Bronze Age of Comics

[Christopher R Taylor]

Kids today have grown up with the modern "Cinematic" age of comic books; that's what they assume is normal for superhero stories.  To them, the Bronze Age of comics is ancient history.  Its sort of like for me, the Golden Age, an era 20 years before I was born.

 

So the Bronze Age is historical now. Sure, its what I grew up with as a kid and its the base template of comics: this is how superheroes are supposed to be.  But for them its an era, a period in comics in the past.  For them, the time traveling superhero goes back to the 1980s before they had cell phones I mean its ancient history. I was standing in the shower today when all this came to me, a very minor revelation.

 

And to me, Champions is designed to simulate the Bronze Age; that's its ideal setting.  But what makes up the Bronze Age?  What are its base characteristics; obviously these are general themes, not hard and fast rules as they all have exceptions.

 

1) Characters never really die.  They disappear for a while, but that's pretty much it.  Characters in the setting treat death as real, but resurrection as normal as well

2) Heroes don't kill.  There's usually one member of a team that's the Wolverine (or, more properly, the Timber Wolf) who will kill but is always criticized and the team fights to stop him

3) Related: heroes don't use lethal attacks very often.  Even if they have a lethal weapon, they tend not to use it to deal lethal damage to anyone that can die.

4) Good and bad are distinctly aligned.  There is good and bad and you know who they are.  There are complicated bad guys with a sympathetic cause or background, but they are still bad guys.

5) The world is basically realistic, but has no real lasting consequences.  Characters stay pretty well static despite superficial changes.  Peter Parker goes from High School to College, but he's basically in the same situation.  Kitty Pryde is 13½ for 10 years.  A character may have a sidekick hooked on heroin, but in a few issues, its as if it never happened.

6) Teams are the rule rather than the exception: people join up and stay joined up even if the membership varies over time.

7) Real World issues rarely are significant beyond broad strokes.  Nobody goes and beats up Moammar Khadafi or Idi Amin, they might fight a vaguely similar bad guy or villains from a real world trouble spot, but that's as close as you get  Heroes don't go to Iraq, they got Quracistan, or Umbulatu, usually not real world places.

8) The mood is generally upbeat for most titles -- X-men and Doom Patrol notwithstanding, overall the stories end well and good guys win.  Heroes succeed and protect their loved ones.

9) Characters have personal quirks and complications that shape who they are and give them motivation rather than define their particular angst and misery.  They are hunted by Joe Blow because of a personality clash or event before they became good guys, not because they killed Joe Blow's sister and live in constant regret.

10) The characters have no significant impact on the world.  They don't invent flying cars or portable forcefields and sell them.  Technology and magic stay in the superhero realm without changing the world in any way.  Mr Fantastic creates things he never shares with anyone else.

11) Heroes have secret identities.  They wear masks, don't tell everyone their name in a press conference, and they use code names without shame or any sense of irony.

12) Characters wear costumes, not leather outfits or street clothes.  They are colorful costumes, not costume-like tactical clothing.

 

Those are the basic ones I can think of.  Any other thoughts or themes I missed?

[Tjack]

I think of the Bronze Age as from the 1970's till 9/11. After that I suggest shifting from metals to simply call this "The Electronic Age"'. This new age is defined by the computers influence on both the business and creative sides of the industry.

[mrinku]

Pretty good start. As Tjack just said we may need to nail down what we mean by Bronze Age... 9/11 is far too late for the end, which I'd place more around the late 80's and Early 90's when Grim n Gritty became cool. Watchmen (1986-7) was the shape of things to come. Dark Knight Returns (1986) also showed where things were headed, but was set in A (not The) future. Killing Joke (1988) and then Death in the Family (1988-9) flipped the nasty switch on and things largely got grimmer after that. Making Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985-6) the Last Bronze Age Comic works pretty well for me. It wasn't quite as smooth as all that - Byrne's run on Superman was actually more typically bronze age than much of the actual Bronze Age Superman IMHO, and likewise the George Perez run on Wonder Woman was in no way Grim or pessimistic and makes a great exemplar for a Bronze Age character.

 

One thing I'd add to the "One member of a team who will kill" - that character will almost always voluntarily refrain from killing while working with the team, and it's that self-control (typified by Wolverine) that adds interest to the character. Wolverine wasn't one of the most popular Bronze Age characters because he was a killer... he was popular because he was a killer who refrained from doing so. He'd given his word to Xavier on the matter and that was enough.

 

As far as tone and everything working out in the end goes... well, you may be surprised on that. Bronze Age includes the Phoenix Saga in X-Men, The Judas Contract in Teen Titans and Sue Richards' miscarriage in Fantastic Four. And many cite the death of Gwen Stacey in 1973 as the real starting point. The Legion of Superheroes tended to develop rather than stay static too, though they always had the great advantage of existing in the Far Future.

 

One trope that is around in spades is intra-team bickering and soap opera - probably best gamed as a Rivalry. The Fantastic Four are probably best known for this, although it was always a feature of the team even in the Silver Age, but the X-Men and Teen Titans had it as well. Most commonly done as two members of the team with opposed personalities who ribbed each other. Thing and the Torch; Cyborg and Changeling; Wolverine and Cyclops (romantic).

 

Oh... and we must not forget Introspective Self Doubt. Very much a feature of the era

[Tjack]

Well, if the first two Ages lasted twenty years each, (Golden 1930-50, Silver '50's-'70's) then we're 2 1/2 ages down the road so let's just bag the whole metal designations and decide what THIS age is or will be known for.

As I said in my last post I believe it will be the one where the 'net changed the whole ball game. From comic stores becoming no longer needed for getting actual comics to the rise of reading comics on personal devices to mainstream comics that are never published on paper.

The Electronic Age. Known to me as "when I stopped reading them".

[mrinku]

Tjack, it's really not  as clear cut as that, even for GA and SA.

 

The Golden Age of Superheroes basically started in 1938 and lasted through to about 1951 at the latest (many would argue it stopped much earlier). Then there was basically no superhero comics outside of a handful at DC that struggled through until the Silver Age kicked off with the relaunch of The Flash in 1959. Other old DC heroes got makeovers and then Marvel got in on the act with a flowering of innovative new titles from 1961. But in effect the 1950's was a dead decade and not really part of either GA or SA.

 

It's really quite hard to stick a date on when things morphed from the SA to BA. Things were definitely there by the end of the 70's, but many titles weren't particularly different from how they had been in the 60's. So the Silver Age pretty much runs from 1959 to "sometime in the 1970s'" and the Bronze Age goes from "sometime in the 1970's" to "Late 1980's", but would be more like 15 years than 20.

 

In any case, what Christopher is talking about is the era that wound up when superhero comics tried being "gritty" and "dark".  I don't disagree that digital production and distribution had a big impact on comics... but it didn't directly follow on from the Bronze Age ethos.

 

Oh! And there's one REALLY important distinction between Bronze Age and the following ones... Bronze Age predates company wide mega crossover events. You had plenty of team ups and guest stars, but basically plots stayed within their own books and you did not have to buy a limited series plus all the titles it crossed over with. For that reason Secret Wars can often be seen as the end of the era, although that didn't actually require you to invest in titles you weren't interested in, since it all happened between a couple of issues. Crisis on Infinite Earths was the first one that did that.

[assault]

The Flash was relaunched in 1956. (The original Batwoman appeared in 1956 too, but she was a bit of a dead end, being dropped in 1964. Not a bad run though.)

 

1958 saw Green Lantern, Supergirl, and the Legion of Superheroes.

 

The gap between the Golden Age and the Silver Age was actually quite short.

[massey]

While some books may fall clearly into a particular age, that doesn't mean that that age really began with that book.

 

Alan Moore's Miracleman/Marvelman was in 1982, but you probably shouldn't count that as the beginning of the Iron Age. Comic book ages probably need to go from when the tonal shift changes across the majority of books.

 

So the Golden Age goes from 1938 with Superman, until sometime in the early 50s (when western comics and horror comics supplanted superheroes as top sellers).

 

The Flash starts in '56, but really it's the Justice League in 1960, followed by all the Marvel books that really marks the beginning of the Silver Age. Most people mark the death of Gwen Stacy as the end of the Silver Age, but honestly many comics continued in that same style for a few years after that.

 

But even if you say the Bronze Age starts in 1973, I don't think it ends until the early 90s. Image comics is probably the first big marker for the beginning of the Iron Age, but you have to consider the Death of Superman, Knightfall, and Zero Hour as the point where it spread throughout DC.

 

I don't know that the Iron Age has ever really ended. If it has, we probably won't really be able to tell until more time has passed. I think we're in a period where comic book films are controlling what gets published in the books. Everybody needs to look like their movie versions. So maybe the success of the Iron Man movie will mark our transition into the Cinematic Age. But who knows.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Its really not easy to give exact dates to the ages, because they kind of overlap: there's a transition period for each.  I put 1990 as the hard end of Bronze age, but there's a period between about 86-90 where Iron is starting up as mrinku notes.

 

The reasoning behind all this is that I'm thinking that if you have a Golden Age Champions book, it makes sense to have a Bronze Age one, too.  

 

While I want to do a Champions intro scenario, I'm concerned that I may not connect with younger players who are thinking Avengers movie when they think Champions instead of Claremont's X-Men. Where they see a superhero game not as guys in costumes fighting crime but Iron Man partying and dealing with the problems he creates.  I don't know.

[massey]

Younger players are more likely to connect with some of the cartoons that have been out lately. I haven't really watched anything like that since Justice League Unlimited ended, but I'm sure there's been lots of animation that captures a Bronze Age feeling.

[Tjack]

I''m just less concerned about defining the Ages gone by as I am about understanding the we're in now.

Another feature of what I keep calling the Electronic Age seems to be as Mr Taylor & Massey note, the newest generation identifying the Movie versions of characters and history as canon to them.

[mrinku]

Actually, the current Cinematics are far more Bronze Age to my eye than most of the actual comics over the last 20 years. There's some modernisation, of course, and costumes that have to make sense as clothing, but the bulk of the MCU plots have been drawn from 1960's and 1970's comics and the characterisations would not feel out of place in 1983. Bronze age does include Tony Stark falling into a bottle and Speedy becoming a junkie, after all. Winter Soldier and Civil War  are the only MCU movies I'd consider Iron Age plots, and even then the end result (Cap giving up the shield and going into exile) comes from the Bronze Age when he became Nomad instead of the actual Civil War comic (where he gets assassinated). The next story for the MCU Avengers takes them right back to 1992. And while the original Infinity War story was technically Iron Age, it wasn't exactly Grim 'n' Gritty fare.

 

The Spider-Man movies up until Homecoming have been stand alone Silver Age or Bronze Age stories (mostly Silver Age, but Spidey was always ahead of the pack).

 

So Tjack, I'll agree about the Electronic Age and using the definition as when the movies took over from comics to define the characters. But I think it really starts with Iron Man (2008).

[Christopher R Taylor]

Another feature of what I keep calling the Electronic Age seems to be as Mr Taylor & Massey note, the newest generation identifying the Movie versions of characters and history as canon to them. 

 

 

That's why I call it the cinematic age, started with the release of Iron Man.

[mrinku]

Christopher, I'd be very happy to help out with any Bronze Age project. I lived through it and have thousands of the relevant comics.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I don't have a project in mind, I just was brainstorming with people here about tone and concept.  I agree with you that in some ways the cinematic characters have a bronze age feel, but in others they do not.  They barely have any sort of costume other than Spider-man, Daredevil, and Iron Man (and the DC guys but they haven't really gotten off the ground other than Batman).  Almost none of them have a secret identity.  They're wracked with misery and angst most of the time.  There is only one real team right now, so its not the primary theme of the setting, etc.

 

Its stuff like that I wonder about.  Should we abandon the concepts of stuff like secret identities and costumes?  Should the teams only form temporarily?  Should the bad guys be primarily evil government types and thugs or super villains?  Here's the list of superhero films out so far, the big ones (starting with 2000):

 

X-Men: Magneto and Brotherhood of Mutants

Spider-Man: Assorted thugs and Green Goblin with gadgets

Hulk: the army, his dad (quasi-Absorbing Man)

X2: Evil scientist, Magneto and Brotherhood of Mutants

Spider-Man 2: Assorted thugs, Doc Ock with gadget (his arms)

Sky High: each other, evil genius with gadgets

Incredibles: Evil genius with gadgets

Batman Begins: Ra's Al Gul and Scarecrow, only powers are the fear gas and a gadget.  Thugs galore

Fantastic Four: themselves, Dr Doom...ish

Superman Returns: Evil "Genius," thugs

Zoom: each other, evil brother with powers

X-Men Last Stand: Each other, Magneto and brotherhood of mutants

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer: Dr Doomish, Silver Surfer, Space Cloud

The Dark Knight: Thugs, Joker

Hancock: Himself, Thugs

The Incredible Hulk: Abomination, army

Iron Man: Himself, thugs, Ironmonger

Spider-Man 3: Sand Man, Alien Costume, Studio Execs

The Dark Knight: Lots of thugs and Joker (who seems to have a superpower of teleporting high explosives)

X-Men Origins Wolverine: Thugs, Weapon X, Sabertooth, bad writing

Iron Man 2: Himself, War Machine, Whiplash

Captain (mumble), the First Avenger: Lots of thugs, Red Skull

Green Lantern: Himself, Sinestro, Space Cloud

Thor: Loki, Giants, Himself, Destroyer

X-Men First Class: Magneto and Brotherhood of Mutants, quasi Hellfire Club

Avengers: Each other, Loki, zillions of alien thugs with gadgets

Dark Knight Rises: Lots of thugs, Bane, contrvied writing

Iron Man 3: Guys with fire powers, Himself, lame Mandarin

Man of Steel: Zod and his buddies, alien  gadgets, bad writing

Amazing Spider-Man: Lizard, boredom

Thor Dark World: Dark elves

The Wolverine: Ninjas, mecha-samurai

Amazing Spider-Man 2: Electro, bad writing

Captain America: Winter Soldier: Winter soldier, government agents, Hydra

X-Men Days of Future Past: Magneto, Government agents

Ant-Man: Thugs, Yellowjacket (this one has the most comic book feel of all of them, in my opinion)

Fant4stic: Dr Doomoid, bad writing

Captain America Civil War: the Avengers vs each other, Iron Man, lame Baron Zemo

Dr Strange: Dormammu, Kaecillius (who?)

X-Men Apocalypse: Apocalypse, each other

Logan: Old age, government thugs

Wonder Woman: German soldiers, Ares

 

The main theme is that while there may be a big villain, its mostly little guys and rarely a team of villains.  if there's a team of villains its usually heroes or is the same guys over and over.  So should the Champions Begins project be along those lines, because its what new customers expect, or be more traditional and introduce them to a more comic book feel?

 

And then there's the anime influence, which brings in a whole separate bunch of themes which I'm less familiar with as well but new customers may expect.

[massey]

I think the movies have generally taken Bronze Age stories and given them an action-movie aesthetic.  In today's world with tons of government surveillance, camera phones everywhere, the idea of maintaining a secret identity seems kind of quaint.  We've got super-spies in the universe, why can't they figure out who Captain Roundhouse really is?  Batman maintains a secret ID, but most of his real villains know who he is anyway.  So it's sort of half of a secret ID.  It's part of the comic book genre that really hasn't made the transition to the big screen.  That doesn't mean it's a bad thing, just that it hasn't really been done all that well.

 

Not everything is going to translate from comics to movies, just like not everything is going to translate from comics to an rpg.  Or from movies to an rpg.  And that's okay.  The basic themes are still there.

[mrinku]

Hmm... despite saying there's only really one team, that list includes several X-Men ones and the Fantastic Four (plus Sky High and the Incredibles). I count about 12 of those films (over a third) as having definite hero teams, and that doesn't include the likes of SHIELD providing a support base or BvS, which is a teamup movie, even if the Justice League haven't formed yet.

 

And shame on you for leaving out Spider-Man: Homecoming! That's a definite team-up one. You also left out Deadpool, Suicide Squad and both Guardians of the Galaxy movies which all involve teams that aren't the Avengers.

 

Massey makes a really good point that the cartoons are as big if not more of an influence. And that reminds me that when I was a young tacker in the early 70's it was TV that was providing my view of superheroes through syndicated 50's and 60's live action shows and various cartoons.

 

Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na Batman! 

Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

When Captain America throws his mighty shield...

Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can... (and massive kudos to Spider-Man Homecoming for those opening credits )

 

...and whatever the Hanna Barbera Fantastic Four theme was. I remember the show, but not the jingle.

 

During the 70's we had Super Friends, Shazam!, Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk on TV, as well as Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman. By then I was reading the comics (mostly DC ones in thick black and white reprint volumes. It was an Australian thing).

[Christopher R Taylor]

You also left out Deadpool, Suicide Squad and both Guardians of the Galaxy movies

 

 

 

Well I don't consider any of those to be actually about superheroes, personally. Spider-Man Homecoming was an ommission, but I haven't' seen it either.  And while I listed them, I kind of leave the FF out of the cinematic universe continuity.  They're like Highlander 2.

[megaplayboy]

wiki pegs it as beginning in 1970(Jack Kirby's last comic for Marvel, FF102) and ending in 1985(Watchmen, DKR, COIE, Secret Wars). Since the Golden Age goes roughly from 1938(Superman) to about 1953(the only comics left were Batman and Superman at that point), and the Silver from 1956 to 1970, that divides things into 15 year eras.

I'd probably modify some of the elements listed in the OP.  Death becomes a reality in the Bronze Age, to a far greater extent than in the Silver, where it rarely happens.  Some heroes and characters who die do in fact stay dead, or at least it's a very long time before they come back.

I'd also add there's broadening diversity in the Bronze Age--the lineup of the "New X-Men" was emblematic of that.  There's also some effort to address/introduce real world issues like racism, drugs, etc.  Mistrust of authority figures starts to creep in as well.

There's a movement away from "silly" or outlandish stories--though this isn't absolute.  The Bronze Age introduced a talking duck to the MU, after all.  

[mrinku]

As well as actual death (which is still rare) the comics code starts to loosen a bit and you get the re-introduction of horror elements in the 70's that weren't allowed in the Silver Age, as well as mention of drugs as long as it showed them in a bad light.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority

 

In fact, you could probably take the 1971 revision of the Comics Code as the marker for the end of the Silver Age as much as anything. Things started to change up. 

 

Howard stands alone in terms of being what is essentially an underground character in a mainstream comic, but there were a few other silly ones like Ambush Bug.

[Tjack]

The MCU movies are great, but the film that proved the theory that people might buy a serious comic movie was Blade. Some might say Superman: The Motion Picure, but that was more about a character that had world wide recognition getting a multi million dollar tentpole spectacular than something from only the comics getting a shot.

[massey]

The Crow predates Blade. But neither of those had the effect of Iron Man on the comics industry.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah I consider Iron Man the real start of the comic book movie.  It showed that a lesser known character, if handled properly, could be a big, big hit.  It demonstrated what all the comic book fans had been saying for years: if you just do a good job, people will like it.

[Cantriped]

Not saying anyone here is wrong, but Champions (6th edition) pegged the end of the Bronze Age in the mid-eighties... Which is a little before I was born. Per Champions, ​I grew up in the midst of the Iron Age. The first Superhero cartoon I remember watching was Spiderman and His Amazing Friends (1981). Of course by the time I saw it was probably almost a decade old. Spider-Man and Batman cartoons were a staple of the Saturday Morning block when I was growing up. 

 

Champions ​describes Cinema Superheros as being part of the Iron Age; which ostensibly continues to this day. However, it also mentions that Cinema Superheroes draw many elements from the Bronze and Silver Ages. Barring any massive revolution in storytelling, I expect that a "Retro Age" will follow the Iron Age. I think that the current rash of cinematic superheroes in the last decade have been a lead up to said age. The "Retro Age" is an age where writers will create stories that pay homage to past ages.

[mrinku]

The Retro Age has been an ongoing process since the Silver Age, which is got its start by taking old characters and updating them, or in the case of Marvel, uncorking the actual characters (Captain America and Submariner). Mid-to-late Bronze Age went through a lot of rehabilitating Silver Age characters - New X-Men, Teen Titans, Legion of Superheroes, even while remaining in the same continuity. John Byrne spent a lot of his celebrated run on Fantastic Four revisiting the early 60's... up to and including having a Doctor Doom replacement rerun one of his early schemes and send the Baxter Building into space.

 

The JSA revival was pure Retro.

 

Instead of "ages" what you really have these days are Universe Resets about every 10 years. The company sets up some apocalyptic event and restarts all the continuity, picking and choosing what they will keep from the previous decades of stories. Retro has been part of that all along.

[Cassandra]

When taking about comic ages once must remember that they will be about ten years behind the times in terms of social attitudes. 

 

The Bronze Age was between 1970 and 1985 for DC with Social Change story lines that ranged from interesting (Speedy on Drugs) to idiotic (Lois because Black).  Some new characters were introduced with psychological issues (The Thorn's split personality, The Creeper's and Ambush Bug's borderline insanity).  All this came to an end with the Crisis on Infinite Earths which attempted to create a single continuity (like Marvel), and ended up with DC destroying it's continuity ever ten years since.