1990s = Age of Excess
1990s = Age of Excess
Personally I'd simplify things more into how comics were distributed.
First Age - Distribution was supermarkets, dime stores, drug stores, you name it.
Second Age - Direct market.
Third Age - Graphic Novel market. All or most comics are being written to be sold as GNs
Fourth Age - Digital being embraced rather than floppies. We have a ways to go, I think, before we get there
Every day is a gift, not a given right.
I want to call what DC is only just starting to move away from - the removal of as many legacy characters as possible and the return of the Silver Age versions to prominence - the Mercury Age. It looks like silver at a glance, but it's really, really toxic.
Dark does not mean deep.
Many submissions I see here are about "what I read" with no thought about "why it happened."
!? No.
The Plantinum/Gold/Silver/Bronze/modern ages are all ages based on the real why reason !
Pre-wartime, wartime, comics code time, lighter comics code, no more comics code !
Then the modern age had no real very distinguishable reasons why it evolved like it did.
So the reasons are eras are more defiened on the "what I read".
You forget distribution. Seen in that light, the Platinum age was the age of comics being syndicated in newspaper distribution, and the Golden Age was the rise of the floppies. The rise of the direct market and the collapse of the newsstand distribution ought to fit into one age as well, as does the rise of the digital market and the trade market.
«Speaking generally, it is because of the desire of the tragic poets for the marvellous that so varied and inconsistent an account of Medea has been given out» (Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History [4.56.1])
Not necessarily, but they are a huge outside factor that govern what type of readers you get, what type of visibility you have from "mainstream" society, and what storytelling formats to use. A shift in distribution is likely to mean that publishers are in great need of new creators who can understand and work with the constraints of the new distribution format as well, as not all of the established creators will be able to make the leap.
«Speaking generally, it is because of the desire of the tragic poets for the marvellous that so varied and inconsistent an account of Medea has been given out» (Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History [4.56.1])
1990s - mid-2000s: age of speculators
since then: age of burst bubbles
The transition from one age to another isn't visible until years or decades after it happens. If you'd asked me in 1978, I would have said that we were still in the Silver Age. Nobody used the term Bronze Age until much later.
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The discussion forum for fans of 20th-century comics: http://classiccomics.org
2010 - present
The movie age
Dark, Iron, and Modern have been used quite a bit.
I think from 1999, onward, there should be a big reference to the Hollywood-ization of comics, but I don't know what.
Yeah. For instance, "Golden Age" wasn't used until 1960, and it took several more years before we figured out what to call the Silver Age.
Last edited by MyriVerse; 06-03-2020 at 01:14 PM.
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