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Narrative
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The Dark Age, also known as the Iron Age, the Rust Age, the Lead Age or the Chrome Age, was the culmination of the move towards an older audience that had started in the Bronze Age. It was encouraged and supported by the semi-coincidental rise of "direct market" comic book shops, which were not covered by the Comics Code and could thus sell books that did not have Code approval.
The most famous milestones kicking off the Dark Age were Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen. The Dark Knight Returns was a purposeful return to Batman's roots: dark and gritty. Many fans found this appropriate, given Batman's notoriously bad record of Adaptation Decay. Watchmen was one of the first deconstructions of the entire Superhero genre, setting the tone for all that would come after.
At about the same time (that is, 1986), Crisis On Infinite Earths was rewriting the face of The DCU. The writers and editors picked and chose which elements of continuity they wanted to keep and which they wanted to throw away. More and more often, it seemed like the "silly" stuff was gotten rid of and new, more "serious" material was put in its place, making the world Darker And Edgier.
It seemed that comics were now taking a more mature and adult look on things. On the other hand, cynics countered that "mature" usually ended up meaning "violence" and "sex", especially when it began to leak into other superhero titles featuring characters who were at their core designed to be fairly optimistic and lighthearted. Thus was begun the stereotype of the "comic book teenager", an insecure fan who wanted his comics to be taken seriously, although the shocking content only implied a sense of immaturity. While not always a deconstruction of the Silver Age, it was certainly a deliberate opposition.
In 1992, seven of Marvel Comics' top men left the company over the issue of creators' rights. Together, they formed Image Comics. Free of the Comics Code and with some of the most popular creators of the time on board, they quickly gained a reputation for two things. First, comics that relied heavily on sex and violence. Second, comics that sold extremely well. Pretty soon everyone was trying to catch the same lightning.
Of course, sex and violence weren't all they sold; the critically-acclaimed love-letter-to-the-Silver Age Astro City started there, and the cute adventure series Bone moved there from a different publisher. But it made up the majority of their output, and the majority of what was ripped off.
Now, it may seem that the cynics were wholly correct, and that the push toward adulthood in comics had gotten tangled in the obsessions of puberty. But some people were taking advantage of this newfound freedom to create comics that really were more mature.
In 1988, the first issue of The Sandman, written by Neil Gaiman, hit the stands. The Sandman starred Dream, AKA Morpheus, one of the seven Endless, Anthropomorphic Personifications of various aspects of the universe. It took both the reader and the characters through a dreamlike tour of compelling concepts and characters that were at once cosmic and familiar, monstrous and human.
Similarly, Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol and Animal Man explored reality, fiction, and the difference between the two, while Alan Moore's Supreme got into the superhero myth and explored what made it work. Many of these mature series were published by DC's Vertigo Comics imprint, although not a few were successful independent productions.
In addition to these mature series, this era also saw a general boom of newly created characters, many of whom starred in their own series. At Image, Todd Mc Farlane's Spawn and Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon were the most popular.
For its part, Marvel released new titles such as The New Warriors, Sleepwalker, Darkhawk, and Thunderstrike, all of which were eventually cancelled. Some fans view these titles as part of the reason the comic book market collapsed in the 1990s (more on that below), although they all had their own merits and cult followings.
This was also the age of the comic collector boom. Originally, comics were seen as light, disposable reading material. But over time, the earliest comics appreciated considerably in value, as those who had read the material disposed of it. Selling rare comics to collectors had been around for decades, but suddenly, mainstream attention began to focus on the profit potential of it. And the industry soaked it up.
Series were relaunched with new #1s. Issues were printed with multiple variant covers so that completists would buy multiple copies of a single issue. Some issues came bagged in mylar, so that one could either read the comic or keep it pristine. Gimmicks like trading cards and holofoil covers would appear whenever the editor thought a series needed a sales boost. Indeed, the latter gimmick was so common that some refer to this as the Chrome Age.
Unfortunately, this was only a short-term benefit, which ignored one basic economic fact; the old comics were only selling for such high prices in the first place because they were difficult to get a hold of, being extremely rare. Conversely, the new "collectables" were being churned out by the truckload. Millions of people had bought comics like X-Men #1 in hopes it would become a rare collectible, but since there were millions of copies floating around, it naturally wasn't rare at all, and anyone who wanted to collect it could get it for a song. When the public realized this, the bottom fell out, and the market collapsed. Two-thirds of all direct market comic book stores went out of business.
Indeed, the recurring theme of this Age seems to be short-term gains that lead to long-term harm for the series or company. This was the era of the Crisis Crossover; while participating in one would usually drive up a title's sales, it also had a tendency to make a mishmash of its ongoing storylines by interrupting them every few months. It was also the era of Big Events, like the death of Superman and Spider-Man being revealed as a clone, which were almost without exception retconned away at the end of the storyline.
Many of the smaller publishers of the era, such as Valiant Comics, Eclipse Comics, and Defiant Comics, went out of business due to these two factors. And in 1997, Marvel Comics, one of the Big Two and stalwart bastion of the industry, filed for bankruptcy. But in the same year, a new version of the Justice League Of America returned to a line-up that echoed the best parts of the Silver Age and the Bronze Age, becoming a smash sales success for DC Comics, and the first bells of the Modern Age tolled.
See also Nineties Anti Hero, and Dark Age Of Supernames.
Notable series of the Dark Age:
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