The entire series (with few exceptions) takes place between the third and fourth paragraphs of chapter 27 in Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel A Princess of Mars.Man, I am so cracking open my copy of A Princess of Mars when I get home.
As a side note, people like to debate when these various comic ages start and end. I don't have a solid handle on the start of the Bronze Age, but my own personal take is that it ended no later than 1986 with the publication of Iron Man #194. That's the first appearance of Scourge, the guy who killed many of the goofier villains littering Marvel's sordid past.
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Eek; my childhood has been re-labeled :)
ReplyDeleteI haven't been a comic collector since the mid-80s (back when I was still working every day at a comic and games shop) ... and at the time, we considered ourselves to be _IN_ the Silver Age, still. It was just Gold, and then Silver ... with the line between them being based either on the standard size of the comics or the arrival of the standard Marvel lineup, depending on how you preferred to slice it ...
Being a shop employee, I tended to think of the divisor in terms of size, since that's how we had to order the mylar and poly bags ... silver-age size, golden-age size, and full-magazine size (for our stock of Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated, etc).
There was talk of a "new age" being ushered in by Baxter paper* glossy comics and/or the black and white implosion, but when I stopped working there and stopped collecting, I don't think it had a widespread name yet ... We were still all in the Silver.
Now it turns out I was _never_ in the Silver, but in the Bronze all along :)
Of course, there's a very real possibility that the term was already around and I just missed it. My heavy reading into "panelology" (what a hideous name that many liked at the time) boiled down to reading the intro of the Overstreet guide every year ...
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* Do people even say "Baxter paper" anymore? I remember getting the vague impression in the early 90s that I was a relic for even having that term in my vocabulary ...
Okay, following up: I read the Wikipedia articles, and I can now comfortably adopt this terminology and say with confidence that, from my perspective, the Bronze Age ended when I said "fuck this noise" and gave up comic collecting forever, since that seems to correspond approximately (within a year or three) to just about every other event listed as a possible ending for the Bronze. And not coincidentally, either ... it reads almost like a laundry-list of why I quit comics (or, more precisely, why I had no trouble trading my comics obsession for my RPG obsession).
ReplyDeleteSeveral of the events listed at the end of the Bronze Age were invisible to me back then. Crisis on Infinite Earths was unknown to me, as was Watchmen. But Scourge and the New Universe signaled a sea change that comics were going in a direction I'm not sure I wanted to follow.
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough, with Warren Ellis writing the new New Universe title 'newuniversal', I may end up becoming a New Universe fan after all.
Apart from New Universe, I recall with a queasy kind of nostalgia another marketing experiment for Marvel near the end of my comics years: Star Comics.
ReplyDeleteOne of the benefits of working at the shop was reading basically everything, from the arty stuff like Watchmen to the ... other stuff, like every single new issue of Peter Porker: The Spectacular Spider-Ham
And all this reminds me further of another one of the coffin-nails of the time that drove me away ... steady price-hikes :(
ReplyDeleteOnce run-of-the-mill Marvel titles broke past the 60-cent price point they'd held for years, I started to back away slowly. By the time 75 cents was established as standard, I had my things packed and my train ticket in hand. By the time it hit a full dollar, I was gone, with only an open window and a print curtain on the breeze to let anyone know I'd been there at all.
Most of my gear is Walt Simonson's run on Thor, starting near #337, introducing Beta Ray Bill, which I still read through.
ReplyDeleteThe Warriors Three, Fandrall the Dashing, Hogun the Grim, and Volstagg, appear in many issues.
Good reads every one, and the price is also right. I bought the run for less than a buck an issue except Bill's appearance.