User blog:Nausiated/The Golden Age of Comics? It wasn't that golden..

A lot of people will like to think of the comics published circa 1939-1960 as the "Golden Age of Comics", it easy to understand why they would make that conclusion. It was the birth and early life of a medium that is a highly popularized part of our popular culture. Comic books are to us today, what Greek mythology was to the ancient Greeks.

I have had the opportunity to look back at some of Marvels and DC's earliest offerings... And other than the obvious cultural impact, I wonder what exactly was so great? I mean comparably to the medium today.

There is certainly a large cultural void between the late 20th and the early 21st century in terms of story telling. There are a lot of dated concepts, the artistry was primitive by comparison -- hey these guys were commercial artists trying to make a buck after the great depression after all, most of them were lucky to have work -- and while I can admit that they were kind of gritty in the very early days, they really don't seem to be that bad.

However, there's that cultural divide thing again. The stories were written for a generation that went through a financial depression, and were entering into a world war the likes of which was unheard of. Slavery may have been abolished, but race relations were hardly that great. The way we treated each other was vastly different.

So going back and reading these old comics, with these vigilantes that were doing what vigilantes do: When they don't think that law is doing enough, they take the law into their own hands. And in situations like that, it's the lynch mob mentality. I've read comics where Superman is threatening to throw criminals to their death, crooks are being gunned down by the Angel, the Human Torch (the android not Johnny Storm) was burning crooks alive. Namor the Sub-Mariner was beating the shit out of everyone who pissed him off, including Atlaneans, Americans, and Nazis.

These were not nice people. They were violent and angry sons of bitches. I think that was reflective to the people writing the stories of the time. Again it's all about perspective. Most of these guys in the Marvel and DC bullpens lived in New York during the depression, prohibition. They likely experienced a lot of poverty, a lot of organized crime, and a lot of authority figures not doing enough to clean up the streets. These were angry guys, who when they couldn't defend themselves came up with fictional characters to beat up the bad guys, and teach a whole new generation of kids that crime doesn't pay, and that the bad guys do pay the piper after a while, even though it doesn't seem that way in the world.

World War II offered a very interesting look into the super-hero dynamic. The bad guys went from being mobsters to Nazis. It's interesting the sort of propaganda that was proliferated during the time. And I'm not talking about the Nazi kind either (although that was way worse), but there was a lot of over the top patriotism in these stories, and I'm not talking about any old issue of Captain America -- I'm talking about all of them. America hadn't entered the war yet, however paranoia was sweeping the country that spies were everywhere. Nobody was above suspicion and what better way to prove that you were a true patriotic American, out there to crush the Axis powers than to eat, breath, and sleep America. The land of the free, yadda yadda yadda...

The last time I felt this sort of surprise sort of revelation was when I read Art Spiegleman's Mause (Which by the way, is possibly the best graphic novel ever written.) Reading it on the outside you could pass it off as a dull survivors tale with not a whole lot of blood and guts or action.. However if you stop and consider what Spiegleman's father went through living in Germany during World War II and surviving Auschwitz. It's mind boggling. Reading passages where characters are excited about getting such simple things as chocolate and bread, sounds impossible to believe.. But it's there.

Golden age comics are kind of like that... Only, instead of sorrow and a glimmer of hope in nightmare, it's the voice of an angry lower class forging the myths of this era of civilization. It is a very very interesting period to read. Not because of the hard hitting story telling -- to be honest, most of the stories are repetitive, and rather dull. But from a sociological standpoint.