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jools&jim

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    So What Exactly Are We Talking About When We Talk About the Bronze Age?

    in Bronze Age Comic Books

    Posted

    Comics creators must have been at the cutting edge of pop culture at the time, getting their influences from small indy and international creators, rather than following the US media.

     

    Good point. I'm not sure how many mainstream artists and writers at the time were "true" '60s radicals and hippies (Denny O'Neil was a Navy vet!), but many of them were clearly aspiring bohemians, and young and hip enough to be keenly aware of the counterculture (if not always genuine products of it), which as early as 1966 was already emerging (slowly) into the mainstream (e.g., The Smothers Brothers show; Laugh-In; Hunter S. Thompson's "Hell's Angels" and his late '60s articles for Esquire and other respectable magazines; Roger Corman's low budget biker movies which preceded "Easy Rider" by several years; the debut of Rolling Stone magazine in 1967; John Boorman's extremely dark, and extremely strange "Point Blank" -- a major studio nouveau-noir thriller starring Lee Marvin -- talk about anti-heroes! -- also in '67; etc., etc.).

     

    So yeah...the comics guys were definitely paying attention and absorbing influences from a variety of sources; my point is that a lot of the stuff they would bring to comics had already been happening for several years in other media -- mostly in the underground, with occasional (but influential) instances of it bubbling up through the bong water and into the mainstream...

    So What Exactly Are We Talking About When We Talk About the Bronze Age?

    in Bronze Age Comic Books

    Posted

     

    I think it's also instructive to make the somewhat obvious point that comics were merely a (small) subset of the broader culture, wherein many of these same trends (more mature themes, leftist political content, more open sexuality, social relevance and protest, shifts in management philosophy, the rise of maverick "auteurism", etc.) had already made their way into popular entertainment via movies and music (and, to a lesser extent, television). What was happening at Marvel and DC in 1970 and 1971 would have been unthinkable without the cultural upheaval, on a wider scale, which transpired from 1967 to 1969. As they had done in past eras, comics in the '70s were reacting to, and emulating, existing trends in art and entertainment, not setting them.

     

    The tendency in art, as in culture in general, is always towards greater and greater license. In that sense, the Bronze Age of comics is roughly analogous to Rock-and-Roll post Sgt. Pepper (with its newfound "seriousness" and artistic pretensions) and the birth of "independent" film and New Hollywood in the late '60s. That comics were lagging behind these trends isn't surprising; what's surprising is that they followed them at all, and did it successfully enough for us to still care...

    KUDOS THREAD - positive feedback on buyers/sellers

    in Kudos Forum

    Posted

    Major KUDOS to 50 Cent #II (1st) for hooking me up with copy of Fogel's UG Comix Price Guide when I inquired via a pretty much dormant post, and at the *nice* price even!

     

    And some major KUDOS to mikeyriffhard for the awesome batch of DC war books! I got them for readers but, damn, Mikey's grading is SWEET and I ended up with some really nice looking copies.

     

    Thanks a million, guys!!! (thumbs u

     

    (thumbs u Thanks Jeff!

    General discussion thread - keep the other threads clean

    in Comics Market - Forum Only Selling Area

    Posted

    A quick suggestion: Could we consider making it mandatory for all sellers in the Marketplace to at least list their general location (e.g., USA, Europe, Canada, etc.) with the other member data beneath their avatar (where it says "Loc:")?

     

    I've had some serious problems receiving shipments from outside the USA, so as a general rule I tend to browse and buy from threads from domestic sellers only. Unfortunately, it's sometimes not so easy to tell, esp. when that "Loc:" data is missing.

     

    Best,

     

    Mikey