Originally Posted by
Ilan Preskovsky
First, I wasn't talking about all of them. Gerber's Howard the Duck is still fantastic and I really like Green Lantern/ Green Arrow, though that's despite some very clunky writing.
Aside for something like the Spirit, there's just nothing particularly good about Golden Age comics. Historically important, sure, but not much fun to read.
For the Silver Age, the problem, unfortunately, is that comics were not written with adults in mind during and even in terms of things aimed at kids, older comics don't exactly fall into the Harry Potter school of writing. There are some fantastically inventive ideas in Silver Age comics and I can have fun with them in small doses but the dialogue is usually pretty terrible, there's too much exposition for a visual medium and the characterization was almost non-existent. I enjoyed that stuff when I was a kid but they're much harder to relate to as an adult. Some really nice art by the likes of Kirby or Infantino, though.
The Bronze Age is the easiest to get into, of course, but through they're often a lot less childish, they are overwritten to the point where they're a total slog to read. Folks like Chris Claremont and Marv Wolfman (to name the two biggies of the early '80s) are/ were very good writers but X-Men and New Teen Titans are way too wordy for their own good and, again, the dialogue is pretty stilted. It was in this period, though, that comics really started to grow up and there's still stuff from back then that reads just as well today. Moore's Swamp Thing, in particular, shifted the expository narration into something much more poetic and literary, which is something that seemingly all early Vertigo series picked up on. I actually greatly miss that kind of third-person narration and wish it would come back.
As you can see, my tolerance for old comics greatly improves over the years with each passing "age" offering more and more to latch on to. Though, again, I fully appreciate that for kids, it's really difficult to beat the Silver and Bronze ages.
I understand the comparison to older movies but it's a comparison that sadly doesn't really hold up. Compare comics in the '60s and '70s to, say, film or music and tell me that the medium - in particular, superhero comics - had come even close to its more respected counterparts. This isn't a criticism of comics as a medium but an acknowledgement that the earlier attitudes towards comics being, basically, trash for kids and juvenile, uneducated adults, and the later attitude of comics being harmful to kids and needing to be greatly neutered, meant that comics were stuck in a state of arrested development for decades. Within these parameters, there's still plenty to admire, of course, about old comics but I can't say that old comics work for me in the way that Annie Hall, Some Like It Hot or Casablanca do for me even now.