The Gold Standard
By Adam Murdough
Why do we keep coming back to the Golden Age of Comics?
What is it about those turbulent years between the mid-1930s and late 1940s (the exact dates will vary, depending on whom you ask) when superheroes first appeared, emerging from a primordial soup of pulp fiction, post-Depression angst and pre-war anxiety to capture the imagination of a generation of readers? Why does this time continue to seem so magical to us? Why does it resonate so strongly with the fannish imagination that even now, so many decades after the fact, a large and organized body of dedicated Golden Age fandom still exists, and the creators of contemporary superhero comics still look to the comics of the Golden Age, not just for inspiration, but for story content? What fuels the continual impulse for superhero comics to revisit their own roots?
These are, of course, questions without clear and definitive answers, but given the number of Golden Age-inspired series and special projects that have been appearing on the market lately, they are questions worth asking. Between the perennial popularity of DC Comics' Justice Society of America and the sleeper success of newer titles like Dynamite Entertainment's Project Superpowers and Marvel Comics' The Twelve, Golden Age revivals appear to be a hot commodity. The time has come for Comics Now Magazine to take a look at what happens when the comics of now take their cues from the comics of then.
The Golden Age has always been a source of fascination for fans and creators of superhero comics. Witness the fact that people have been "reviving" it, in various ways and for various reasons, since barely a decade after it ended. Comics' second classical period, the Silver Age of Comics, actually began with a string of very loose Golden Age revivals in the late 1950s, when DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz began taking the names of classic, wartime superheroes and building entirely new characters around them, beginning with the Flash in 1956. When that went over well with readers, Schwartz decided to reintroduce the original, Golden Age versions of DC's new star characters and team them up with their Silver Age namesakes, again beginning with the Flash(es) in 1961. Soon, the entire membership of the Justice Society of America, the premier super-team of the 1940s, had been reinstated as a relevant presence in the then-fledgling DC Universe, and their frequent rendezvous with their modern counterparts in the Justice League became a beloved tradition lasting longer than twenty years.
Meanwhile, Marvel Comics writer/editor Stan Lee appropriated a few Golden Age gems from the publisher's past incarnation as Timely Comics to fortify Marvel's own burgeoning universe of characters; the revitalization of one-time fan-favorites like the Sub-Mariner and Captain America resulted in some of the most memorable moments of Marvel's Silver Age. Still elsewhere, Radio Comics, as Archie Comics was once known, unearthed a handful of MLJ Publications characters from the 1940s (The Shield, The Comet, The Black Hood, et al.) and enfranchised them as The Mighty Crusaders in 1965. It became increasingly clear that although comics' Golden Age had ended some time ago, it was still fertile ground for storytelling.
In the ensuing decades, revived Golden Age characters came even more into their own, moving beyond their early Silver Age role as guest stars to become the headliners of their own series once again. Some of these series placed the Golden Agers in a contemporary setting (e.g., Eclipse Comics' Airboy; DC Comics' Freedom Fighters, Shazam!, and All-Star Comics, the latter of which, resuming publication in 1976 after a fifteen-year hiatus, returned the Justice Society to ongoing comics in the same title that introduced the team in 1941), giving fans the satisfaction of seeing their old-time favorites fighting the good fight in a new era. Another approach was to craft new stories with modern sensibilities around Golden Age characters, but set them in the heroes' native context of World War II (e.g., DC's All-Star Squadron; Marvel's The Invaders and the "Liberty Legion" feature in Marvel Premiere #29-30). There were even series that presented the wartime adventures of brand-new, completely original "Golden Age" characters, as in DC's Steel the Indestructible Man and The Young All-Stars. These "period pieces"--arguably exercises in historical fiction, many of them penned by fan-turned-writer and Golden Age aficionado Roy Thomas--added historical depth and texture to the superhero universes in which they were set, and they proved fans' affection not just for the characters of the Golden Age, but for the time period itself.
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