Essay on Golden Age Comics
May. 3rd, 2010 10:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kent_allard_jrI just wrote this for Two Fisted Tales: The Golden Age. It was supposed to an essay on the plots you might have in a Golden Age super's game, but shifted at the end to more of a historical note. I'll probably have to expand it and split it later. In the meantime ... I'd appreciate feedback from anyone familiar with Golden Age comics.
Today, superhero stories take place in rich, self-contained universes, each with an elaborate “mythos” of long-established characters. Stories are about these familiar super-beings, their relationships with each other and the conflicts between them. Their fans are few but highly sophisticated, adults more often than children, with large collections of comic books and trade paperbacks at home, many considered valuable “collector’s items” kept in sealed plastic bags.
None of this was true in the 1930s. The characters were new and unfamiliar. There was no “mythos”; aside from occasional team-ups, each superhero lived in blissful ignorance of the others. The fans were kids, and their parents looked down on what they read. Comic books were junk, and after you read them you threw them in the trash. Yet millions read them – literally, with Superman selling ten million copies a month, a number few magazines, pulp or slick, could match. They were fresh, new and unsophisticated. No one cared what these characters thought or felt; the fact that they could leap over skyscrapers or punch through tanks made them interesting enough.
Superheroes were new to the world, and it took a while to figure out what to do with them. Supervillains were rare. (The whole point of Superman was that he didn’t get beaten up like everyone else.) In the early years superheroes fought the same enemies as the pulpsters: Gangsters, “Oriental” villains, mad scientists and so forth. Some of these villains looked strange and menacing, but most lacked any true super powers. Naturally, none of them stood much of a chance against a genuine superhero; after eight pages the villain would be dispatched and order would be restored to the world.
Since combat was perfunctory, most of the comic was devoted to investigation, piecing together the villain’s scheme. This “piecing together” usually involved beating up flunkies, rather than ratiocination, but typically the hero had to at least find who the mastermind was before he could punch him in the face and end the story. If many modern comics could be described as “soap operas with fist-fights,” Golden Age comics would be “detective stories with fist-fights.” They were crude stories, to be sure – all too brief, written in extreme haste for a young, unsophisticated audience – but this was their form in outline.
There were deviations from the formula, to be sure. Depression-era comic books were written by young Jewish kids, and sometimes they brought a left-wing perspective to their stories. Superman, for example, would try to stop wars in Central America, fight prison wardens who abused their inmates, even rip down tenements so the government could build housing projects in their place. (In those days this was considered an improvement.) Crime-fighting was still his main activity – superheroes were never “left-wing” when it came to punching crooks – but he branched out from time to time.
Other authors added slap-stick, “funny papers”-style humor to their superhero stories. Jack Cole introduced Woozy Winks to Plastic Man and took the comic in often surreal directions. Will Eisner’s Spirit shifted from standard crime-fighting fare to fantastic fables in which the Spirit himself was a peripheral figure. Even straight-laced Captain Marvel teamed up with Tawky Tawny and fought ever more goofy, cartoonish villains. Much of the humor is dated and corny by our standards, but these comics are among the most imaginative of the Golden Age, and often regarded as the best of the period.
Stories got more predictable, and cruder, when World War II began. Sometimes the investigate angle was still there – superheroes still had to unravel networks of spies and saboteurs – but other comics became nothing but a series of fight scenes. Whole comics were devoted to beating up Nazis or “Japs” with only the barest pretense of plot. The comics industry never did better, but as the best men were drafted the quality of the stories steeply declined. By the end of the war superhero comics were a bit passé, and crime comics were the hot new craze. The Golden Age was over.
Today, superhero stories take place in rich, self-contained universes, each with an elaborate “mythos” of long-established characters. Stories are about these familiar super-beings, their relationships with each other and the conflicts between them. Their fans are few but highly sophisticated, adults more often than children, with large collections of comic books and trade paperbacks at home, many considered valuable “collector’s items” kept in sealed plastic bags.
None of this was true in the 1930s. The characters were new and unfamiliar. There was no “mythos”; aside from occasional team-ups, each superhero lived in blissful ignorance of the others. The fans were kids, and their parents looked down on what they read. Comic books were junk, and after you read them you threw them in the trash. Yet millions read them – literally, with Superman selling ten million copies a month, a number few magazines, pulp or slick, could match. They were fresh, new and unsophisticated. No one cared what these characters thought or felt; the fact that they could leap over skyscrapers or punch through tanks made them interesting enough.
Superheroes were new to the world, and it took a while to figure out what to do with them. Supervillains were rare. (The whole point of Superman was that he didn’t get beaten up like everyone else.) In the early years superheroes fought the same enemies as the pulpsters: Gangsters, “Oriental” villains, mad scientists and so forth. Some of these villains looked strange and menacing, but most lacked any true super powers. Naturally, none of them stood much of a chance against a genuine superhero; after eight pages the villain would be dispatched and order would be restored to the world.
Since combat was perfunctory, most of the comic was devoted to investigation, piecing together the villain’s scheme. This “piecing together” usually involved beating up flunkies, rather than ratiocination, but typically the hero had to at least find who the mastermind was before he could punch him in the face and end the story. If many modern comics could be described as “soap operas with fist-fights,” Golden Age comics would be “detective stories with fist-fights.” They were crude stories, to be sure – all too brief, written in extreme haste for a young, unsophisticated audience – but this was their form in outline.
There were deviations from the formula, to be sure. Depression-era comic books were written by young Jewish kids, and sometimes they brought a left-wing perspective to their stories. Superman, for example, would try to stop wars in Central America, fight prison wardens who abused their inmates, even rip down tenements so the government could build housing projects in their place. (In those days this was considered an improvement.) Crime-fighting was still his main activity – superheroes were never “left-wing” when it came to punching crooks – but he branched out from time to time.
Other authors added slap-stick, “funny papers”-style humor to their superhero stories. Jack Cole introduced Woozy Winks to Plastic Man and took the comic in often surreal directions. Will Eisner’s Spirit shifted from standard crime-fighting fare to fantastic fables in which the Spirit himself was a peripheral figure. Even straight-laced Captain Marvel teamed up with Tawky Tawny and fought ever more goofy, cartoonish villains. Much of the humor is dated and corny by our standards, but these comics are among the most imaginative of the Golden Age, and often regarded as the best of the period.
Stories got more predictable, and cruder, when World War II began. Sometimes the investigate angle was still there – superheroes still had to unravel networks of spies and saboteurs – but other comics became nothing but a series of fight scenes. Whole comics were devoted to beating up Nazis or “Japs” with only the barest pretense of plot. The comics industry never did better, but as the best men were drafted the quality of the stories steeply declined. By the end of the war superhero comics were a bit passé, and crime comics were the hot new craze. The Golden Age was over.
