User blog:Nausiated/1948 Almost done

Okay, for real this time.. I am just about done with 1948, and pretty well done with the "Golden Age" of Marvel Comics.

There's not a whole lot that is interesting that I can mention for the year 1948, because honestly a lot of the stories are very very boring. It's no wonder why super-hero comics lost popularity by the 50's, because these stories stank.

Notable changes was the shift in the number of female super-heroes that were brought to the table. Namora was introduced and was a regular running character in Sub-Mariner stories, Toro suddenly vanished after and was replaced with Sun Girl with no explanation or reason. This was not addressed until the 90's in if you want to check it out (Honestly, it's a weak explanation, but an explanation none the less). This year also saw Bucky getting shot and replaced by Golden Girl as Captain America's sidekick in. This incident was recently retold in and. That version is totally different than the one from CAC #66, which you can chalk up to Marvel's standpoint that all stories from the 40's were propaganda comics based in "real events". At this point super-heroes were on the downturn, but still Timely choked out some new titles named Namora Vol 1, Sun Girl Vol 1 and Venus Vol 1... Although the latter started off more as a humour/romance book and evolved into all sorts of nutty horror/fantasy stuff. Namora and Sun Girl's titles only lasted 3 issues a piece.

What boomed in the late 40's were crime comics and westerns. With westerns came the original Two-Gun Kid, and Kid Colt, two of Marvel's most well known western heroes. Some other more obscure and somewhat lasting characters came out of this year as well: Tex Morgan, Tex Taylor, Arizona Annie and Blaze Carson to name a few. Only Arizona Annie ever made any sort of come back in later years.

With the fall in super-hero comics, Timely was doing whatever they could to keep the readers. One gimmick was the above mentioned female side-kicks. The other was trying to inject comedy into some stories. These were the type of awful garbage that you found in latter Golden Age and early Silver Age DC Comics... Most of these "wacky" stories involved the Sub-Mariner... such as trying to get him to wear a tux to a banquet, or taking orphans on a field trip to the Statue of Liberty (Yeah, that must of been great: "Hey kids, see that Statue? Earlier in my career when I was pissed off I was going to use it as my staging ground to wipe out the human race! Isn't that swell!" I wonder how many of these orphans were created by Namor's various attacks on New York?) Another was Namor being judge in a baby beauty pageant, helping a guy catch a fish, and so on...

Another thing they attempted to do was integrate super-heroes into the crime books that they were pumping. Usually having the title hero (Captain America for example) tell a story about a criminal who learned that crime doesn't way, or the Human Torch helping a police officer catch a crook, and the officer is the one who nabs him. There was also a lot of odd stories where the characters were merely observers, such as a Torch and Toro story where they witnessed a stage comedian commit suicide after putting on a dramatic play (No making that up it's true, it happened in !) or the Sub-Mariner and Namora helping downtrodden children who were homeless. Really weird to read considering since the 60's Namor has always been played off as an angry guy who barely tolerates surface dwellers on a good day... I guess that mind wipe by Destiny and all the decades wandering with amnesia made him pretty damn cranky. Another funny thing I'd like to point out is that they had not yet established that Namora was Namor's cousin. Which is kind of funny when some writers inferred that the two were a couple. Seriously, check out, Namor refers to Namora as his "Water Cutie". There's another story where they refer to Namora as Namor's girlfriend, but the exact issue escapes me... I put a note about it in the comic summary, so happy hunting!

Anyway, next up is 1949... Then after that I believe I am going to take a little hiatus from the Marvel Wiki to pay similar attention to the DC Comics Golden Age. It drives me positively bug-sh!t how disorganized and incomplete the DC Wiki is. I'm not trashing the people over there or anything, they all work hard, but most of them only focus on what's new and scoff at all the old stuff or can't be bothered. Also when it comes to doing stuff that is considered apocryphal to modern DC chronology they can doubly bothered. That doesn't make much sense to me, an encyclopaedia should be as complete and thorough as possible... So I'm going to show the DC Wiki some love after I'm done 1949. For those who keep track of things over there, I'm going to be working my way from 1939 (Starting with Action Comics #1) and working my way through all the super-hero books until 1949 and creating profiles for interesting obscure character, updating character profiles and doing issue summaries. You know, the same stuff I've done here.

But you got me for another couple of months while I do 1949... So I'll be around for a bit longer.