Favorite Superhero Era

[Cassandra]

Which is your favorite Superhero Era?

 

Pulp Age

Golden Age

Silver Age

Bronze Age

Iron Age

Modern Age

 

And do you model your campaigns and heroes/villains on it?

[Matt Holck]

My champions world pretty much keeps up with current times and technology and altitudes

[Lord Liaden]

I'm pretty solidly Bronze Age: colorful costumes and code-names, fairly clear-cut boundaries between good and evil; but some shades of grey, moral quandaries, personal tragedies, and the like.

 

It's the era I came to maturity during, so that may have helped shape my tastes.

 

[Corsair]

Silver age for me. The whole DC revival of superheroes in the late fifties and early sixties, and then them being blown completely out of the water with the neighborhood kids when we discovered Marvel in early 1963. I suppose the campaign I'm developing borrows a little bit of this and that from several eras, but tries not to overdose on any.

[Escafarc]

Very Silver Age.

[assault]

Silver, more or less. Particularly early Silver, mid 50s - early 60s. Pretty much the period before I was born, now I think about it.

[Old Man]

Bronze Age by far. Deeper storylines (without being really dark) and the increasing popularity of non-superhero comics (ironically). My Champions characters, though set in the modern juncture, tend to reflect this era--pretty clearly heroic, but often quite deeply flawed.

[Cancer]

Silver, predominantly, with some leakage into early Bronze. That is chiefly set by when I was reading a lot of comics.

[Tasha]

Which is your favorite Superhero Era?

 

Pulp Age

Golden Age

Silver Age

Bronze Age

Iron Age

Modern Age

 

And do you model your campaigns and heroes/villains on it?

 

Late Bronze, Early Iron. Heroes were Heroic (even Wolverine), sometimes people died. The Artwork started to get better as the paper and printing technologies allowed for better everything. We had Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and X-Men God Loves:Man Kills as graphic novels and events. There's also a ton of good Indie books available with Elementals being one of the best of the super books. This is all before Image came and gave us artwork without much in the way of decent story. Kind of the Michael Bay of Comics. They did cause the artwork to stay good and not backslide to the cheap paper from early ages.

 

Silver Age had a ton of great books from Marvel esp the FF in the 60's and early 70's, but DC was all about Camp and not respecting their IP or readers.

 

Late Iron Age, Rust/Modern era has it's high spots, but too many characters forget they are heroes. Writers do things to get attention. This is the "Women in Refrigerators" era.

 

I prefer to run my games in that late 80's early 90's Marvel Comics era and feel. I prefer that PC's not kill, that they act like heroes and not out of control vigilantes.

[BTolputt]

Early Iron & Modern Ages for me.

 

I like the early iron age because that was when heroes were still the good guys, but they had an edge to them that stopped them from being "camp". Adam West is funny to watch as the Batman on TV, but in the comics Batman was far cooler as The Dark Knight. The art was pretty good too, but that remained a constant throughout the Iron Age & into today. Of course, Image & (most of) Wildstorm kind of killed the storyline in the middle with awesome looking art & action scenes, but with all the depth of a Brady Bunch episode.

 

I like the modern age because the "necessity" of characters having a dark side is removed, but the edge still remains. Though I have to say that DC's recent efforts are not terribly exciting in this regard. Only so many times you can kill everyone in an orgy of violence & death, bring them back, then reset the universe before that schtick gets old.

[Hermit]

Someone once said the best age of comics is whatever you read at age 12. I think there's some truth to that, so I'd probably favor Early Bronze with a lot of respect for late silver. The modern age now isn't so bad IF you know where to go, but it can be hard to pick up the slivers of bronze or silver (If that's your preference) If you don't have a clue it is still around. I've little patience for 'deconstructing the superhero'. It's been done so often it almost makes regular superheroic decency look fresh and new

 

I've also read some "Golden Age" stuff, and really, Pre-Comics Code Authority stuff and post Comics Code Authority are two different beasts. The heroes were a lot more pulp and savage in the earliest days, even the ones who didn't often watched the bad guy plummet to his death with a shrug. Then the CCA came in, and yeah, mostly the corn remained

 

[Greywind]

I read comics for the longest time. Couldn't tell you what the first one I read was. Mom was just happy that I was reading *something*. What got me into collecting was Perez's first run on The Avengers back around 150 of the first series.

[phoenix240]

Late Bronze, Early Iron and the Modern age. I do model my games on their eras.

[Lucius]

Stone Age

 

Lucius Alexander

 

the palindromedary likes Age of Aquarius, but would like to see the Ages of Gemini, Libra, and Pisces

[Lawnmower Boy]

This is a tough one. I think that my basic preference is any and all of the expansionary phases of the industry, when people took chances and told goofy stories. The late '50s, when we saw people play with concepts like the Golden Gladiator. There was the early '70s, when Kirby was spinning stories about Omac and Etrigan and had some kind of side thing going on with "New Gods," and Atlas made its doomed bid for big-three status, and Marvel was willing to take chances with characters like the original Deathlok. In the late '80s, you had the rise of the independent, creator-owned characters like American Flagg

 

Now, it's easy to do that badly. Just look at the stereotypical alt weekly comic strip. The difference between Ernie Pook's Comeek and, say, Turok, Son of Stone, is that in the former case a powerfully insightful writer who could be telling an engaging story has instead launched herself up her rear in an extended tour featuring herself as tour guide. That can be an entertaining thing in small doses, but it is pretty draining in the long run. I may sound like a phillistine here, but there's a reason that Lynda Barry's work never really took off, and it's not that everyone is a phillistine. Turok, on the other hand, was in itself a pedestrian creation of a hack writer. And yet the property keeps getting revived as a vehicle for new stories in new mediums.

 

Note that we've had novels of interior development and character for two centuries now. The ones that survive tend to be stories, though. It' s not hard. Put a girl and a boy, or a girl and a girl, or a boy and a boy in it, and it's like you've wheeled your bike to the top of the hill and the finish line is at the bottom. Sure, go ahead and play with your handlebars on the way down. You're going to get to the end.

 

Serial comics, meanwhile, don't have ends. They don't need ends, because they are located within a cycle of repeating themes, telling a series of shorter stories that gain their power from the use of familiar characters. For that to work, you need a powerful, open-ended commitment to explore the world. That's what you get when times are good. When times aren't good, people turn inward. The stories that do get told can be powerful and affecting and escapist and romantic. My issue is with the stories that don't.

[Nothere]

I'd have to say silver age. And yes most of my charecters do adopt that mindset.

[Doc Shadow]

For me it's always been Bronze Age. Although there can be some bleed over on either side.

[culhwch]

I read comics for the longest time. Couldn't tell you what the first one I read was. Mom was just happy that I was reading *something*. What got me into collecting was Perez's first run on The Avengers back around 150 of the first series.

It was Perez's & Wolfman's New Teen Titans that hooked me for life!

[culhwch]

Kind of a tie between Bronze and Golden for me. I grew up mid-late Bronze, and those are the stories I love the most. But I also love the Golden Age stories where every thing was new in the comics. Most Silver Age stuff was just too campy (particularly from DC - my favorite company) for my tastes.

[Zephrosyne]

For reading comics, I am partial to Bronze Age and Modern. For roleplaying, I prefer Modern. There are things that I am ok reading about but I don't really care for in my games.

[Greywind]

I read comics for the longest time. Couldn't tell you what the first one I read was. Mom was just happy that I was reading *something*. What got me into collecting was Perez's first run on The Avengers back around 150 of the first series.

I was happy that I got in on the ground floor for that one. I did start picking up the new Brave and the Bold with Perez. First issue was Batman/Green Lantern.

[Andrew_A]

My favourite era of comics isn't the same as my favourite era of superhero comics. Looking purely at superheroes, it's Silver Age For The Win. That's the era with the greatest number of enduring characters.

 

It's also the era with the most diverse take on superheroes. Nowadays, Marvel is almost indistinguishable from DC or Image or Indy comics*. Back then, there was a distinct difference between Mort Weisinger's comics or Julius Schwartz's comics. And that was in the same company! You get the same differences between a Jack Kirby Marvel comic, a Steve Ditko Marvel comic, or a Don Heck Marvel comic.

 

It's also the era that introduced more crazy concepts than any others: the Phantom Zone, the Negative Zone, Mutants, Inhumans, cities in bottles, clubs for 30th century teen superheroes, multiple versions of Atlantis, stage magicians from the 63rd century, corps of alien police officers, three different super metals, two different wish machines, giant aliens in purple armour that ate planets, giant clouds that ate stars, etc. To me the Silver Age just feels fresher and more imaginative than either the Bronze, Iron, or Modern Ages (although those eras have a lot of good to great work).

 

*If we're looking purely at superhero comics.

[Enforcer84]

Bronze by and large with Silver Age sympathies and a great sadness that the technology for printing and coloring came when I could no longer give a rat's patootie about the writing. I've been pleasantly surprised but even the comics I read as a kid and liked kind of disappoint me now.

 

 

[kahuna's bro]

silver age

[TheQuestionMan]

Strangely enough I do not have a favourite Era. I just love a good story and good art. Even when role playing. Cheers QM