Hierarchy of Golden Age Comics (2017 Edition) 1 1

[PopKulture]

13 hours ago, sfcityduck said:

Denny O'Neil, Neal Adams, Stephen Englehart, Marshall Rogers, Giordano and many others would view your history of Batman, which basically skips from the Bill Finger days to Miller as grossly inaccurate.  Although I will say that Englehart and Rogers did an excellent giant typewriter story!  But Detective 457 probably is the real blueprint for Miller's version of Batman.

The people you mention did great work, no doubt. But you run the same risk of minimizing the Miller effect as you accuse me of by ignoring everything up to Miller. It wasn't an incremental step or another chapter: it was cataclysmic. The biggest reboot in comics history probably. Sorry, but Batman was languishing before DKR.

Consider this: check Overstreet under "Batman" and its related titles. You may find "Batman Family" and one or two others prior to DKR, and THEN count all the titles and mini-series and one-shots, and Killing Jokes and Shadows of the Bat and Legends of the Dark Knight, and on and on, and then tell me how I'm understating how inexorably Batman's current popularity still owes to The Dark Knight Returns! The avalanche of titles is mind-boggling and relentless, and DK gave birth to that. It is not only the spark, it's the powder keg, too.

p.s. And it's with a partially heavy heart, mind you, that I advocate forcefully this view. I loved the DKR in a vacuum, more as one in DC's never-ending sea of hypotheticals, but I don't like how gritty comics became throughout the 80's and onward, and DK was a big part of that. 

[sfcityduck]

2 hours ago, Wayne-Tec said:

 

Collector's in the 1970s weren't crazy, there was a lot of substance to the FMV of old, arguably, more so than there is today. The combination of the aforementioned is enough to not only make an argument for Marvel #1 over Cap #1, but to make an argument for its place in Tier-1 alongside Action #1 and Tec #27.

Frankly, to my mind, they were far less crazy than collectors today.  Encapsulation had not turned comic books into baseball cards yet, so content meant more to them "back then" than covers.  Which is a pretty rational way to view a collectible that is a book with interior contents, not a two dimensional card or poster, and which really can't stand up to being put on display the way equivalently valued fine art is.  Of course, the type of content that mattered to them was not just first appearances, but also origins of characters, significant story lines, stories of special artistic merit, content important to comic history, etc.  In short, what drove the value of books back then seems, to me, to have been a broader array of factors and a more intellectual and historically driven view of the hobby.  The Gerber book and encapsulation havn't eliminated those considerations for collectors, but it sure has made them less of a factor for many collectors who appear to focus on covers and financial factors.  From my weird perspective of being a collector in the 70s and 80s, parking the hobby, and only really re-discovering it 10 years ago after encapsulation had changed the hobby (sort of like being Buck Rogers in going from one era to another without seeing the evolution), a lot of the modern attitudes are simply inexplicable.

Which of course, doesn't change supply or demand.  It just makes me scratch my head at how demand has changed.  

[PopKulture]

9 minutes ago, sfcityduck said:

Frankly, to my mind, they were far less crazy than collectors today.  Encapsulation had not turned comic books into baseball cards yet, so content meant more to them "back then" than covers.  Which is a pretty rational way to view a collectible that is a book with interior contents, not a two dimensional card or poster, and which really can't stand up to being put on display the way equivalently valued fine art is.  Of course, the type of content that mattered to them was not just first appearances, but also origins of characters, significant story lines, stories of special artistic merit, content important to comic history, etc.  In short, what drove the value of books back then seems, to me, to have been a broader array of factors and a more intellectual and historically driven view of the hobby.  The Gerber book and encapsulation havn't eliminated those considerations for collectors, but it sure has made them less of a factor for many collectors who appear to focus on covers and financial factors.  From my weird perspective of being a collector in the 70s and 80s, parking the hobby, and only really re-discovering it 10 years ago after encapsulation had changed the hobby (sort of like being Buck Rogers in going from one era to another without seeing the evolution), a lot of the modern attitudes are simply inexplicable.

Which of course, doesn't change supply or demand.  It just makes me scratch my head at how demand has changed.  

I think you touch on some of the salient points about how the hobby has evolved. And there is a bit of that Rip-Van-Winkle effect on many of us collectors!  

[sfcityduck]

20 minutes ago, PopKulture said:

The people you mention did great work, no doubt. But you run the same risk of minimizing the Miller effect as you accuse me of by ignoring everything up to Miller. It wasn't an incremental step or another chapter: it was cataclysmic. The biggest reboot in comics history probably. Sorry, but Batman was languishing before DKR.

Consider this: check Overstreet under "Batman" and its related titles. You may find "Batman Family" and one or two others prior to DKR, and THEN count all the titles and mini-series and one-shots, and Killing Jokes and Shadows of the Bat and Legends of the Dark Knight, and on and on, and then tell me how I'm understating how inexorably Batman's current popularity still owes to The Dark Knight Returns! The avalanche of titles is mind-boggling and relentless, and DK gave birth to that. It is not only the spark, it's the powder keg, too.

I love Miller's Batman.  I was a collector in the 70s and 80s and have vivid recollections of that period.  He certainly helped the development of the character, although he didn't invent the gritty Batman.

But, I'd never argue or accept the argument that the proliferation of Batman titles (or X-Men titles) in the 80s is evidence of a popularity increase.  I think it is really evidence of a change in the way publishers marketed comics with the advent of the direct market as they tried to squeeze every dollar out of collectors.  That proliferation of titles drove me out of collecting new comics by the end of the 80s.  It is also worth noting that the proliferation of titles started before DKR.  I fondly remember "The Untold Legend of the Baman" and unfondly remember such junk as Batman and the Outsiders.

Viewed more broadly, I think Batman & Robin anchored four titles in the GA, more in the SA, and the Bronze Age explosion started in 1980.  Dark Knight was the fourth new Batman title of the 80s.  It was part of the new publishing trend, not the cause of it.  It's popularity certainly sped the process along for Batman though.  DC lagged Marvel a bit on this front.

[PopKulture]

2 minutes ago, sfcityduck said:

I think it is really evidence of a change in the way publishers marketed comics with the advent of the direct market as they tried to squeeze every dollar out of collectors.  That proliferation of titles drove me out of collecting new comics by the end of the 80s.  It is also worth noting that the proliferation of titles started before DKR.

THIS part we can REALLY agree on! 

[Aman619]

Millers effect on the languishing Batman titles of the 80s was no more game changing than Oneil and Adams dark Batman was in the 70s. If anything, the preceding 70s Batman books were far worse than those pre 1986 before DKR!.

both of these new directions kick started Batman sales and interest .  It was the eras that were vastly different that caused a proliferation of Batman titles in the mid 80s, not DKR. The Late 80s were a boom time in comics: new distribution, higher prices new formats (graphic novels,) Independent publishers springing up, plus the B/W indie explosion too, etc.  Innovation in the early 70s was staid compared to the 80s:  limited to sword and sorcery, Kung fu  and horror titles ... ushered in by a new generation of Boomer artists and writers taking over. Outside of new genres gaining popularity, superheroes 9and the whole industry) were pretty much on a death spiral leading to the impending Calamity of 1977 --`IMPLOSION . Frantic exploration for anything that would stick as newsstand dealers increasingly ignored comics as money making products worth shelf space.

 

[N e r V]

8 hours ago, woowoo said:

Marvel 1 in the 70s/80s put cap to bed. 10 years ago Cap 1 was a cheap book. I sold my VG unrestored for around 10k. I told Vincent book was so unpopular that I never thought to call him.  Marvel 1 has always been in demand. I would think the movies did Cap a huge bump.

Now this is just my opinion and I know that Marvel Comics #1 isn't the Sub-Mariner's first appearance although it is probably his first "public" appearance in an expanded story but if my sources are correct and Marvel/Disney are getting closer to using the Sub-Mariner in their movie plans (the rights issues having been worked through for a while now) I do believe that could have a nice impact on Marvel Comics #1 and give the series in general more "bump". We are going to have to wait a bit on that though until something actually gets done so for now Marvel Comics #1 just seems to be a book that for whatever reasons is turning up less often for sale at least from my perspective. 

[N e r V]

27 minutes ago, Aman619 said:

Millers effect on the languishing Batman titles of the 80s was no more game changing than Oneil and Adams dark Batman was in the 70s. If anything, the preceding 70s Batman books were far worse than those pre 1986 before DKR!.

both of these new directions kick started Batman sales and interest .  It was the eras that were vastly different that caused a proliferation of Batman titles in the mid 80s, not DKR. The Late 80s were a boom time in comics: new distribution, higher prices new formats (graphic novels,) Independent publishers springing up, plus the B/W indie explosion too, etc.  Innovation in the early 70s was staid compared to the 80s:  limited to sword and sorcery, Kung fu  and horror titles ... ushered in by a new generation of Boomer artists and writers taking over. Outside of new genres gaining popularity, superheroes 9and the whole industry) were pretty much on a death spiral leading to the impending Calamity of 1977 --`IMPLOSION . Frantic exploration for anything that would stick as newsstand dealers increasingly ignored comics as money making products worth shelf space.

 

Hmmm. I think I have to agree and disagree with that statement.

I agree that the O'Neil and Adams series was super important in helping get the series "back" to some of its dark roots at the time and had some really tough hills to climb from previous years of dreck but mostly coming off the heals of the super popular, super camp Batman TV series so in that respect they certainly had a much more difficult battle to wage with public perception of the character at the time. Infantino at least provided some light with the art prior to their arrival. By returning the "darker" aspects to the series they allowed others who followed to continue to build upon that "reset" foundation too.

Where I diverge from your complete opinion is that Miller not only continued the "dark" themes that were first inherent with the series but like Moore did with Watchman he blew up the concept with the Dark Knight series by taking it to an extreme not really seen before. There's a reason why fans heads were spinning over it at and that by the the time the 1989 movie hit (with Burton gushing over the Miller work at the time) we were seeing a completely new non camp Bat-Mania that has continued pretty regular since with comic collectors and non-collectors. I still don't think I've ever seen anything in comics like the year 1989 with all things Batman. Yes the 1980's may have been a different animal than the 1970's comics market but I would say the Miller impact on the character and series was significantly greater than the O'Neil/Adams run regardless of how one may view them for their own merits. 

Miller built the bomb and Burton lit the fuse in my opinion to the modern Bat-Mania.

[lou_fine]

7 hours ago, N e r V said:

Hmmm. I think I have to agree and disagree with that statement.

I agree that the O'Neil and Adams series was super important in helping get the series "back" to some of its dark roots at the time and had some really tough hills to climb from previous years of dreck but mostly coming off the heals of the super popular, super camp Batman TV series so in that respect they certainly had a much more difficult battle to wage with public perception of the character at the time. Infantino at least provided some light with the art prior to their arrival. By returning the "darker" aspects to the series they allowed others who followed to continue to build upon that "reset" foundation too.

Where I diverge from your complete opinion is that Miller not only continued the "dark" themes that were first inherent with the series but like Moore did with Watchman he blew up the concept with the Dark Knight series by taking it to an extreme not really seen before. There's a reason why fans heads were spinning over it at and that by the the time the 1989 movie hit (with Burton gushing over the Miller work at the time) we were seeing a completely new non camp Bat-Mania that has continued pretty regular since with comic collectors and non-collectors. I still don't think I've ever seen anything in comics like the year 1989 with all things Batman. Yes the 1980's may have been a different animal than the 1970's comics market but I would say the Miller impact on the character and series was significantly greater than the O'Neil/Adams run regardless of how one may view them for their own merits. 

Miller built the bomb and Burton lit the fuse in my opinion to the modern Bat-Mania.

Interesting to see how times have changed over the decades and it looks like we are now heading back towards a lighter tone and away from the darkness. 

Yes, the early darker versions of the Batman related movies definitely pulled in the audience and were box office hits compared to the low budget Marvel character related movies of the early 90's which went straight to late night TV if they were lucky to make it even that far.  Fast forward 25 years to the past few years and it looks like the darker versions of the DC movies are no longer in vogue as the box office records are all being set by the lighter and more humor related tone of the Marvel movies.  Especially in terms of the much talked about Deadpool movie which is certainly approaching campiness much more so than darkness.

Sounds as though DC has finally seen the light and the majority of their movies are going to shift away from the darker approach and take the more lighter humor tone of the successful Marvel movies going forward. 

Edited July 15, 2017 by lou_fine

[PopKulture]

21 minutes ago, lou_fine said:

 Fast forward 25 years to the past few years and it looks like the darker versions of the DC movies are no longer in vogue as the box office records are all being set by the lighter and more humor related tone of the Marvel movies. 

As it should be. Comics were meant to be fun, not all serious, dire and dark. The world is cr@ppy, enough: our escapism shouldn't then mirror the gritty elements of that which we seek to escape.

[N e r V]

There never was a problem with comics having a "dark" tone or style to them.

The problem was the comics did the same thing movies and TV regularly do which is excessive repetitiveness of a concept or idea.

Not every story idea needed to  be urban or gritty. 

Being urban and gritty also does not equal realism either.

Comics found themselves in the same boat many horror films do when they feel that a good gory effect is somehow equal to a good -script. 

It's not.

Edited July 15, 2017 by N e r V

[N e r V]

"Interesting to see how times have changed over the decades and it looks like we are now heading back towards a lighter tone and away from the darkness.   "

 

Well hopefully not to light... 

 

[ender]

15 hours ago, N e r V said:

Hmmm. I think I have to agree and disagree with that statement.

I agree that the O'Neil and Adams series was super important in helping get the series "back" to some of its dark roots at the time and had some really tough hills to climb from previous years of dreck but mostly coming off the heals of the super popular, super camp Batman TV series so in that respect they certainly had a much more difficult battle to wage with public perception of the character at the time. Infantino at least provided some light with the art prior to their arrival. By returning the "darker" aspects to the series they allowed others who followed to continue to build upon that "reset" foundation too.

Where I diverge from your complete opinion is that Miller not only continued the "dark" themes that were first inherent with the series but like Moore did with Watchman he blew up the concept with the Dark Knight series by taking it to an extreme not really seen before. There's a reason why fans heads were spinning over it at and that by the the time the 1989 movie hit (with Burton gushing over the Miller work at the time) we were seeing a completely new non camp Bat-Mania that has continued pretty regular since with comic collectors and non-collectors. I still don't think I've ever seen anything in comics like the year 1989 with all things Batman. Yes the 1980's may have been a different animal than the 1970's comics market but I would say the Miller impact on the character and series was significantly greater than the O'Neil/Adams run regardless of how one may view them for their own merits. 

Miller built the bomb and Burton lit the fuse in my opinion to the modern Bat-Mania.

This is just my opinion but I would agree that Miller changed the model a bit more than Adams and O'Neil.  But what I really find interesting is that if I go back and read them today I think the Adams era holds up better than then Miller.  I don't know if that means it's better, or if my age when I first read them is important, the place that I am in my life now, may be just as important.  But I am curious as to others opinion.  If you had a couple of free hours on a Saturday night and were going to read some classic Batman, and those were your only two choices, would it be O'Neil/Adams or Miller?

[Aman619]

well, there are a few ULTRA CLASSIC DKR scenes that are timeless and better than anything ever done with Batman.... "This would be a good way to die."  However, didn't Miller only do a handful of Batman stories, and they include DKR2 and 3?  Whereas in the relatively quiet 70s comics scene, Adams version had a consistent level of excellence for years.  Just a few actually, but these were th regular issues in regular continuity, not an "Imaginary  One-Shot" thing -- in its own title -- that was so prevalent in the 80s.

[lou_fine]

2 hours ago, Aman619 said:

 However, didn't Miller only do a handful of Batman stories, and they include DKR2 and 3?

Miller did only 2 Batman story lines of any significance in the 80's.

One of them was Dark Knight and the other which I actually liked better was Batman - Year One.  The best story line which I thought Miller did, however, was Daredevil - Born Again which I thought was superior to the 2 Batman story lines. 

Of course, that's just my own personal opinion. 

[Aman619]

Wow. I forgot Year One!  That was also filled with amazing moments... and great Mazzucheli artwork.

[N e r V]

As a comic book fan I actually prefer Miller's first run on Daredevil for it's story and art. His later work although I kind of like it I still always preferred Miller's slightly incomplete looking art from Daredevil 1979-81 or so. Probably because I'm a very big fan of the impressionist art period (Renoir, Monet, Degas, etc.). As mentioned his later Born Again storyline from DD remains a high point (for me at least) with that characters journey in comics.

I'll restate too that the O'Neil/ Adams stories are a very important part of Batman history. You can't get from A to Z without everything that comes in between them.

The Dark Knight Returns is by no means a perfect work then or now. But it did have a tremendous impact on the character Batman and any number of people in comics and film on their perspective of the character going forward. There was just something about the whole look and feel of the character that was really raw at the time. A real badass Batman if you will. I haven't read it in years and have no plans to. Like the original Claremont/Byrne X-Men run I have no doubt it would play differently in my now adult mind. Best to leave books like the Dark Knight Returns for how I first remember them. Key scenes from that book remain etched in my brain.

Why screw up a pleasant childhood memory with a 30 years later review of it?

[Aman619]

you might be surprised how well DKR holds up mostly. I watched the (pretty tamely) animated version a while back and enjoyed seeing the same scenes in motion. I think I went all billy. (something like that)

[Wayne-Tec]

On 7/15/2017 at 1:32 AM, sfcityduck said:

Frankly, to my mind, they were far less crazy than collectors today.  Encapsulation had not turned comic books into baseball cards yet, so content meant more to them "back then" than covers.  Which is a pretty rational way to view a collectible that is a book with interior contents, not a two dimensional card or poster, and which really can't stand up to being put on display the way equivalently valued fine art is.  Of course, the type of content that mattered to them was not just first appearances, but also origins of characters, significant story lines, stories of special artistic merit, content important to comic history, etc.  In short, what drove the value of books back then seems, to me, to have been a broader array of factors and a more intellectual and historically driven view of the hobby.  The Gerber book and encapsulation havn't eliminated those considerations for collectors, but it sure has made them less of a factor for many collectors who appear to focus on covers and financial factors.  From my weird perspective of being a collector in the 70s and 80s, parking the hobby, and only really re-discovering it 10 years ago after encapsulation had changed the hobby (sort of like being Buck Rogers in going from one era to another without seeing the evolution), a lot of the modern attitudes are simply inexplicable.

Which of course, doesn't change supply or demand.  It just makes me scratch my head at how demand has changed.  

I think that if one had no exposure to current FMV, but had access to the information needed to educate themselves about the wealth of books the GA has to offer, they wouldn't expect the Top-30 GA books via FMV to be the actual Top-30. It also seems, in some ways, like the pool of collectors that make up the GA market don't know exactly what kind of collectors they want to be.

Take the average, big-time spender who has dropped five-figures on a Detective Comics #35 and ask them to detail what happened in the Batman story. I'd be surprised if more than half would be able to provided a detailed summary. But it's not just cover-driven books either. Ask a six-figured spender to detail what happened in Batman #1 and see how detailed the response is. I suspect it would be something to the effect of:

"There's the first Joker story where Batman and Robin foil his crime. There's a Catwoman story and she's not wearing a mask. I think there's also a story without Robin, which is weird because he's in the other stories."

Everyone has the right to know, or not know, whatever they please. But from an investment perspective, it's shaky ground to see collectors investing top-dollar into stories they rarely, or barely even read.

[sfcityduck]

45 minutes ago, Wayne-Tec said:

 

Take the average, big-time spender who has dropped five-figures on a Detective Comics #35 and ask them to detail what happened in the Batman story. I'd be surprised if more than half would be able to provided a detailed summary. But it's not just cover-driven books either. Ask a six-figured spender to detail what happened in Batman #1 and see how detailed the response is. I suspect it would be something to the effect of:

"There's the first Joker story where Batman and Robin foil his crime. There's a Catwoman story and she's not wearing a mask. I think there's also a story without Robin, which is weird because he's in the other stories."

Everyone has the right to know, or not know, whatever they please. But from an investment perspective, it's shaky ground to see collectors investing top-dollar into stories they rarely, or barely even read.

Do you know any "average, big time spenders" who are as you describe?