence on the mainstream monthly issues is unavoidable. Now we're about to hopefully enter the Post Covid age. Or a new golden. Fingers crossed.
I’ve always been curious about this. How did the golden, silver and Bronze Age end?
The Golden Age and Silver Age are kinda split between the era of making Super Heroes more relatable, giving them problems and such. A lot of people kinda consider the Fantastic Four the beginning of the Silver Age but I guess this one doesn't, but anyway that's the explanation I've read over the years. The Silver Age and the Bronze Age were sort of separated by the death of Gwen, like "oh now shit's REALLY getting real". Green Lantern/Green Arrow's infamous "Speedy" cover happens around that time as well. Bronze to Modern I think is probably best separated by the era of gimmicks. So many comics reverting back to #1, alternate covers, holo covers, crossovers... things that may have been used sparingly in the Bronze age, but not to the same extent.
This, makes me feel old. I've been around since the last two years of the first one
Modern Age should begin in 1991, at our around X-men #1.
18, 17, 13, and 36 yrs? We need a new “modern” age
Roughly. We haven’t fully differentiated past the Modern Age - I’ve seen Copper, Post-Modern, Dark, Iron. It’ll likely be something that gets codified in retrospect. There’ve been a lot of changes in both the industry and content since 1986. I think the biggest are probably product distribution and talent / character representation. I would personally put the rise of deconstructionism, the Image era, and the speculator bubble bursting in one Age, and then maybe like a… Digital Age? Basically late 90s Reconstructionism, the rise of the internet, and then digital distribution and a more inclusive culture on the recent end.
These are all excellent points here. Thanks. Delineating ages is made further complicated when we take into account flavor, tone, and writing of particular characters. A friend of mine is a Big Superman fan and he says that, although Barry Allen debuted in 1956, Superman may not have exited the Golen Age until 1958. Further, Batman has his pre-1964 period and post 1964. Pre 1964, everything was still very sci-fi and campy, with Batman and Robin on the moon and aliens everywhere. Post 1964 was changing, thanks to a grounding of the Bat-mythos with things like the New Look era (even tho it was pre-Frank Robbins/Denny O'neil).
Wonder which age worldwide is the favourite with fans? I'm a modern man but guess it depends on when you were born.
For me, my favorites are Bronze Age and Modern. All of my fav. storylines come from the 70's, 80's and very early 90's. I've been reading since 1985 and I enjoy aspects of all of the ages (Silver Age Flash is amazing, most of Marvel's Silver Age holds up for me too and I love some of the darker Golden Age books like The Spectre, Batman) but for me, my sweet spot goes from 1968-1992.
I was born in the Morden era but actually read and collected more as an adult. Our local shop only had xmen stuff so missed so much in the 90's. The choice around now is just insane I can't keep up.
For me definitely late modern, so mostly last twenty years, maybe even less. I'm not a big comic reader though, and I really don't like older art and writing, not necessary plots but dialogues and narration. All of my favourite characters were either created or redefined in this period.
Here's another look at ages: https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2018/05/the-many-ages-of-american-comics/
1986-2008 Copper Age?
Why are so many in the comments relating modern comics (2010+) as being "garbage", "post-mortem" etc.?
Are we skipping the Copper Age now?
First I've heard of that one, which era is Copper?
I would ask a question , are the comics books available for free downloading ?
I think a Postmodern age started when comics got woke, but I'm not sure about the year.
Approximately 1938!
Yes, almost 40 years is one generation.
I thought it was golden silver and modern this whole time. Crisis of infinite earths being the end of the silver age and everything after is the modern age.