Has "The Modern Age of Comic Books" ended?

What in the devil is the floppy market?

smaller, bite-sized issues usually around 22-30 pages. A lot of comics are serialized this way,

Oh, regular comic books.

Still, at least more non-superhero stuff is winning out somewhere...

edited 14th Oct '14 4:33:11 PM by Aldo930

Last page: And then there is the Brazillian Comics industry which is basically Monica's Gang and.... yeah, I think that is basically it.

And a ton of Brazil-made Disney comics, most of them starring Joe Carioca.

there is a small brazilian market with creators like Rafael Albuquerque (he actually lives in the same city as me, for all I know I might have run into him at some point and never noticed), Fábion Moon and Gabriel Bá, but it's pretty low-key and most of these creators do work for international publishers anyway.

funnily enough the reason stuff like monica and the brazilian disney comics endure is because you can find them everywhere, like grocery stores and newspaper stands. that's a big part of why the american comic market shrunk and stagnated.

edited 16th Oct '14 7:03:17 PM by wehrmacht

Well, that and there was variety. Aside from the heroes, you had funny animals, romance, horror, etc. Everything but the superheroes got pushed out by the 90s.

For much of the 2000s at least, comics were available in a lot of the bookstores I went to in the USA. Just putting that out there.

edited 16th Oct '14 7:07:48 PM by Aldo930

Barnes and Noble has comics, in their magazine section (the monthlies, apart from the collections and graphic novels on the main floor), as do quite a few grocery stores even now. Not a LOT of comics, mind you. Usually, I see the Batman and Superman lines, or Spider-Man and Star-Wars, depending on the grocery store. Archie comics seem to be pretty widely distributed, too, and I have yet to encounter a grocery store that doesn't sell their digests in the magazine section or at the checkout. Still, it'd be nice to see a spinner rack again.

archie was about the only comic you could find in grocery stores for a while. it's part of why it's still around.

Archie comics are actually great in that they keep their material(at least, their material since the early 50's or so) in almost constant reprint. Their digests are all pretty much the same stuff, but it's always in circulation. They will edit older stories, too, by updating references Apparently, getting stuff into grocery checkout lines is pretty expensive to do, but I'd love to see digest-sized reprints of older DC or Marvel stuff. They've both done it in the past; DC had it's Blue Ribbon Digest series from the late 70's and early 80's (one of my very first comics was one of these) and Marvel, in the late 80's, was doing classic Spider-Man reprints in digest size.

I don't think that much has really changed in the comic book industry in terms of stories and the characters (even if DC rebooted their universe, Marvel still hasn't rebooted their universe yet). I do see the new age of comic books either being renamed the "Digital Age" as more comic books are being shown online or the "Comic Book Movies Age" as many comic books (mainly Marvel and DC) are being influenced by the movies or vice versa.

I never did like the name "Modern Age." At best, it should be standard to have a "Current Age", and if there was a major landmark in the industry at least five years ago (enough time to know it really was a major landmark), you can split off another age and move the start of the "Current Age" up accordingly.

I do think that the New 52 + Marvel Now rebranding signals a nice, clean start of an era.

That particular rebranding did a lot:

• DC revamped their continuity, again
• Both companies completely standardized their trade paperback numbering and graphic design
• Marvel instituted a new system whereby each series would get a renumbering for every author change
• Marvel gained a corporate overlord, Disney, to match DC being backed by WB
• WB and Disney both seem to be changing how things are done, at the same time
• Both companies are getting a resurgence in popularity due to movies and TV shows
• Said movies and TV shows are also popularizing new characters

All in all, I would say that these are indeed features of the current era that will make it stand out from even the recent past.

I disagree.

First of all, rebooting of continuity has nothing to do with a new Age; indeed, the only transition marked by such a reboot was that from the Bronze Age to the Dark/Iron Age. The transition from the Dark to the Modern Age was marked by a shift towards less EXTREME BLOOD GUTS AND TITS and more big-screen, cinematic storytelling, which remains in continuity with the Dark Age. The Bronze Age was marked by a shift towards more 'relevant' stories, while maintaining continuity with the Silver Age. The Silver Age itself was a transition from the chaos of the Golden Age towards a more coherent, more innocent, child-friendly environment which, with the exception of The Flash, remained entirely in continuity with the prior Age. (It it only when the Dark Age began that DC's Golden Age material was retconned into taking place in an alternate universe).

The importance of the movies is precisely why I feel we are still in the Iron Age. Recall that in the 90s, when the so-called Dark Age was at its darkest, we had a slew of popular cartoons based on Marvel and DC's properties, as well as a few decent movies, notably Tim Burton's Batman movies and the Blade films. These were the primary means by which new fans got into the comics, which is something that, as you noted, we are witnessing today with the movies. The transition from TV to film was pretty smooth and gradual; Tim Burton showed us that Batman could be dark and gritty before the cartoons appeared, while the first two Spider-Man movies came out while Justice League was still airing.

Since the Ages were initially defined by sales figures, and later by theme and tone, I don't feel that corporate ownership or issue/collection numbering is a criterion by which a new Age can be delineated, though they might be considered features of a new Age when we get enough distance to identify with reasonable consensus when the next Age begins.

(Also, is Marvel seriously going to reboot the numbering every time the writer changes? As if it wasn't confusing enough).

As far as I can tell, yes, that's the new policy, although some series are getting renumbers before that happens (see: Captain Marvel).

And, more confusing? Arguable. Given that they also seem to be letting each writer tell their own big story arc with a coherent beginning, middle, and end, I think that it's actually going to be less confusing that you can just say "read Gillen's Iron Man, starting handily at this volume or issue 1 and ending when it ends" than "read Roger Stern's Avengers starting with Avengers #227 and continuing on to issue #285" - the former definitely has less record-keeping for the new reader and a greater expectation of a complete story.

I think it's going to be more confusing.

"Go read Avengers #1!" "Which #1 are you talking about?" "Uh, the sixth #1, the one from such and such a year."

I think that's quickly going to be a lot more confusing than a single numbered volume, if it isn't already.

That actually happened early in the Silver Age, starting with "The Flash of Two Worlds" and then extending into the Justice League of America when the whole JSA returned.

edited 22nd Oct '14 5:42:50 AM by andersonh1

Whereas I have pretty much never heard recommendations in terms of issue numbers to begin with? I'll hear, say, a rec for Stern's Captain America, or Gillen's Journey into Mystery, or Michelinie's Iron Man, or Hickman's Fantastic Four, or Busiek's Avengers. So, I am all for anything that makes it easier to organize a series by author runs - especially since it all gets thrown into trade paperbacks, anyway, where there have already been a million different volume numberings.

edited 22nd Oct '14 7:35:01 AM by TheEvilDrBolty

This seems like a kind of intermediary period whose signature trait is a series of radical continuity experiments and reboots, in the seeming hope of finding something with legs. From around the start of Ultimate Marvel and DC's first officially dubbed Elseworlds titles, through the New 52, the MCU, and other such experiments, the major publishers have collectively been trying to "pupate" into something that can accommodate stories for a wide range of reader maturity & sophistication, and that won't have to be rebooted again in a few years.

Of all the preceding "ages" of comics, this period reminds me most of the interregnum between the Golden and Silver Ages—except where superhero comics pretty much vanished c. 1950, fermented for a while, and then came back transformed, we're watching the current ferment play out live, in published form.

Still, what we got as a replacement was pretty damn good... EC and all that.

Your case is pretty good too...

edited 18th Nov '14 12:28:22 PM by Aldo930

Lord, I'd love to have an EC renaissance to tide us over while the superhero universes sort themselves out. And so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. ...Oh, sorry—zoned out there for a moment.

And maybe a funny animal, Carl Barks-type renaissance to go along with that as well...

Would that fate would be so kind.

Captain Carrot awaits.

edited 14th Jan '15 5:13:03 AM by AnotherGuy

The "Modern Age of Comic Books" will end if/when these movies by Disney, Warner Bros, Sony, or Fox end up failing at the box office.

edited 15th Jan '15 1:24:59 AM by TailsDoll

It's funny how people gauge these things. I've heard the end of the Golden Age marked as the end of WWII in 1945, 1950, and the adoption of the Comics Code in 1955. If the criteria is diminishing sales/popularity, then really only super-hero comics started falling by the wayside after WWII, and while a lot of them were gone by 1950, certainly all were not (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and a number of more minor characters). This as well discounts (as often happens) the short-lived super-hero "indian summer" that occured in the early-mid 50's, BEFORE the Comics Code, ushered in by the resurgence of Captain America (plus a number of other characters, like the Black Cobra and the Blue Beetle). This particular spate didn't last long, though some ahve attributed it's transience to poor business practices on the part of publishers rather than a drop in popularity. As the Code was adopted in 1955 and Showcase Comics debuted the new Flash in '56 (usually cited as the start of the Silver Age) that would make the interim only a year.

The era had a decline in the popularity of superheroes... Excepting Superman, who had a popular TV show about that time. George Reeves and all, y'know.

Still, they had to have had some degree of popularity for Wertham to rail against them.

Of course, what we got after the big superhero decline was, as I said, wonderful - EC's horror and satire comics, influential to a whole generation of cartoonists.

I'd put the death of the Golden Age at 1955, when the Comics Code came in and, as Art Spiegelman said, Donald Duck became more sophisticated than Superman.