Historically Most Important Comics of the Copper Age

[RockMyAmadeus]

[dgarthwaite-migration]

Valiant pre-Unity keys vs. the Marvel silver age keys - by ComicConnoisseur (2010)

 

This was a pretty cool discussion about a favorite period in Valiant publishing history.

 

 

That's a terrible thread. I just now read it all. It's filled with misinformation, miscommunication, and people arguing. I thought about replying, but decided the thread is too old.

 

DG

[joecgcmaniac]

What are the top ten copper keys if we started a portfolio? - by MR.COMICBOOK

 

Whatever happened to MR.COMICBOOK?

He became Mr.9.8

I know trying to keep up is biyotch.

 

Who the hell was mr.comicbook anyway? God the ones that just fade in and out of here,thank God for the regular boardies who don't change names.I would be even more lost than I am now.

 

I believe that MR.COMICBOOK became a ComicConnoiseur

[Bosco685]

Valiant pre-Unity keys vs. the Marvel silver age keys - by ComicConnoisseur (2010)

 

This was a pretty cool discussion about a favorite period in Valiant publishing history.

 

 

That's a terrible thread. I just now read it all. It's filled with misinformation, miscommunication, and people arguing. I thought about replying, but decided the thread is too old.

 

DG

 

I'm not sure I completely agree with you.

 

Sure, it started off with some odd comparisons. But once the discussion got started about the period of time where Valiant really made a mark and why, many good points were made. CKB and Valiantman had a good discussion too on the pre-Unity books to focus on for that period, and what to look for in tracking down the best examples.

 

I'd say even the part about the market for that period when Valiant and Image were easing into taking on the Big Two was good discussion. But Valiantman summarized it best.

 

The loss of most of the creative leadership is probably the key factor in Valiant's outcome.

 

I guess we'll never know what might have been...

 

I would have loved to have seen how far Shooter, Layton and BWS could have taken the company based on the first two years' successes. Maybe it would have slowed down, or maybe it would have kept on going.

 

But for that period of time, Valiant was amazingly creative, attention-grabbing, and a clear example that the B&W implosion had not killed the momentum of the independent market. Image was able to keep the torch burning when Valiant faltered. But so many of us wanted to see Valiant in that top spot due to the strong foundation established which had captured our attention through fantastic characters, great stories, strong creative teams and loads of potential.

[vaillant]

But why would power pack 1 be a key/most important book of the copper age?

 

I’m not saying Power Pack #1 would, because there are a lot better stories than #1, but trying to grasp what people mean by "key", as #1 is indeed the first apperance of Power Pack.

 

Power Pack may have had a cult following compared to other titles, but it is the first team of children (mostly pre-teen) superheroes in the Marvel Universe and the first in comics to operate without adult supervision.

The quality of the stories often puts to shame the average quality of staple titles of the same period, and the reason for which is not as much appreciated as it should is connected to the fact that people still does not have often a good relationship with childhood, or have a partial vision of it.

 

Jon Bogdanove was an illustrator coming from children books and so far he has been one of the very few to portrait children in such a realistic, complex and expressive way, even just his drawings are worth the effort to read (or re-read) some stories.

 

The Drug-related story in 29-32, for example:

 

And although Inferno was mediocre, the PP stories from Inferno are definitely poignant, and pretty disturbing.

 

[vaillant]

So, maybe not "keys" in the sense of highly collected (but they’d deserve it) - surely important.

[seanfingh]

 

I didn't know Ronald Reagan was turned into a child and made a member of Power Pack for issue 30!!!

[wardevil0]

Jon Bogdanove was an illustrator coming from children books and so far he has been one of the very few to portrait children in such a realistic, complex and expressive way, even just his drawings are worth the effort to read (or re-read) some stories.

 

Hmm. While I did generally enjoy Power Pack, especially the way the kids interacted with other fully established heroes like the X-Men, Spider-man, and Thor, I really hated Jon Bogdanove's art. I read it as very caricaturish and it turned me off completely. I bought the Inferno issues because of the crossover but didn't care for them nearly as much as the first twenty issues or so.

[DeliBebek]

Jon Bogdanove was an illustrator coming from children books and so far he has been one of the very few to portrait children in such a realistic, complex and expressive way, even just his drawings are worth the effort to read (or re-read) some stories.

 

Hmm. While I did generally enjoy Power Pack, especially the way the kids interacted with other fully established heroes like the X-Men, Spider-man, and Thor, I really hated Jon Bogdanove's art. I read it as very caricaturish and it turned me off completely. I bought the Inferno issues because of the crossover but didn't care for them nearly as much as the first twenty issues or so.

I liked Bogdanove on Power Pack more than on Superman.

 

One of the things that I found formulaic about Power Pack from the beginning was that the breakdown of boys and girls was exactly like the Pevensie children from the Narnia stories. The best twist on it was that the older boy had a very passive power. It was very intriguing around issue 24-25 when they all switched powers. Unfortunately, it was no longer on the newsstand after that, so I couldn't follow it easily.

[Mayor006]

Power Pack brings up something I often wonder about. Has there ever been a hero that aged at a realistic rate? Could you imagine if Power Pack had continued for years and years and they continued to age along with the readers?

[wardevil0]

Power Pack brings up something I often wonder about. Has there ever been a hero that aged at a realistic rate? Could you imagine if Power Pack had continued for years and years and they continued to age along with the readers?

 

As far as I know, the only comic to try to age appropriately has been the newspaper strip Gasoline Alley.

Gasoline Alley wiki

The most extreme opposite case I think is Illyana Rasputin, who went from six year-old to mid-teen in a matter of moments due to time dilation in Limbo (Magik limited series), then turned back into a six year-old after Inferno (New Mutants 73), and died from the Legacy Virus (Uncanny X-Men 303). She got better, and is now somehow a late-teen again.

[Mayor006]

Only in comics can you die and then get better.

[dgarthwaite-migration]

Valiant pre-Unity keys vs. the Marvel silver age keys - by ComicConnoisseur (2010)

 

This was a pretty cool discussion about a favorite period in Valiant publishing history.

 

 

That's a terrible thread. I just now read it all. It's filled with misinformation, miscommunication, and people arguing. I thought about replying, but decided the thread is too old.

 

DG

 

I'm not sure I completely agree with you.

 

 

I got back into comics about 6 months after Valiant started publishing superheroes. I was mainly just reading my comic collection that had been in storage for 6-7 years. I had bought a few comics with Jim Lee & Rob Liefeld art and thought it was horrible. It looked like chicken scratch to me. I was ready to give up new comics entirely, but in a plea of desperation I asked my friend who was a comic retailer "What is Bob Layton working on?" He replied, "He's working for Jim Shooter's company." I said "Who is that?" He explained, but I wasn't one who had paid attention to the names of editors and all I knew were the artists. I picked up a Magnus #2 which they still had and thought the cover was awesome. The art was great and I gave it a try. Another friend had been rambling about how good Harbinger was. He bought out a dealer at a show who had about 20 copies of Harbinger #1. Next thing I know I was hooked. They were the best comics I'd ever read. As I filled in back issues, I was also collecting Tales to Astonish. I saw a lot of uncanny similarities between silver age Marvel the Valiant issues as they came out. The way the heroes casually interacted and drifted from one title to another was one similarity. Another was the fact that scenes that happened inside the comic were being reproduced on the cover. Each pre-unity book set up a lot of future stories by teasing you with connections between the characters. Over time you learned exactly how the characters related. You knew Harada was a clear match for Solar. You knew Shadowman wasn't. You also learned that Sting was possibly the most powerful character in their universe. A lot of info was conveyed in each issue.

 

Valiant was poised to be the next Marvel. One of our local retailers, Dark Adventure was a huge Valiant supporter had been in contact with the Valiant offices. I didn't normally shop at their store, but I was there one day when the owner was on the phone with someone at Valiant. He hung up the phone and had a very concerned look on his face. He relayed the fact that someone said Jim Shooter was no longer employed with the company. Immediately I was concerned also. Just guessing, I'd say I knew about Shooter being ousted within 48 hours of it happening.

 

The books were still great, but I started watching them cautiously. Slowly some titles lost cohesiveness immediately. Others seemed to be following pre-plotted paths and stayed pretty good. By that time Dark Adventure hosted Dark Adventure Con which was dedicated to Valiant. Bob Layton, Jon Hartz and others flew to Atlanta and gave a presentation on the upcoming material.

 

 

 

 

 

I already owned all the pre-unity stuff at this point and was trying to complete my Valiant pre-hero stuff. I met Bob at the show, and he signed Captain N #1 for me. This was his first artwork done for Valiant. He said "He drew it in the lawyer's office" when he was trying to get hired.

 

At some point he was doing trivia contest with the fans and giving out HARD Corp Golds to anyone that had the answer. Someone asked him a question about Harbinger. He froze. He looked very upset. He turned to Jon Hartz who had an expression like he didn't see a big deal. Bob saw Jon wasn't going to say anything. He got a lump in his throat. He swallowed and said "I don't know. Harbinger was Jim's baby." It was a very awkward moment and I knew that whatever happened was really bad. As I watched their presentation on Rai and they talked about the destruction of the Utopia in the Magnus titles, I saw that everything Jim had built was being abandoned. All the mystery and intrigue wasn't relevant anymore. Solar went from being a God-like entity to a guy in a red suit blasting people. For me who was vested in all the stories, it was turning to garbage. I jumped ship and started trading all my duplicate issues for silver age keys. I did some very entangled and complicated trades, but ultimately ended up with Amazing Fantasy #15, Hulk #1, FF#1, and a stack of EC's. I'm probably leaving something out. I remember getting $90 a piece trade credit on about 4 or 5 Magnus #12's towards the AF #15. They guy who traded the AF#15, sold out of the 30 or so Valiant books he got from me in the last hour of the same comic show.

 

But anyway, after Valiant awry, I did start to see more similarities to EC. Both started with children's books, shifted to well written comics that the market was needing and maintained high quality standards with a tight cohesive group of very talented creators. The need to succeed drove them to higher quality standards.

 

As far as Marvel not selling well in the 60's, that's a joke. Marvel "didn't sell well" because of the stranglehold they had on their distribution. Their competitor was distributing their books for them. Marvel almost died completely in about 1959. Some people consider Strange Worlds #1 to be the beginning of the Marvel we know today. When they switched over in about 1968, they could take the double feature format titles and give every hero their own title. They did that and more. By early 70's I was told lesser DC titles like Wonder Woman were down to the 20,000-30,000 copy range and on the verge of cancellation.

 

I honestly feel like I quit collecting as the copper age was starting. Some people say the copper age included the last comics I was buying between 1981-1983, I'm not really sure there is a defining moment. I'd rather describe comics by the decade.

 

Nobody really talks about the first comic from Avatar. The first comic from Pacific was in 1977, so that's technically Bronze.

 

DG

 

[Bosco685]

Now that is a lot of cool personal experience and shared details such as the event program. I loved it!

 

 

Valiant was poised to be the next Marvel.

 

DG

 

So you were in agreement with ComicConnoisseur's thread. I agree, as many felt like it was being there early on when Marvel's Silver Age period was slowly coming together. I remember reading this on the Valiant Comics wiki page.

 

In 1992, Valiant's Editor-In-Chief Jim Shooter was given the Lifetime Achievement Award for co-creating the Valiant Universe in a ceremony that also honored Stan Lee for co-creating the Marvel Universe.

 

What timing to support this comparison. And Shooter during a 2000 interview said Stan offered an additional compliment to go along with the award.

 

CBR Jim Shooter Interview: Part 2

 

After the thing, I walked up to Stan and I said congratulations, shook his hand. We were exchanging pleasantries and I said, "Y'know, Stan, I know you wrote something like 12 comic books a month for something like 10 years. I just wrote six and it nearly killed me. How did you do it? How did you write so many books for so long?" I love this. He said, "You put a lot more into it than I do." I remember a lot of those early Marvels and there was a lot in them. So revolutionary, so good, so clever. It was a really nice thing to say.

 

That's a terrible thread. I just now read it all. It's filled with misinformation, miscommunication, and people arguing. I thought about replying, but decided the thread is too old.

 

DG

 

So I agree there were heated debates in that thread. You'll see the same in many of these threads. But in general, it touched on much of the points you made. You should have posted this in that thread, as it is very much in line with the discussion.

 

[the blob]

Let's be realistic, would anyone be saying Valiant was on the brink of being the next Marvel if those pre-Unity Valiants had not hit those absurd price levels and, instead, Harbinger #1 was a $12 book at the time, Magnus #1 and $7 book, etc. causing the Unity and post-unity books to have huge numbers because people thought they'd get rich?

 

Seems like a lot of the explosion was people speculating, not new readers beyond the 30-70,000 or so pre-unity readers out there. Yes, it's purely anecdotal, but my local shop owner told me that the Valiant books were never such big sellers off the rack (even during unity and post-unity) and they'd get tons of calls (from the same people, often women) asking about Valiant back issues, but not so many people actually coming in, which made my pal suspicious (particularly after he had manipulated CBW into jacking up the price on some book for a month or two that he had a palette of in a similar fashion -- I guess it takes one to know one). Maybe that was just a NYC thing. I got back into collecting in the middle of Unity when the bloom was coming off the whole shebang, so I don't purport to be a witness to these events.

 

Valiant had a nice 4-5 year run and, to a certain extent, they were victims of their own success. Had so many people not been burned on the glut books, some of the titles might have survived -- afterall, some of the Image titles surivived and new Image titles hit the scene big in the mid/late 90s.

 

Cross-Gen produced some absolutely gorgeous books for a similar period (I haven't read a lot of them, are they well written?), where's the nostalgia for them?

[dgarthwaite-migration]

Now that is a lot of cool personal experience and shared details such as the event program. I loved it!

 

 

Valiant was poised to be the next Marvel.

 

DG

 

So you were in agreement with ComicConnoisseur's thread. I agree, as many felt like it was being there early on when Marvel's Silver Age period was slowly coming together. I remember reading this on the Valiant Comics wiki page.

 

In 1992, Valiant's Editor-In-Chief Jim Shooter was given the Lifetime Achievement Award for co-creating the Valiant Universe in a ceremony that also honored Stan Lee for co-creating the Marvel Universe.

 

What timing to support this comparison. And Shooter during a 2000 interview said Stan offered an additional compliment to go along with the award.

 

CBR Jim Shooter Interview: Part 2

 

After the thing, I walked up to Stan and I said congratulations, shook his hand. We were exchanging pleasantries and I said, "Y'know, Stan, I know you wrote something like 12 comic books a month for something like 10 years. I just wrote six and it nearly killed me. How did you do it? How did you write so many books for so long?" I love this. He said, "You put a lot more into it than I do." I remember a lot of those early Marvels and there was a lot in them. So revolutionary, so good, so clever. It was a really nice thing to say.

 

That's a terrible thread. I just now read it all. It's filled with misinformation, miscommunication, and people arguing. I thought about replying, but decided the thread is too old.

 

DG

 

So I agree there were heated debates in that thread. You'll see the same in many of these threads. But in general, it touched on much of the points you made. You should have posted this in that thread, as it is very much in line with the discussion.

 

 

Prior to Bob Layton taking over, I was the biggest Valiant fan around Atlanta. Retailers saw me and they knew I was the Valiant fan that knew the stuff they wanted to know because back then, the knowledge was worth money. After Bob took over, I think he wanted to establish a name for himself and separate the characters from what Jim was doing with them. It was a big mistake.

 

Years after the company was run into the ground, a group of guys at the local comic shop were talking about how pathetic things had gotten. We came to the realization that we knew of the Visitor character and we knew there was a character called the Harbinger. Out of about 6 or 7 people, no one had even followed the storylines to know the alter ego of either. Even people who owned the comics for the sake of continuity had not cared enough to read them. We started speculating amongst ourselves on the identity of each and nobody was 100% right. I discovered both were Peter Stanchek after digging through the store's back issue bins. We all collectively agreed that was just stupid.

 

Seaborn Adamson (Valiant's archivist) probably met Bob Layton at Dark Adventure Con. He lived closer to that store. He bought his comics at the store near my home where I hang out. When he passed away, the guys at my local comic shop collected any comics that referenced him for his family. He was an all around nice guy. I didn't talk to him much because he kept his enthusiasm through the quality drop. At one point we debated BWS's intent in an early Master Darque story. Page 1 titles the story something to the effect "Falling Through Time". There is a timestamp. The epilogue has Master Darque rising up and there is a time stamp there also. The time stamp in the epilogue is dated one year prior to the date the story starts. The timestamp in the epilogue also coincides with the date Shadowman #1 took place. To me that was extremely relevant, but Bob Hall never used it and Seaborn Adamson said he thought it was a mistake. I would've kept buying some of their comics if BWS had stayed with them. When he left, I knew they were a lost cause. I have a hand written letter from colorist JayJay Jackson explaining exactly how badly Jim and any of his loyal friends were treated when they ousted him. I believe it to be an early version of the story printed in Forbes magazine.

 

DG

[dgarthwaite-migration]

Let's be realistic, would anyone be saying Valiant was on the brink of being the next Marvel if those pre-Unity Valiants had not hit those absurd price levels and, instead, Harbinger #1 was a $12 book at the time, Magnus #1 and $7 book, etc. causing the Unity and post-unity books to have huge numbers because people thought they'd get rich? (snip)

 

I was saying it. Everyone who read them was saying it. I was buying Tales To Astonish issues back then and my jaw was dropping at how Jim was doing many of the same things Marvel had done. Definitely Yes.

 

Dealers who criticized modern comics at the time were reading them and saying "Valiant is different"

 

The 1993 boom for Valiant was the biggest bait and switch campaign in the history of comics. Everyone praised Valiant as being the greatest, but the architect behind their success was already gone. People were buying some horrid comics and thinking they were getting the comics people like me had been praising. They weren't. To this day there is a huge number of people who can't tell you what books Jim was involved with and which were done after he left.

 

Crossgen never appealed to me at all. Wrong genre. I'm not into fantasy based stories.

Crossgen's covers were the first place I noticed that artists were getting lazy and drawing less detail while letting the colorist do all the shading and filling in what they hadn't drawn.

 

DG

 

 

[hoknes]

I was a gigantic Valiant nut and I loved the quality of the early books and I will admit I only tried Valiant once the hype and the price increases happened. The first valiant book i ever bought was Solar #10 and I paid $40.00 in 1993 for it.

[Kevin76]

I was a gigantic Valiant nut and I loved the quality of the early books and I will admit I only tried Valiant once the hype and the price increases happened. The first valiant book i ever bought was Solar #10 and I paid $40.00 in 1993 for it.

 

Was Solar #10 your investment pick of the week?

[Bosco685]

I was a gigantic Valiant nut and I loved the quality of the early books and I will admit I only tried Valiant once the hype and the price increases happened. The first valiant book i ever bought was Solar #10 and I paid $40.00 in 1993 for it.

 

Solar #10

 

Solar #10 @ $40

 

Archer & Armstrong #0 was my intro. I was hooked from there!