If you’re a Faithful Spoilerite, you’re probably familiar with our wonderful website. As such, you’re hopefully at least aware of the Retro Reviews that I occasionally toss together out of a box of scraps that I found in a cave. In my travels throughout nearly a century of comics history, though, I often find myself gravitating towards the era from about 1966 to 1972, late Silver/early Bronze Age, an era of relevance, go-go boots, and a fascinating take on teenage slang that seems only to exist in comics, especially comics featuring any member of the Teen Titans. I’m fascinated by Green Lantern traveling America in a pickup truck, Spider-Man’s love triangle with Gwen and Mary Jane, the wild, weird things that came out of the Batman television show, and some stuff that even *I* can’t figure out. (Wham-O Giant Comics #1 has been on the Retro Review pile for nearly two years now, but it kind of boggles even my comics mind.)
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) reminds you that Richie Rich, Jughead, Goofy and even The President had superhero personas back in the day, asking: What era of comic/pop culture history resonates most with you and why?
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In wider pop culture, I am utterly fascinated by the mid to late 1970s. Don’t ask me why – I can’t pin down one thing. I like the wide variety of music that was popular (last time I can think of really twangy country music being in the Top 40 & not just pop with steel guitars), I like the weirdly over-the-top clothes, I like the fact that TV tried to be more daring than it ever would today, I like the simultaneously exciting growth of both independent “auteur” cinema & big crowd pleasing blockbusters. There’s the start of the Bronze Age comics that would shape my tastes, too. It’s a very dynamic era in nearly every medium I can think of. Maybe it helps that I never lived through it and can look at it through this filter of “hey, it wasn’t all gas shortages & quickie disco knock-offs” without any bitterness.
I think for me it is around the timeframe of mid 70’s to mid 80’s, Most things I like seem to have some great stories from around those times (Doctor Who, Super Sentai, comics, etc) and some of my life-long favorite movies are also from around the same time (Star Wars, E.T., Rocky Horror Picture Show, etc).
The “Bronze Age” of comics. While I was a fan all the way from being a kid in the 60’s it wasn’t until the 70’s that I started understanding and enjoying comics on a level above “Smash” and “Kapow” and “Up up and away…”. Comics were begining to get a bit more serious yet still were fun. The juxtaposition between Elliot S! Maggin’s writing and Cary Bate’s classic “Flash” stories was enjoyable. It was also the time of the “Giant Size” comics with all the reprints of Golden Age and Silver Age stories that started my love for the JSA characters. Trying to separate the Earth-1 and Earth-2 and Earth-S, etc. was simply fun. And Marvel Comics were actually fun to read and weren’t depressing. Movies like Animal House came out in the later part of the decade. The 70’s were the last “simple times” I remember before the 80’s (which is when I went to college and I don’t have a lot of recollection from that point until the latter part of the decade for some reason….)
I hate to say it, but I grew up a child of the 80’s, and am mostly still there. I like a lot of things from a lot of times, but I do find myself gravitating to a lot of mid 80’s and early 90’s. Hellblazer and Sandman would be the ones I would cite, except really it was Wolverine. I started comics with Wolverine, first as single issue, and later in collections, and didn’t really look back.
Outside of comics, the late 80’s had some of the best music (The Pixies) and some of the best movies (Die Hard).
For movies and TV its the 80’s. I have brothers that were older than me and made sure I could appreciate things like Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Ghostbusters, A-Team etc.
For comics, I really began reading on my own and paying attention in the 90’s. I know that people say it was the era of excess and it almost destroyed comics (over exaggeration) but to a kid in Jr. High Maximum Carnage was super cool! That’s why I will always like characters such as Cable, Deadpool, Wolverine and others (Mojo…anyone remember Mojo?).
Honestly I have to go with the early “modern era” by which I mean the turn of the 21st century. The Vertigo era is how I think of it. Books from that time really began using the modern form of story telling and a modern art style with bigger panels and decrompressed (aka 6 part arcs). Though late 80’s early 90’s Marvel was great too.
The late 1960s – even though this was the heyday of the Kurt Swan Superman and the last gasp of the Bill Finger Batman era, which has provided “Superdickery” the bulk of its fodder, and Disney comics were on the ropes, there was one character who I went out of my way to collect, in fact, this character inspired me to begin actively collecting comics even though I was only in grade school or junior high. That character appeared randomly in Disney’s Goofy comics – he was Super Goof. Goofy ran around in his normal had and long johns and ate a “super goober” to gain powers. It was a parody of other super hero comics and I loved Super Goof, even though at the time I didn’t know what a parody was.
His normal hat, I meant.
The Claremont-era X-men, The satellite-era JLA, and JLI/JLA/JLE period are three of my go-to cross sections. The second Brood ark is one of the all-time favorites.