I note that Barry Allen, dead for a generation, is being brought back as the Flash. This vexes me a tiny bit (as I have a limited amount of emotional energy, I only budget 0.000001% of it for comic books). Not merely because I like Wally West, whose had a quite interesting character arc, but because DC, in general, just refuses to let go of its 60s’ characters. Of course, that pales at the ridiculousness of Jarry Garrick & Alan Scott still kicking around. Won’t they EVER be allowed to retire?
Eh. I’m an unreformed Gold and Silver Age comics geek. I used to LIVE for the Justice League/Justice Society crossovers back in the 80s because they had all those EXOTIC Earth 2 heroes, and the really cool alternate (older) Superman and Batman (and goddamit! Helena WAYNE! Helena WAYNE! Helena WAYNE!)
Silver Age Rules! As long as us geezers still have money and still buy the books, the Silver Age will never die. Anything since then has been revisionist garbage!
I like the Golden Age characters. I think Jay Garrick rocks as the Flash. And I love the Silver Age too. But making the characters immortal, never permitting any change to last, throwing away perfectly good developments (which will happen to Wally, I predict, just as it happened to Connor Hawke and is happening to Kyle Rayner) is vexsome. I’d be much happier if Jay & Alan were used only in stories noted to have taken place before 1960; and if Barry were allowed to stay dead.
Because the only comics that really sell are those that hype big events and huge changes to the status quo.
But if they make new changes, even if the ensuing comic books are really good, people may be turned off. So they revert things to an earlier state (not coincidentally, from when comics sold much better and the current writers/editors were young), and it least attract some of the nostalgic.
Also, in the specific case of the Flash, they gave Wally kids and didn’t know how to successfully write or market the book as a family unit.
I grew up on Silver Age comics. I was born in '81 but all my comics were given to me or found at yard sales, dusty corners in antique stores, etc. Besides rare instances like The Death of Superman and the early '90s relaunch of X-Men, I didn’t have a new comic until I started driving 45 minutes into the city to get them myself in the late '90s. All my comics were either genuine Silver Age, or '70s and '80s reprints from that era. So needless to say, I have a soft-spot in my heart for it. That being said, I’ve come to accept in my adulthood that those comics were not very good. A lot of them had pretty cool artwork, but the writing was almost exclusively garbage. I think the love I and most others feel for them is pretty much entirely nostalgia. And I can’t blame the time period, either, because the comics Disney was putting out in the '40s all the way up through the '60s hold up pretty well to this day.
The covers, though. Oh, the covers of the Silver Age! Who wouldn’t want to have this framed on their wall?
While I agree that DC (and Marvel, for that matter) should let characters age, die and rotate out to make room for new ones, there are practical reasons against it. Very few successful, marketable new characters were created after 1980, and almost none after 1990. It’s good to have Batman and Captain America disappear for a few months every now and then, but until readers support titles like Booster Gold and Alias for more than a year or two at a shot, you really have to rely on the characters with a proven track record.
One problem is that virtually ever damn issue becomes the “Oh noes! Someone will die for certains!” issue, or the “Oh mys! Nothing shall evar be teh saem!” issue. And comics can’t sustain that kind of change, and they don’t need it. Characters shouldn’t die often and casually, but when they do they ought to commonly stay dead more or less.
I have to say that the most fun issues of comics I ever read were those where the bad guys tried something and good guys pounded them into the pavement. And that was that.
I remember reading a letter-from-the-editor type thing inside a Superman comic one time - no idea from what time period - where he was basically saying Superman had gotten stale and they were about to shake things up, make the title more exciting, etc. One of the things I disctinctly remember him saying was “no more busting small-time crooks”, etc, meaning Superman was only going to face superbeings with the potential to kill him from then on out. Maybe some heroes should go back to busting small-time crooks.
The answer is that they’re selling to a shrinking audience; the remaining comic book fans are long time comic book fans. DC’s answer to that is to go for the nostalgia until they’re stuck in self referential loops.
And that’s more or less why I never got into comics. I liked them, and collected a few for a while, but I dind’t understand what the heck was going on half the time and didn’t really care. I definitely wasn’t going to spend good money on them. So in my case, the crossovers (which were too expensive to get all the issues of and involved too many characters I didn’t care about) just kept me out.
Maybe they’ve got a marketing genius I don’t know But they don’t appeal to me, the potential consumer, and they seem to deliiberately push me off.
Or, they can sustain it, but for real; and it’s a risk, as mentioned, because what happens to the readers who liked how things were before “everything changed”?
Or at best they get only one comeback and it better be worth it. You die and come back, once. Next time, it’s some new guy putting on the spandex, for good.
Original Cap’n America did it right: a couple of decades later he’s found to have been alive but frozen, and once he clears out the cobwebs, gets back to the fighting-evil gig. That worked. In THAT case.
But now you have people who “die” (and are buried) but **within six months ** a half dozen new competing versions have sprung up, or s/he shows up again with an entire new look and name as a supervillain/Herald of Galactus[sub](the cosmic temp agency must love that dude)[/sub]/Whateveroid and we take a further year and a half bringing things back to an approximation of where they were? Annoying. Lame. Unexciting.
(Characters who make deals with the devil and suddenly the last 20 years did not happen, let’s not even go there)
I dunno, maybe part of the fault lies in the public who became too fond of fanwank about continuities and canon. Of course, if you pretend that the comic’s universe works in close to real time, you have the issues of aging, dying, etc. If you pretend it’s in timeless present, then you have to every 10 years call in a RetCon so you don’t have your protagonist be someone who was a spy during WW2, dropped acid at Woodstock, married during the Reagan administration, was pregnant with her first child on 9/11… but make up your minds how you’ll do it.
FTR, that was the stated reason for the whole “deal with the devil voids last 20 years” Spiderman situation. Joe Quesada essentially stated that readers are morons when he said “you really wanted Spidey married ? Next you’ll want him to grow old and die.”
At some point, you’ve gotta let heroes go. Give them a grand finale, and that’s it. No resurrection, no flashback if at all possible, just grief, then oblivion and memories.That’s what happens in reality. Then you bring forward a *new *hero, who’s not just a carbon copy but is inspired by the dead one in significant ways. Cause that’s realism as well.
I don’t think it has much of anything to do with the Silver Age. The characters they’re reviving are also Bronze Age. And some are* strictly* Bronze Age.
Wonder Woman: Spinning Wonder Woman? Fighting Dr Psycho? With Tom “Nemesis” Tresser in tow? None of that’s Silver Age.
Titans: Vic, Gar, & lots of Deathstroke riffs? Late Bronze Age.
Superman: The jerkish reporter guy is Bronze Age. The jerkish reporter lady is a Byrne character written more broadly.
One issue is that there’s a bias against creating new characters rather than using existing ones. Now, that said, Geoff Johns (of whom I am no fan) does create some new characters–but he uses* lots* of old ones too.
The weirder thing is the bias toward characters from before a subjective Point X (which may be anywhere from 1986 to 1990 depending on Og knows what) as opposed to after Point X. Sometiimes this is to the extent that earlier characters get resurrected & more recent characters get killed off casually.
It appears to be the behavior of a fan turned pro on a book he liked–who set his ideal point some time ago & just wants to trash any innovation since then. (Not that this explains killing, say, Anima.)
It only looks like a Silver Age bias because Silver Age designs survived for so long into the Bronze Age.
Except that Captain America was found and revived in 1964. Which means that by now he should physically be in his sixties and he’s as much of a anachronism as if he hadn’t been frozen.
Except they’re not. This is the point I wanted to make but forgot. Stylistically, what we’re seeing now is derived from stuff Marv Wolfman & Alan Moore were doing in the 1980’s. Except in longer form & with more crossovers.
It has no thematic commonality with the DC Silver Age, which was typified by relatively stable, safe premises; & self-contained issues.
It’s not Silver Age in approach, it just uses those trademarks.
