The Aluminum Age: Postmodern Themes in American Comics Circa 2001-2018

Georgia State University Georgia State University

ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University

History Theses Department of History

5-8-2020

The Aluminum Age: Postmodern Themes in American Comics The Aluminum Age: Postmodern Themes in American Comics

Circa 2001-2018 Circa 2001-2018

Amy Collerton

Georgia State University

Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/history_theses

Recommended Citation Recommended Citation

Collerton, Amy, "The Aluminum Age: Postmodern Themes in American Comics Circa 2001-2018." Thesis,

Georgia State University, 2020.

doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/17466605

This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of History at ScholarWorks @ Georgia

State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Theses by an authorized administrator of

ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected].

THE ALUMINUM AGE: POSTMODERN THEMES IN AMERICAN COMICS CIRCA 1985-

2018

AMY COLLERTON

Under the Direction of John McMillian, PhD

ABSTRACT

This thesis seeks to update the fan-made system of organization for comic book history.

Because academia ignored comics for much of their history, fans of the medium were forced to

design their own system of historical organization. Over time, this system of ages was adopted

not only by the larger industry, but also by scholars. However, the system has not been modified

to make room for comics published in the 21

century. Through the analysis of a selection

modern comics, including Marvel’s Civil War and DC Comics’ Infinite Crisis, this thesis

suggests a continuation of the age system, the Aluminum Age (2001-the present). Comics

published during the Aluminum Age incorporate Postmodern themes and are unique to the

historical context in which they were published. By analyzing the content of comics and the

historical context in which they were published, this thesis proves the necessity of a new age.

INDEX WORDS: Comic books, American culture, American history, Popular culture, Cultural

studies, Material culture

THE ALUMINUM AGE: POSTMODERN THEMES IN AMERICAN COMICS CIRCA 1985-

2018

AMY COLLERTON

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

in the College of Arts and Sciences

Georgia State University

2020

Amy Katherine Collerton

2020

THE ALUMINUM AGE: POSTMODERN THEMES IN AMERICAN COMICS CIRCA

1985-2018

AMY COLLERTON

Committee Chair: John McMillian

Committee: David Sehat

Electronic Version Approved: April 20, 2020

Office of Graduate Studies

College of Arts and Sciences

Georgia State University

May 2020

DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Susan and Patrick Collerton for their unwavering

faith and support throughout the writing process and to my sister, Ellie Collerton, for never

giving me up or letting me down.

This thesis is also dedicated to my grandparents who were not able to see me complete it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to acknowledge the aid of Dr. John McMillian and Dr. David

Sehat for serving as readers and supporting the writing process of this thesis.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................................... V

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ................................................................................................. VIII

1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1

2 “THEY CAME IN THE THIRTIES, THEIR GOLDEN AGE WAS IN THE

FORTIES.”: THE EARLIEST AGES OF CCOMICS .................................................. 6

2.1 The Birth of a Medium: The Platinum Age (1883-1938) .......... Error! Bookmark not

defined.

2.2 The Birth of a Genre: The Golden Age (1938-1949) ... Error! Bookmark not defined.

2.3 The Decline of a Genre: The Atomic Age (1949-1956) Error! Bookmark not defined.

2.4 The Rebirth of a Genre: The Silver Age (1956-1970) .. Error! Bookmark not defined.

2.5 The Evolution of a Medium: The Bronze Age (1970-1985) ...... Error! Bookmark not

defined.

3 “TIME TO FINALLY NAME THIS ERA OF UNKINDER, UNGENTLER COMIC

BOOK HEROES”: THE DARK AGE (1985-2001) ..................................................... 29

3.1 The Rise of the Independents ..................................................................................... 30

3.2 Dark Age Conventions ............................................................................................... 32

3.2.1 Token Diversity ....................................................................................................... 32

3.2.2 Sales Gimmicks ....................................................................................................... 35

3.3 The End of the Dark Age ........................................................................................... 43

vii

4 “THE SENSE OF ESCAPISM COMIC BOOKS HAVE PROVIDED NO LONGER

EXISTS; THE FANTASY WORLD MUST GIVE WAY TO THE REAL ONE”:

THE ALUMINUM AGE (2001-PRESENT) ................................................................. 48

4.1 Gender Diversity ......................................................................................................... 48

4.2 September 11, 2001 and the De-escalation of Violence ........................................... 51

4.3 Comics as Transmedial Objects ................................................................................ 56

4.4 Prequels, Sequels, and Tie-Ins: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle ......................................... 59

4.4.1 Doomsday Clock ...................................................................................................... 59

4.4.2 Secret Wars .............................................................................................................. 60

4.4.3 Infinite Crisis ........................................................................................................... 62

4.4.4 Dark Nights: Metal ................................................................................................. 63

4.4.5 Other Notable Texts ................................................................................................ 65

5 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................ 68

REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................ 73

viii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CCA – Comics Code Authority

CoIE – Crisis on Infinite Earths

TDKR – The Dark Knight Returns

v. – Volume

1 INTRODUCTION

Widely regarded as one of the fathers of comic book fandom, Richard Allen (Dick)

Lupoff, visited Pittsburgh’s World Science Fiction Convention in 1960, where he and his wife,

Pat, distributed the first issue of a fan publication called Xero. Wanting to fill the pages of Xero

with original material, Dick wrote an eleven-page article about his favorite comic book

superhero from the 1940s, Fawcett Comics’ Captain Marvel. Later at the convention, Dick and

Pat appeared in a costume contest dressed as Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel. “[They] were

extremely popular costumes,” Lupoff recalled.

The popularity of the couple’s costumes, and the

article on Captain Marvel, suggested there was still a robust audience for comics. At the time,

however, comic book fans had limited resources. True, some fan publications dedicated to

science fiction often included comic book pieces and news, but it was not until the spring of

1961 that fans began making a concentrated effort was made to carve out a space exclusively for

themselves.

That was when Dick and Pat Lupoff published one of the first fan publications dedicated

entirely to comic books, Comic Art. In the first issue, Dick wrote a column called “Rebirth”

which included this crucial sentence: “[Comic books] came in the thirties, their golden age was

in the forties [sic.].”

Unknowingly, with that sentence, Dick Lupoff gave birth to the system that

would one day be used to organize the history of comic books in the late twentieth century. The

most important word’s in Dick’s column were “golden age.” Over the second half of the

twentieth century, the 1940s would become known among comic fans as the Golden Age of

comics. Once that naming convention caught on, other ages appeared. In a letter published in

1966’s Justice League of America v.1 #42, a comic book fan named Scott Taylor wrote: “If you

Dick Lupoff, “Rebirth,” Comic Art #1, 1961, 3.

Lupoff, “Rebirth,” 5.

guys keep bringing back the heroes from the Golden Age, people 20 years from now will be

calling this decade the Silver Sixties!”

Sure enough, in the modern age system, the 1960s are

part of what is known as a the Silver Age.

Historically, academics have not devoted great attention to studying the comics, so fans

of the medium have been given more or less free rein to organize and write that history

themselves. These fans developed a system of ages that organized comics in a way that they

could understand, and this system became somewhat standardized. The age system allows

researchers to identify transformational points in the history of the medium. Since successful

comic books normally spawned numerous imitators, those key moments generally gave rise, over

a period of time, to a shift in the overall content of comic books. In some cases that shift was

immediately apparent, while in others, the shift was gradual, and took a number of years to make

itself known.

It was only when comics began to become more mature and serious in order to appeal to

a now older fan base in the late 1970s and early 1980s that a few academics began to examine

them in the same way that fans had since the 1960s. Even today, scholars are more often

interested in how comics relate to another more “important” form of media, such as television

and film, than how comics stand on their own. Scholars outside the realm of Film and Media

Studies link comics with other academic fields, giving rise to books on “philosophy in comics”

or “comics as history.” Studying comics themselves without linking them to another academic

field or form of media allows researchers to look at comics as complex texts and pieces of

culture that inform and are informed by the world around them.

At their height, comics were

Gardner Fox (w), Mike Sekowsky (p), Bernard Sachs (i), “Metamorpho Says—No!” Justice League of America

v.1 #42 (February, 1966), National Periodical Publications Inc. [DC Comics].

Greg M. Smith, “It Ain’t Easy Studying Comics,” Cinema Journal 50, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 110-111.

the most popular form of media in the United States. They were read by nearly every child and a

quarter of U.S. troops in World War II. That popularity has waned significantly in the twenty-

first century, but images from comics are deeply embedded in western culture.

By ignoring

comics, scholars have cast aside a massive amount of cultural material from the late twentieth

century.

Whether they have scholarly credentials or not, most comic book scholarship continues to

be done by fans of the genre. The contributions of those scholars who examined comics when

others in academia refused—and who created an age system that enabled them to more easily

discuss their passions—should not be ignored by modern historians. As the age system was

originally created and defined by fans for the sake of being better able to discuss comics with

other fans, any continuation of the age system must be made with the needs of fans in mind. It is

in this area that additions to the age system suggested by scholars fail.

Defining an age by the

dominant academic trends into which the books fall and attempting to attach significance to the

names of the ages contributes nothing to comic book culture, provides little structure for fans

when discussing comics as a whole, and actively misinterprets the reason for the existence of the

age system.

Keeping with the established trends in naming comic book ages, the new age of comic

books should be given a metallic name that says something superficial about the books it

encompasses. Regardless of the scholarly merit of the age system, it has become the dominant

Greg M. Smith, Thomas Andrae, Scott Bukatman, and Thomas LaMarre, “Surveying the World of Contemporary

Comics Scholarship: A Conversation, ” Cinema Journal 50, no.3 (Spring, 2011): 146.

One could argue that the new age should be named the “Postmodern Age” or the “Metamodern Age,” but

Postmodernism has a notoriously nebulous definition, and average comic book fans are rarely well versed in

academic theories.

The metallic naming conventions of the ages were never designed to inform anyone about the narrative and artistic

trends in comics that fell into those ages. Indeed, if the specific names of the ages have come to signify anything,

then they are representations of the modern cost of comics from that era, with Golden Age comics being more

expensive than Silver Age and Platinum Age comics being even more expensive still.

mode of organization for the history of the comic medium. Even major comic book companies

have begun to use the Age terminology to describe their publications.

The age system provides

the beginnings of a framing device through which works of comic scholarship—both amateur

and professional—can be displayed. Such a framework will never be able to encompass current

comics as hindsight is needed to identify the shifting trends in comics, but it can function as a

useful tool in examining how comics have changed broadly over the past century.

One of the age system’s most important failings, however, is the fact that it has not been

updated since 1985, and so a lot of modern comics have therefore been lazily placed in an age

within which they do not seem to belong. Now it is time – it is past time – to finally remedy this

situation. The purpose of this thesis is to establish a beginning to a new age of comic books

called the Aluminum Age. It began after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and is

characterized by a reduction in the levels of violence displayed, greater attention given to current

events, greater levels of diversity, and increased numbers of comic book adaptations. Many of

the people currently writing and drawing comic books were comic fans while growing up. These

creators took inspiration from the comics they loved to read when they were younger and in

doing so, reused themes and plotlines found in previously published comics.

One might say, in

fact, that these plots have been recycled for a new audience. This recycling is, more than

anything else, the facet of the new age that gave it its name.

DC Comics in particular has used the terms “Golden Age” and “Silver Age” to describe books published at a

certain time, even going as far as to publish omnibus collections of comics with titles like Batman: The Golden Age

Omnibus Volume 1 and The Golden Age Green Lantern Archives Volume 1. IDW Publishing has published a

number of collections of syndicated comic strips with titles paying homage to the age system.

Liz Ohanesian, “DC Comics Writer and Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns Explains the Comic Books That

Inspired Him.” L.A. Weekly, last modified, 24 May 2016, www.laweekly.com/arts/dc-comics-writer-and-chief-

creative-officer-geoff-johns-explains-the-comic-books-that-inspired-him-4184145.

The age system details the evolution of the comic book from an unrecognized form of

publishing in the early 1930s, to a massive, award-winning publishing industry in the 1980s and

1990s. These changes came about in incremental ways. As will be demonstrated, The September

Attacks were particularly important in signifying the end of the Dark Age. Changes to the

types of stories told in comics came about in 2001 that represented a shift away from the ever-

escalating levels of violence that dominated comics from the previous age. New modes of

storytelling became the dominant trend in comics during the Aluminum Age as violence was

abandoned and the literary merit of the Dark Age was restructured to fit the new needs of the

industry. An increasingly diverse cast of characters accompanied the changes to the narrative

traditions of late twentieth century comic books. More mainstream attention to the industry

brought several of its flaws to full view in the 1990s, and the Aluminum Age attempted to

address some of those shortcomings by both altering its narrative and artistic conventions and

adding more diversity to its casts. The Aluminum Age reframes comic book history in such a

way that the social commentary found in comics published since 2001 is separated from that

found in comic books published in the Dark Age. Such a distinction will also differentiate the

narrative and artistic advancements in comics since 2001 from those of the Dark Age.

It was also in the Aluminum Age that comics began to be better utilized as transmedial

objects. The ways in which comic books have adapted to fit other forms of media (films,

television shows, books, etc.) is a unique aspect of the medium. The ease with which comic

books are adapted makes them less “books” in the traditional sense and more transmedial—able

to be represented across many modes of media—cultural forms. Thus, while few people actually

read comics, the characters and storylines are almost ubiquitous in popular culture.

It is this

Shawna Kidman, Comic Books Incorporated: How the Business of Comics Became the Business of Hollywood

(Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019), 2-3.

paradox that the Aluminum Age exploited in the sudden boom of the comic book film into a

multi-billion-dollar industry. Comics have long crossed media boundaries, but it was not until

the early twenty-first century that the business of the comic book film became a multi-billion-

dollar industry. The sudden popularity of the comic book film altered the stories being produced

by the comic book industry. Enough changes were made to the comic book industry in 2001 to

merit the existence of an addition to the age system beginning in that year. In the first chapter of

this thesis, I will describe the earlier ages of comic books. Chapter two describes and analyzes

the Dark Age. The most important analytical work in this thesis, however, occurs in chapter 3.

That is where I propose the creation of a new age—the Aluminum Age— to reflect the changes

in writing, representation, and adaptations from 2001 to 2018.

2 “THEY CAME IN THE THIRTIES, THEIR GOLDEN AGE WAS IN THE

FORTIES.”: THE EARLIEST AGES OF CCOMICS

When Dick Lupoff wrote the “Rebirth” column for inclusion in Comic Art #1 and

included the above quote, there was no way for him to know that he was playing a role in the

creation of the system by which fans and the larger comic book industry would organize the

history of comic books. Of course, he was not the only person to play a role in the difficult

evolution of comics and their study. Though the most important elements in that evolution often

knew each other, the growth of the comic book was not an organized undertaking by any stretch

of the imagination. The history of the comic book has not necessarily been a story of artistic

innovations and narrative breakthroughs, but instead a story of the fight for respect. In their

earliest days, comic books were routinely given away for free as part of an advertising

promotion. Indeed, the publication that comic studies scholars widely recognized as the first

modern comic book was given away for free as part of a series of promotions undertaken by a

number of clients of the Eastern Color Printing Company. Over the course of the twentieth

century, comic books evolved from cheap publications given away for free to a vital tool of the

World War II propaganda machine, to the villain behind juvenile delinquency and, finally, to

both a multimillion-dollar transmedial industry and the underground domain of a nihilistic

counterculture.

None of this evolution would have taken place without fans of the medium. Comic book

fans acting as amateur historians, sociologists, and literary critics have participated in the

narrative of comic book history in ways that are unheard of in other forms of media. These

“outsiders” have been allowed to shape the narrative and organization to suit their needs rather

than to conform to any academic standards. This system, naturally, has its downsides. For

instance, there is an inordinate amount of attention paid to the superhero genre, often to the

determent of both the age system itself and the work put into other genres of comics. This

obsession with the superhero genre has also led amateur scholars to ignore the roots that the

modern comic book industry has in the comic strips and political cartoons of the late nineteenth

century. Some comic and art history scholars have even taken the history of comic books back to

the sixteenth century and the narrative broadsheets that served as one of the main sources of

news for the general public.

These earliest ages were not only inserted in the system long after

the creation and acceptance of the more modern ages, but are also poorly defined and not widely

accepted by fans of the medium. The history of the modern comic book began in 1883, and it is

here that the age system begins in earnest with the Platinum Age.

The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, one of the longest standing fan publications concerning the history and

value of comic books, includes two ages preceding the Platinum Age: The Pioneer Age (1500s-1828), and the

Victorian Age (1828-1883). Though both of these ages are important to understanding the roots of the comic book

as a literary form, the earliest days of the comic’s evolution have little baring on the argument of this thesis.

2.1 The Birth of a Medium: The Platinum Age (1883-1938)

The world has a relatively unknown company called Eastern Color Printing Company to

thank for the creation of the modern comic book. In 1929, Dell Publishing Company printed

their first publication, The Funnies, through Eastern Color Printing. The Funnies was a collection

of previously published comic strips that sold for 10 cents. Though not yet a modern comic book

as fans would recognize today, The Funnies was nonetheless significant in the formation of the

comic book industry, since its success “gave a couple of Eastern Color employees ideas.”

Harry I. Wildenberg and Maxwell Charles Gaines (hereafter called M.C. Gaines), both under the

employ of the Eastern Color Printing Company, imitated the style and format of The Funnies in

1933 to create a promotional comic for the Gulf Oil Company. Gulf Comic Weekly was tabloid

sized, like The Funnies, and was given away for free at gas stations with a fill up.

Likewise, Famous Funnies was a promotional collection of comic strip reprints given out

by a number of Eastern Color’s clients and, according to legend, M.C. Gaines stuck a 10 cent

price tag on a handful of them before giving them to newsstands in order to gauge whether or not

the public was interested in paying for the comic by itself rather than receiving it as a promotion

with another product. M.C. Gaines’s experiment proved successful, with newsstands selling out

over one weekend and vendors asking for more copies. One year later, in 1934, Eastern Color

Printing moved beyond simply printing and packaging comics and became the first major comic

book publisher. Though reprints of newspaper comic strips made up the majority of the books,

original strips and material appeared after the first few issues proved that the book could be

profitable. Having shown that people would be willing to pay for comic books that featured a

mixture of original and reprinted material, M.C. Gaines and Eastern Color Printing laid the

Randy Duncan and Michael J. Smith, The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (New York: Continuum

International Publishing Group Inc., 2009), 28.

groundwork for the modern comic book industry.

It would be a company founded by a former

army major, however, that took full advantage of the emerging industry. In 1934, Major

Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson founded what would later become DC Comics, thereby laying the

groundwork for the most famous creation of the comic book industry: the superhero.

2.2 The Birth of a Genre: The Golden Age (1938-1949)

The beginning of the Golden Age of comics is one of the few things that most comic

book scholars and fans can agree on. Action Comics v.1 #1, featuring the first appearance of

Superman, appeared on newsstands in April of 1938, and thus the Golden Age was born. This

age was notable for a number of reasons. First it created the archetype of the superhero and many

of the conventions that accompanied it. Also, many of the characters created during the Golden

Age remain in publication to this day, and their cultural impact is apparent in the multimillion-

dollar movies still being made that feature their likenesses.

Superman was born out of a need to escape. The 1930s—the decade of his birth—were

notoriously difficult. From the collapse of the global economy to the rise of fascism in Europe,

and more local news like the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the American public was hungry

for any source of escapism. With AM radio still in the chaos of infancy and network television

nothing but a dream, this escapism came in the form of written works. It was into this tradition of

written escapism that Jerry Siegel’s Superman fell. Much has been written on the subject of

Superman and, in particular, his creation. Authors have linked Superman’s origin to heroes of

Greek Myth such as Hercules and Jason and to early science fiction heroes of the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries, including Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and Lester Dent, John

Duncan and Smith, The Power of Comics, 29-30

Paul Levitz, 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking (Koln, Germany: Taschen, 2010), 10.

Nanovic, and H. W. Ralston’s Clark “Doc” Savage. The key aspect of Superman’s character that

made him so different from those that came before him was the fact that he combined the heroic

tradition of the mythic characters with America’s new favorite genre: science fiction.

By taking

their inspiration from science-fiction pulp novels of the 1930s, Siegel and Shuster not only

linked the comic book industry to the science fiction genre, but also set a precedent for drawing

from pulp novels when creating a superhero.

Superman was originally a champion of social justice, fighting for the good of the

common man against corrupt government officials and businessmen. This changed quickly as the

public ceased to need a defender and champion from their own government and began to need

protection from outside threats as America entered World War II.

To the US Government,

comic books represented one of the best forms of propaganda. They were cheap and easy to

produce, and they were directed at children, meaning they could be used to more easily convince

them to support the war effort.

Some superheroes were created in direct response to the war, including Captain America.

The first issue of Captain America Comics featured the titular hero punching Adolf Hitler in the

face. At the time of its publication, the U.S. had not yet entered the war, and other popular

comics were taking something of a cautious approach to the conflict in Europe. Captain America

Comics was different from other publications because, as researcher J. Richard Stevens writes,

Martin Goodman, the founder of Marvel Comics, “resolved as early as 1938 to use his company

as an engine of anti-Nazi propaganda.” In this way, he ensured that “those who were not

Larry Tye, Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero (New York: Random House

Publishing Group, 2012), 8-11.

Jeffrey K. Johnson, “This Isn’t Your Grandfather’s Comic Book Universe: The Return of the Golden Age

Superman,” in The Ages of Superman: Essays on the Man of Steel in Changing Times, ed. Joseph J. Darowski

(Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Publishers Inc., 2012), 199-201.

educated in world affairs […] could comprehend and become involved in the struggle against the

rising Nazi influence in Europe.”

Nazis appeared as villains for heroes like The Human Torch

and the Sub-Mariner as early as Marvel Mystery Comics #4 from 1940.

Unlike other patriotic superheroes, Captain America was a “unique symbol of the values

underpinning the republic,” meaning he suggested the ideal of a man transformed into a

superhero through the “injection of American ideals (the super-soldier serum),” and represented

the best that America could be.

The Captain America of the Golden Age was extremely

different from the Captain America of the modern day. Of the 269 stories that featured Captain

America in the Golden Age, the villains of the story are killed as a direct result of Captain

America’s actions no less than 119 times. These villains were almost always Axis soldiers or

Axis sympathizers, but Captain America was also extremely harsh with American citizens with

whom he disagreed. For instance, in Captain America Comics #15 Captain America and his kid

sidekick, Bucky, came across a member of the German American Bund claiming that it was

impossible to resist the Axis. Disagreeing strongly with the man’s point of view, Captain

America punches him in the face. Perhaps more sinisterly, later in that same issue, Captain

America and Bucky find a group of sailors saying they don’t believe it is possible to defeat the

Nazis. Again, Captain America steps in and violently objects. This sort of aggressive patriotism

was unique to the Captain America of the Golden Age and is provided as an example of the type

of propaganda that could be found in wartime comics and the expectations of wartime comic

book readers.

To Captain America and those who read his comics, there was nothing more

J. Richard Stevens, Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence: The Evolution of a National Icon (Syracuse,

New York: Syracuse University Press, 2015), 26.

Stevens, Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence, 26.

Christopher J. Hayton and David L. Albright, “Oh Captain! My Captain!,” in Captain America and the Struggle of

the Superhero: Critical Essays, ed. Robert G. Weiner (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.

Publishers, 2009), 15.

Stevens, Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence, 43-45.

important than defeating the Axis Powers, and seeing a hero meant to be representative of

American values torturing and killing German and Japanese soldiers fit in that view without

conflict.

Superman’s stance on World War II was more complicated. In the comics, he was forced

to take a more conservative stance than characters that were created specifically to fight in the

war. While American men and superheroes alike were leaping into uniform and onto the

frontlines, Superman stayed behind as his creators and editors worried about the impact that

sending Superman into the war could have. When it came to lesser heroes like Captain America

or Blackhawk, it was merely expected that they would take out an enemy fighter plane or aid

American troops in battle. Superman, however, was expected to end the war, and his editors and

creators feared that, should he enter the fray, readers would demand major results similar to what

they saw in the pages of the comic. Conversely, if Superman were to fight in the war and fail to

end it, then the supremacy of Superman’s powers would come into question. If the Axis Powers

would be shown to be more powerful than Superman (and thus more powerful than American

forces), morale might sink on the home front and the front lines.

No reason was given in the comic books for why Superman did not fight on the front

lines, but the daily Superman newspaper strip revealed that Clark failed his physical due to

accidently reading the eye chart in the room next to his thanks to his X-ray vision.

Instead of

serving overseas, Superman could be found fighting Axis spies and saboteurs in his home city of

Metropolis. Though the covers of Superman’s comics from the war years showed the Man of

Steel dismantling Nazi tanks or protecting soldiers against Japanese aircraft fire, the contents of

the comics themselves rarely dealt directly with the war. Ultimately there were only two stories

Tye, Superman, 58-59.

Jerry Siegel (w), Wayne Boring (a), Superman, February 16-19, 1942, McClure Syndicate.

in which Superman intervened in real combat situations. The first, from Superman v.1 #22,

involved Superman fighting a race of creatures called “Squiffles,” who made a deal with Hitler

to sabotage American aircraft. The second story came from Superman v.1 #24 in which

Superman fought a Nazi military expedition in the Arctic.

More than anything, Superman gave

the war effort exactly what he gave civilians on the home front: a way to escape the horrors of

what was happening around them. Superman comics represented a familiar slice of home to the

soldiers fighting on both the European and Pacific fronts, and that reminder would prove to be

more valuable than any aid Superman could have provided by dismantling tanks and fighting on

the front lines. The decision to keep Superman out of the war ultimately paid off as the war came

to a close. Without a real-life war going on, comics like Boy Commandos and Captain America

Comics declined in popularity, and many faded from view completely. Finding a role for the

characters mired in a war that most Americans wanted to put behind them proved to be a difficult

task, and Superman was able to maintain his popularity by remaining on the sidelines.

Superman was not the only hero in DC Comics’ roster to take something of a back seat to

the war. Batman, for instance, took a very neutral stance on the war. The problem with explicitly

including Batman in World War II was almost the opposite of the problem DC faced with

Superman. While Superman was so powerful that he could end the war in a single afternoon,

Batman was a single man, so it was quickly decided by DC’s editors that Batman and Robin

would be most useful on the Home Front.

Roy Thomas, “In for the Duration,” in Superman: The War Years 1938-1945, ed. Michelle Faulkner and Frank

Oppel (New York: Chartwell Books, 2015), 197-198.

Tye, Superman, 60-64.

Roy Thomas, “The Home Front War,” in Batman: The War Years 1939-1945, ed. Michelle Faulkner and Frank

Oppel (New York: Chartwell Books, 2015), 100.

When Axis agents began appearing in Batman comics, a vast majority of them were

German agents rather than Japanese due in no small part to the government’s “Germany first”

policy. Though the general public may have wanted to get revenge on the Japanese for the attack

on Pearl Harbor, the governments of both America and Britain agreed that Germany’s Nazi war

machine represented the bigger threat. Despite fighting a two-front war, it was therefore decided

that the American Navy would hold the Japanese forces at bay in the Pacific while the rest of

America’s military worked to defeat the Nazis. Comics published in the immediate aftermath of

the attack on Pearl Harbor contained a number of anti-Japanese sentiments, but enemies were

quickly changed to Nazi agents a few months later.

Possibly the most war-related stories to be

published in a Batman comic at this time came in Batman v.1 #14 and #15. “Swastika over the

White House!” from Batman v.1 #14 told the story of Batman and Robin defeating Nazi spy who

got a job as a newsreel cameraman in order to steal top secret weapons information and, in the

process, discovering a map leading to the dismantling of a number of Nazi spy cells around the

country.

“The Two Futures,” from Batman v.1 #15 explored two possible futures for America

after the end of the war. In one, Batman and Robin are executed by a Nazi death squad, while in

the second the US military was able to defeat the Axis Powers, and the might of American

industry was put toward “building a better world.”

The Golden Age was a time when the comic books and the superhero genre, both, came

into their own. Following a rocky start in the realm of humor and animal stories, comic books

found the most success with pulp-novel inspired superhero stories, and that success was only

Thomas, “The Home Front War,” 101.

Don Cameron (w), and Jerry Robinson (p,i), “Swastika Over the White House,” Batman v.1 #14 (January, 1943),

Detective Comics Inc. [DC Comics]: [35-48].

Jack Schiff (w), Bob Kane (p), and Jerry Robinson (i), “The Two Futures,” Batman v.1 #15 (March, 1943),

Detective Comics Inc. [DC Comics]: [33-46].

heightened by the role they played as Allied propaganda in World War II. Most conventions of

both the comic book medium and the superhero genre were established during the Golden Age,

including the creation of the superhero archetype, and a number of characters, such as Batman,

Superman, and Captain America that have remained in publication since their creation in the

1930s or 1940s. Though the superhero genre as a whole declined after the end of World War II,

the jumpstart that the genre gave to the infantile comic book industry allowed that industry to

develop other genres of story-telling that would appeal to the public in the years following World

War II.

2.3 The Decline of a Genre: The Atomic Age (1949-1956)

At the beginning of 1945, it was increasingly evident that there would be an Allied

victory in World War II, and the popularity of superhero comics began to drop. By 1946, sales of

superhero comics fell by a third. By 1949, the genre was all but dead.

Because the age system

focused so heavily on superheroes, there is a gap in the chronology between the end of the

Golden Age and the beginning of the Silver Age, stretching from approximately 1949 to 1956.

Fans and scholars are increasingly calling this time the “Atomic Age” in an effort to

acknowledge the supremacy of other genres of comics in these years.

Though western,

romance, and science fiction comics were all immensely popular during this time, it was the

crime and horror comics that reigned supreme. Many of these comics dealt with aspects of the

Cold War, particularly the rise of atomic power.

Stevens, Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence, 57.

The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide seems to be the driving force behind the effort to include the Atomic Age

in the larger system, but the term has been picked up by other official channels, including IDW Publishing. The

inclusion of the Atomic Age is a point of contention among comic book fans.

As the Cold War dawned, comic book companies hoped that superheroes would be able

to become just as popular as they had been in World War II, but it was not to be.

Patriotic

heroes, such as Captain America, Shield, and Captain Battle, struggled to survive past the end of

World War II. As characters designed to empower the American public through a global conflict,

superheroes had done their job, and the public had no real use for them going into the Cold War.

The invention of the atomic bomb in particular heralded the end of the supremacy of superheroes

as the weapon’s very existence served to reinforce ethnocentric ideals already held by much of

the American public. To the public, the existence of the atomic bomb confirmed that God was on

the side of the West. With that belief, the American public no longer needed superheroes to

reassure them of their dominance in turbulent times, and superheroes began to look rather

impotent when compared to the real-life power of atomic weapons.

Simply put, in the 1950s there was less that people in America needed saving from. The

Korean War conformed to the rules of the Cold War, meaning that the superhero formula of the

1940s was unable to capitalize on the conflict in the same way as it had World War II.

Between

1953 and 1955, the company that would later become Marvel Comics attempted to revive the

superhero genre by enlisting its best-selling heroes from World War II—Captain America, The

Sub-Mariner, and the Human Torch—in the fight against Communism. Captain America Comics

continued from where they had left off (issue #76), with the titular character being reintroduced

as “Captain America … Commie Smasher!” a staunch McCarthyite. In reprising his role as the

protector of the American home front, Captain America stressed that Communists were evil, but

he failed to address the nuances of the Cold War beyond simple dogmatism. This version of

Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore,

Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 121.

Stevens, Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence, 57-58.

Stevens, Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence, 68-69.

Captain America only lasted for three issues before Atlas’s attempt at reviving the genre failed,

and the series was once again canceled, this time at issue #78. The Communist forces featured in

the Commie Smasher comics (as fans refer to them) were different from the Nazis faced by

Captain America in the Golden Age. While the Nazis were obviously and loudly anti-American,

the Communists engaged in nefarious double-talk.

Marvel later disavowed the 1950s version of

Captain America, with writer Steve Englehart labelling him a false Captain America who

appeared while the real Captain America was frozen between his final appearance in the Golden

Age and his first appearance in the Silver Age. Marvel’s disowning of the Commie Smasher

comics “reflected the changing political climate of post-McCarthy America, in which

McCarthyite Americanism was deemed to be false patriotism.”

As the popularity of more realistic crime comics demonstrated, the postwar comic book

market had grown up and, as historian Bradford W. Wright writes, “comic book makers

overestimated the size of the audience prepared to accept such naïve presentations of the Cold

War.”

Crucially, the Commie Smasher Captain America stories and other anti-Communist

superheroes did not engage at all with Cold War political ideology beyond the basic

“Communists are evil” propaganda. Nineteen-fifties superheroes were well aware of the

consequences awaiting the West should the Communists be allowed to expand across the world.

As such, anti-communists superheroes were allowed to utilize extreme violence in their efforts to

combat the Soviet threat. “Merely neutralizing Soviet agents—or, for that matter, Soviet

armies—served no good purpose, given the stakes in the game; so homicide, and not infrequently

Stevens, Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence, 61-62.

Jason Dittmer, “Captain America’s Empire: Reflections on Identity, Popular Culture, and Post-9/11 Geopolitics,”

Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, no.3 (Sep. 2005): 632.

Wright, Comic Book Nation, 123.

genocide, became reasonable and acceptable undertakings for comic-book operatives.”

This

overly simplistic view of the Cold War held little appeal to the general public, and these types of

stories suffered as a result. Comics that approached the issues of the Cold War with more realism

than fantasy found a robust market in the 1950s.

Perhaps one of the more unexpected results of the Cold War in comics was the creation

and fast rise in popularity of the romance comic book genre. A great deal of emphasis was placed

on the traditional nuclear family structure in the 1950s as it represented “the affluence,

consumption, and spiritual fulfillment that the American way of life promised.”

Thus,

preservation of more traditional family and gender roles became interwoven with concerns about

national security and created a domestic form of the containment policy. These strict gender and

family roles naturally had the most impact on women, as girls were expected to marry young and

assume their roles as doting mothers, supportive wives, and dedicated homemakers. One of the

most obvious proponents of these gender roles were the romance comics. First introduced by Joe

Simon and Jack Kirby, the original creators of Captain America, the comic Young Romance

appeared in 1947 and was an immediate success. After selling out its initial print run, Young

Romance gave rise to hundreds of competing titles, until there were nearly 100 romance titles on

the market. Simon and Kirby initially created Young Romance to appeal to the long neglected

female readers and, like crime comics that took inspiration from newspaper headlines, romance

comics got story ideas from confessional magazines.

The Cold War encouraged the development of war comics alongside romance comics.

Both genres purported to be educational and patriotic, and there was a significant degree of

Stevens, Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence, 68.

Wright, Comic Book Nation, 127.

Wright, Comic Book Nation, 127-133.

overlap between them. Romance comics often included stories of Army nurses falling in love

with soldiers in the Korean War, or tales of sweethearts remaining true to their boyfriends who

got drafted. Despite appealing to large numbers of readers, parents tended to disapprove of war

comics. The Cincinnati Committee on the Evaluation of Comic Books found war comics to be

objectionable due to the violence found within the stories, which was the same objection they

had to crime comics. However, war comics were also found to be problematic on the grounds

that they often portrayed the Korean War as being a hopeless situation, and such depictions could

dissuade young men from enlisting. Apparently exposing readers to fictionalized violence was

dangerous but exposing those same readers to real life violence was fine. Thus, superhero comics

that solved the problem of Communism too easily were unpopular with readers, but comics that

addressed the Cold War in more serious ways were panned by critics and parents despite being

extremely popular with readers. Anticommunism appeared, at first, to be a noble cause that

comic book makers and superheroes could easily endorse but, as the audience demanded that

their anxieties about the Cold War be indulged rather than ignored, comic book creators were

forced to reveal the contradictions inherent in the Cold War. Though the messages of the Korean

War comics were still anticommunist, comic book creators had a hard time presenting an

encouraging image of the conflict. Thus, while the comic books of the late 1940s and early 1950s

endorsed the policy of containment, they also, unintentionally, “gave children an early lesson in

the exasperation of waging the Cold War.”

2.4 The Rebirth of a Genre: The Silver Age (1956-1970)

Following the drastic reduction in sales of superhero comics, the genre as a whole was,

for the most part, left to gather dust in favor of other genres. It was only in 1956 that the

Wright, Comic Book Nation, 133-134.

superhero genre came back in any meaningful way thanks, in part, to the Comics Code

Authority, making 1956 the “official” start of the Silver Age. In 1953, the United States Senate

established a subcommittee to investigate the causes of juvenile delinquency. In a series of

public hearings in June, 1954, comic book publishers testified before the Senate about both the

content of their books and the potentially harmful effects those books may have had on the

children.

Those hearings featured testimony from a number of experts in both the comic book

industry and the world of psychology, but only two individuals merit special attention. The first,

Dr. Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist from New York, wrote a number of anti-comics pieces for

various magazines before writing Seduction of the Innocent, in which he made a number of

claims about the effects comics were having on children. Among other things, Wertham claimed

that crime comics were the root cause of juvenile delinquency and that Batman and Wonder

Woman in particular could cause children and teens to stress about the possibility that they might

be gay.

Seduction of the Innocent was part of a larger post-World War II concern about the

changing trends in comic book publishing. As noted above, the superhero genre became less

popular following World War II, and other genres that publishers hoped would appeal to more

mature readers gained dominance. Though the more violent crime and war comics were meant to

be read by more mature readers, there was no system in place to stop children from reading

them.

Wertham might have been the expert witness in the Senate testimony, but it was William

Gaines’s testimony that received the most media attention. In his testimony, Gaines attempted to

“Comic Book Hearings Set,” New York Times, May 27, 1954, 15.

Today, Wertham is remembered for his role in the creation of the Comics Code Authority, but his career included

many other notable moments, such as testifying in the trial of the cannibalistic serial killer, Albert Fish, in 1935 and

attempted, unsuccessfully, to secure psychiatric treatment for Ethel Rosenberg before her execution in 1953.

Carol L. Tilly, “Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications that Helped Condemn Comics,”

Information & Culture 47, no. 4 (2012): 384.

demonstrate that the questionable content of the horror and crime comics published by EC was in

good taste.

Ultimately, the Senate committee did not come to any conclusions about the role of

comic books in juvenile delinquency and did not propose any legislation to censor comics, but

the hearings prompted the comic book industry to “adopt a strict self-regulatory code to which

most of the publishers would adhere.”

Thus, the hearings convinced the industry to do what

years of criticism and more local threats failed to do. The Kefauver hearings always intended to

force the comic book industry to start regulating its own content as crime and horror comics

almost immediately disappeared from the shelves following the implementation of the Code.

There was a shift in the tone and content of comics following the introduction of the

Comics Code Authority, but this shift had less to do with restrictions imposed by the Code, and

more to do with the dominant trends in fiction at the time. As the space race began, the Space

Age in fiction came into being. Stories about aliens, robots, and monsters from outer space

overtook stories of crime and violence. This shift in the zeitgeist meant that superhero comics

had to change to more science fiction types of stories if they wanted to remain relevant. For some

heroes like Superman, Green Lantern, and the Flash, this was easy as their powers and

backstories lent themselves easily to the science fiction genre. For heroes like Batman, however,

the shift to science fiction was extremely noticeable, since the crime and violence that was so

prevalent in his Golden Age stories gave way to more and more plots involving “aliens, robots,

monsters, and more than a few alien robot monsters [….] Batman rocketed into outer space

without a second thought and continued to hop back and forth in time like he was changing

subway trains.”

Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 61-63.

Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 83.

Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 84.

Weldon, The Caped Crusade, 57.

DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz used this shift toward science fiction to bring a

number of Golden Age superheroes out of retirement. Though their names remained the same,

heroes like The Flash, Green Lantern, and the Atom that were reintroduced in the late 1950s

often bore little to no resemblance to the heroes of the same name from the Golden Age.

For

instance, the Golden Age Green Lantern was an engineer named Alan Scott, who survived a train

crash thanks to a magical lantern and ring before becoming a superhero.

The Silver Age Green

Lantern, however, was a test pilot named Hal Jordan, who received his ring and lantern from a

dying alien and was inducted into a universe-spanning peace-keeping force.

Marvel entered the 1960s with only a handful of comic titles. Before 1958, Marvel had

essentially one employee, Stanley Lieber (better known as Stan Lee), who helped create a

number of Marvel’s most enduring characters, including The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man.

Created as a last-ditch effort to save the failing anthology book, Amazing Fantasy, Spider-Man

was a notable success for Marvel. The teenage Peter Parker provided an instant point of relation

for readers as he experienced rejection, inadequacy and loneliness. Like others in Marvel’s new

roster of heroes, Spider-Man shunned long held conventions of the superhero genre by not

making a noble pledge to fight for the good of humanity.

Another of Marvel’s superhero

offerings from the 1960s that would go on to be extremely popular were the X-Men, a group of

teenage mutants who worked to save a world that hated them from other mutants that would use

their powers to harm humanity. The ambiguity that Marvel introduced into the superhero genre

was a product of the anxieties of Cold War culture. These heroes were not adored by the general

Weldon, The Caped Crusade, 58.

Bill Finger (w), Martin Nodell (p, i), “The Origin of Green Lantern,” All-American Comics v.1 #16 (July, 1940),

All-American Comics, Inc. [DC Comics]: [2-9].

John Broome (w), Gil Kane (p), Joe Giella (i), “S.O.S Green Lantern!” Showcase v.1 #22 (October, 1959),

National Comics Publications [DC Comics]: [2-7].

Wright, Comic Book Nation, 201-204.

Wright, Comic Book Nation, 210-212.

public and, in the case of the X-Men and Spider-Man, were often openly hated and persecuted by

authorities. “The rejection of consensus and conformity found expression in superheroes who

were misunderstood by the public and persecuted by authorities,” while anxieties about the role

that radiation would play in society were exemplified by characters like The Thing and The

Hulk.

As with the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner from the 1940s, Marvels’ new heroes

faced realistic problems in addition to the supervillain plots they foiled. For instance, the Silver

Age Human Torch quit the Fantastic Four because he was tired of the older members of the team

bossing him around, and the Invisible Girl often let thoughts of romance cloud her judgement.

The new generation of superheroes were not only inspired by science fiction, but also brought a

level of complexity to the genre that had been absent in World War II. That complexity would

only increase in later ages as comic book companies attempted to make their publications seem

more sophisticated and literary in order to appeal to older, more mature audiences. Complex

characters made for complex storylines, and the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s gave creators

plenty of material from which to draw inspiration. This turn to the complex would be the

defining feature of later ages and marked the transition from the Silver Age to the Bronze Age.

2.5 The Evolution of a Medium: The Bronze Age (1970-1985)

Though technically an invention of the late Silver Age, the impact of underground comics

(or comix) movement can most clearly be felt starting in the Bronze Age. Published outside of

the normal distribution channels of the comic book industry, underground comix were not

subject to the same legal requirements as the big corporations. Most notably, these publications

Wright, Comic Book Nation, 215-217.

Wright, Comic Book Nation, 204-205.

were not subject to the Comics Code Authority. As such, these publications were free to depict

things that were forbidden by the Comics Code without worrying about losing distribution

outlets or readers. “These comics were perceptive reflections of the anti-war, anti-establishment

fervor of the times,” and “arose at a critical time when the convergence of political repression,

the protest movement, psychedelic drugs, and innovations in printing technology created the

right mix for an impromptu and improvised art movement.”

The creators of these comics were

heavily influenced by major events of the 1960s and used those events to inspire the publications

they created. It was Zap Comix #1 that brought the movement together in 1968, and 1968 is thus

widely regarded as the beginning of the movement as a whole, despite the fact that illegal or

dubiously legal publications were not a new phenomenon. By 1973, there were over 300 new

comic titles in print, and the insistence on complete artistic freedom not only revitalized the

larger comic book industry, but also allowed comics to reclaim the adult audience by addressing

provocative topics.

One group who took full advantage of the freedom afforded by the Underground Comix

movement was queer artists and writers. Overt depictions of homosexuality were forbidden by

the Comics Code until 1989, but underground comix gave queer writers and artists an outlet for

artistic and political expression. This freedom of political expression allowed queer creators to

comment on issues unique to them, such as the AIDS crisis, with a viewpoint and compassion

that writers in the larger comic book industry could never hope to accomplish.

These comics

were written by queer people for a queer audience and thus addressed aspects of the queer

Rosenkranz, Rebel Visions, 15.

Justin Hall, introduction to No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics (Seattle, Washington:

Fantagraphics Books, 2013).

experience that were completely foreign to straight or cisgendered creators.

The media ghetto

in which Queer comics found themselves has only recently begun to be dismantled, as more

Queer characters were introduced to mainstream comics in the Dark Age and the Aluminum Age

but, for a long time, the backbone of the queer comics movement was Gay Comix (called “Gay

Comics” after issue #6), created by Howards Cruse explicitly for the Queer community.

The underground comix movement did not last particularly long and, by 1973, a number

of outside forces worked together to strip the underground comix movement of much of its

power. Supreme Court rulings about local standards on pornography and nationwide reductions

in the number of head shops worked to reduce the circulation of magazines, and “peace with

honor” in Vietnam put an end to the anti-war movement that had fueled so many underground

comix artists.

As readership of underground comix dropped in the mid-1970s, publishers began

to be more cautious in regards to the content they printed.

“The underground comix movement

was about both action and reaction – advocating revolution in the streets and sexual freedom, but

also springing from a post war suburban angst and a fatalism steeped in atomic bomb drills.”

The legacy of the movement was far more important than the content of the books produced by

artists within it, as the complete creative control that underground comix artists exercised over

their creations later inspired the pioneers in the push for Independent Comics.

The political messages of underground comix made their way into mainstream comic

books in the 1970s as superheroes became more realistic, and superheroes began to confront

problems that were present in the real world as well as the fictional one. The most famous book

Hall, introduction to No Straight Lines.

Rosenkranz, Rebel Visions, 185.

Rosenkranz, Rebel Visions, 205.

Rosenkranz, Rebel Visions, 221.

to address real-life issues of the time was Green Lantern/Green Arrow. This series addressed

everything from urban poverty, to due process in the judicial system, to the drug epidemic. The

realism portrayed in the storylines from the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series inspired and

influenced artists and writers in the Dark Age as the comic book continued to become more and

more realistic in its scope.

The Bronze Age saw the first real challenges to the Comics Code Authority as more and

more real-life events began appearing in comic books. As the Comic Code often limited how

explicit a comic could be in its handling of issues from the real world, some comics were

published without Code approval. Such comics included Amazing Spider-Man #96-98 from

1971. An anti-drug story written (apparently) by Stan Lee himself, these issues were published

without Code approval because any depiction of drug use, good or bad, was forbidden by the

Code.

Other comics followed suit and began including stories about the dangers of illegal

drugs, including a now famous two issue arc in Green Lantern/Green Arrow, in which it was

revealed that Green Arrow’s teenage sidekick, Speedy, had developed a heroin addiction.

Shunning the approval of the Comics Code would become commonplace during the Dark Age,

and two of the books that would help to shape the era were published entirely without such

approval.

Other major events like the Vietnam War and Watergate made their way into the plots of

the socially conscious Marvel Comics. In the Silver Age, one of the biggest appeals of Marvel

Comics was the more realistic nature of the characters, and this continued in the Bronze Age.

Voger, The Dark Age, 12.

Dennis O’Neil (w), Neal Adams (p, i), and Dick Giordano (i), “Snowbirds Don’t Fly,” Green Lantern v.2 #85-86

(August/September-October/November, 1971), National Periodical Publications Inc. [DC Comics].

Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 139.

Paul Young, Frank Miller’s Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University

Press, 2016), 21-22.

For instance, in 1974, at the height of the Watergate investigations, Marvel published a storyline

in which Captain America fought a subversive organization called the Secret Empire. At the end

of the storyline, in Captain America v.1 #175, the leader of the Secret Empire was revealed to be

a high-ranking official in the US Government who, after being exposed as part of the Secret

Empire, committed suicide in front of Captain America.

Though the government official was never named, the fact that he killed himself in the

Oval Office implied that the official was none other than Richard Nixon, a fact that was later

confirmed by the writer, Steve Englehart.

Disillusioned by the corruption at the highest levels

of government and “faced with an America where private ambitions were being filtered through

third parties and packaged as public interest, [Captain America] was forced to question whether

even his own symbolic authority was complicit with political corruption.”

No longer able to

support a country whose morals were so far removed from his own, Steve Rogers gave up the

title of “Captain America” in favor of the title “Nomad, the Man Without a Country.” By issue

#183, Captain America was forced to return to his original superhero identity and lamented that

“the people who had custody of the American Dream had abused both it and us,” and there was,

in his opinion, no way he could have continued to act as Captain America because the people

who were supposed to be in charge of America’s government were no better than the Nazis he

fought in World War II.

Steve Englehart (w), Sal Buscema (p), and Vince Colletta (i), “Before the Dawn!,” Captain America v.1 #175

(July, 1974), Marvel Comics.

David Walton, “’Captain America Must Die: The Many Afterlives of Steve Rogers,” in Captain America and the

Struggle of the Superhero: Critical Essays, ed. Robert G. Weiner (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland &

Company, Inc. Publishers, 2009), 164.

Walton, “Captain America,” 164.

Steve Englehart (w), Frank Robbins (p), and Frank Giacoia (i), “Nomad: No More,” Captain America v.1 #183

(March, 1975), Marvel Comics.

Over the course of a handful of panels, Captain America realized that it was not the ideals

of America that had failed him; it was he who had failed the ideals of America. After coming to

the conclusion that the ideals he stood for were bigger than any government official, he put the

Captain America costume back on and vowed to continue fighting for “the dream [the country]

was built on, not the deadwood thrown on top!”

The entire Secret Empire/Nomad saga acted as

a mirror to the feelings of many Americans in the wake of Watergate, as it became apparent that

elected officials did not always represent the best interests and attitudes of the general populace.

This political commentary served to give Captain America realistic problems as readers could

see their own problems reflected in the character who, up to that point had not had any reason to

question the motives of the people in charge of America’s government. The Aluminum Age

would see more of this questioning by Captain America as he found himself at odds with a

number of the post-9/11 policies of the US Government.

It was thanks to the realism first introduced in the underground comix movement that the

comic book industry was able to build any sort of literary reputation. As publications by

underground comix artists began entering the mainstream market—and their economic success

encouraged mainstream comic artists to include more realistic plotlines and issues in their

publications—the literary world was forced to confront the literary merit of comic books. Works

that came to define the Dark Age by writers like Alan Moore and Frank Miller built off this

realism to add complexity and literary merit to superheroes. Over the course of the late twentieth

century, comic books changed from cheap publications that were given away for free, to a

respected piece of popular culture with some of the publications gaining the respect of literary

Steve Englehart (w), Herb Trimple (p), Frank Giacoia and Mike Esposito (i), “Cap’s Back!” Captain America v.1

#184 (April, 1975), Marvel Comics.

critics. This development continued through the 1980s and 1990s as changes to the medium and

the industry enabled more artistic freedom and greater sales numbers than ever before.

3 “TIME TO FINALLY NAME THIS ERA OF UNKINDER, UNGENTLER COMIC

BOOK HEROES”: THE DARK AGE (1985-2001)

In 1996, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns turned ten years old, and author Mark Voger

wrote an article in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1252 to commemorate the event. In this article, Voger

finally gave a name to what was, at the time, the newest age of comics: the Dark Age.

It was a

time unlike any other in the history of comic books, when sales numbers reached new heights

even if the literary merits of the books did not. The realistic aspects of Bronze Age comics

evolved into revisionism thanks to works like Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (TDKR). These works applied real world psychologies to

superheroes, and violence and psychosis were often the results. Between 1984 and 1986, four

comic series were published that would lay the groundwork for the Dark Age as a whole. DC

Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths (CoIE), Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Watchmen

along with Marvel Comics’ Secret Wars were all best sellers and dramatically changed the way

that comics were written and marketed by introducing the concept of the “event book” and

creating compelling, standalone stories that readers could pick up at their leisure with no prior

knowledge of the characters. By the early 1990s, revisionism was the dominant mode of

storytelling in the superhero genre, and revisionist comics often experimented with new artistic

formats and narrative techniques. However, as researchers Kevin Thurman and Julian Darius

Voger, The Dark Age, 6.

pointed out, these comics also “often preserved the violence without revisionism’s

intelligence.”

3.1 The Rise of the Independents

Founded by some of the biggest names at Marvel Comics in 1992, Image Comics

represented a new direction for the comic book industry: the creator-owned series. The comic

book industry has been the subject of a number of disputes concerning creator rights, and most of

those disputes centered around whether the creator of a character owns the rights to that

character and are thus entitled to a portion of the profits made off that character.

Image Comics

was founded by Rob Liefeld, Jim Valentino, Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Erik Larsen, Marc

Silvestri, and Whilce Portacio as an alternative to the two biggest names in the comics industry,

DC Comics and Marvel Comics. The seven founders of Image revitalized Marvel Comics when

they joined the company in 1987. Under the new editor-in-chief, Tom DeFalco, Image’s

founders were responsible for creating characters and penning stories that would have long

lasting impacts on both the comic book industry and the in-fiction Marvel universe.

Many of these stories were also among the highest selling books of the Dark Age. In

1990 McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 sold almost three million copies. One year later, Liefeld’s X-

Force #1 sold nearly five million copies, and later that year both of those books were outpaced

by Jim Lee’s X-Men v.2 #1, which sold close to eight million. Image’s other founders had similar

results with their projects and, at least for a while, there seemed to be harmony between the

Kevin Thurman and Julian Darius, Voyage in Noise: Warren Ellis and the Demise of Western Civilization

(Edwardsville, Illinois: Sequart Research & Literacy Organization, 2013), 36, Kindle.

Alan Moore famously stopped writing for DC Comics in 1988 due to disputes over the creative rights to

Watchmen, and Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel sued DC Comics for adequate compensation in the 1970s. More

recently, the estate of Jack Kirby has sued Marvel Comics for a portion of the profits from movies featuring

characters that Kirby had a hand in creating.

George Khoury, Image Comics: The Road to Independence (Raleigh, North Carolina: TwoMorrows Publishing,

2007), 10.

creators and the editors. That harmony would not last, however, as merchandise featuring the

work of these superstar creators was soon flying off the shelves, and the creators did not receive

a penny in royalties. In addition to conflicts over merchandising and international licensing,

Image’s creators soon found themselves clashing with Marvel’s editors over the stories of their

books. These artists and writers already received generous royalties for their work, and they were

household names among comic fans, but the restrictions of working for a public corporation and

the interference of their superiors frustrated Marvel’s superstar creators.

Free from the restraints of the larger comic book industry, Image’s creators were free to

explore more controversial topics much like their predecessors in the Underground Comix

movement. Though the Comics Code was stripped of many of its restrictions following the 1989

revision, creators working for Marvel and DC Comics still had to conform to editorial mandates

and outside pressures that independent publishers could avoid. In theory, this would lead to some

of the most thought provoking and groundbreaking narratives in the graphic narrative genre but,

in reality, many of Image’s early books were overly violent and suffered from inexperienced

creators; again, much like the Underground Comix of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Image’s

books sold quickly and in vast numbers as the creators behind those books exploited market

trends to their fullest extent.

The impact Image had on the comic industry as a whole was immense even if the road

was rocky at times. The books that Image’s creators published had production values that vastly

outstripped the competition, and fans could tell the creators believed in the books as much as

they did.

Despite its immense popularity, even Image Comics was not immune to the larger

economic forces of the comic book industry. By the mid-1990s, both Liefeld and Lee had

Khoury, Image Comics: The Road to Independence, 11.

Khoury, Image Comics: The Road to Independence, 13-14.

returned to work at Marvel, having been given complete creative and editorial control over the

books they produced, something that was unthinkable in the years before Image. The days of

selling hundreds of thousands of copies of a book were long gone by 1998, however, and Image

was forced to turn to independent and alternative creators that did not necessarily want to write

superhero books.

Image Comics both proved a number of long held superstitions about the

comic book industry and effectively demonstrated that individual creators had fans like the

characters they created. Some fans were just as likely to buy a book because of who wrote it as

they were because of what character was in it. More than anything, however, the rise in

independent publishing proved to both publishers and creators that comic books that did not

feature superheroes could be successful. Some of Image’s most well-known and acclaimed series

in the early twenty-first century, in fact, fell outside the bounds of the superhero genre.

3.2 Dark Age Conventions

3.2.1 Token Diversity

Just as the Bronze Age began to introduce more diversity to the cast of characters

regularly featured in comic books with characters like Luke Cage and Black Panther, the Dark

Age took that to the extreme with the introduction of still more minority characters and the .

These characters undoubtedly improved the surface level diversity of the stories in which they

featured, but rarely was any attention paid to the worldviews and situations that minority

characters could bring to the stories. This lack of attention to the experiences and world views of

minorities made the inclusion of such characters seem hollow and self-serving, as though the two

biggest names in the comic book industry were simply trying to see who could boast of having

the most diverse cast without putting any real effort into developing said cast.

Khoury, Image Comics: The Road to Independence, 15.

Queer characters were slower to be introduced than other minorities because of the

Comics Code Authority. In the original text of the 1954 version of the Code, points two and

seven of the “Marriage and Sex” section in Part C of the Code’s General Standards

forbade the

inclusion of queer characters.

It was not until the Code was revised in 1989 that queer

characters were allowed to appear openly in Code-approved comics. Women’s Studies professor,

Kara Kvaran claimed “the gay liberation movement of the 1970s bypassed superhero comics”

because of these restrictions.

Even after the Code’s restrictions were removed, it took almost

four years for DC and Marvel to start including queer characters in their mainstream

publications.

Under the assumption that queer characters did not appeal to their key demographic and

fearful of offending anti-gay activist groups, Marvel and DC were hesitant to include queer

characters in their main publications, and those characters that did appear usually had their

stories told in their adult-only publishing imprints, such as Vertigo and Marvel Max.

Comic

creators were not attempting to foster any sort of anti-gay sentiment in their books by excluding

queer characters. Rather, according to writer John Ostrander, “comics [were] ignoring gays, but I

don’t think anybody [tried] to show them in a bad light. Now whether or not comics show any

sensitivity to gays is a whole other issue.”

This attitude would begin to change in the

Point two read “Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual

abnormalities are unacceptable,” while point seven said “sex perversion or any inference to the same is strictly

prohibited.”

“The Comics Code of 1954,” Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, accessed October 16, 2019, cbldf.org/the-comics-

code-of-1954/.

Kara Kvaran, “SuperGay: Depictions of Homosexuality in Mainstream Superhero Comics,” in Comics as History

Comics as Literature: Roles of the Comic Book in Scholarship, Society, and Entertainment, ed. Annessa Ann Babic

(Lanham, Maryland: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), chap. 9, Kindle.

Kvaran, “SuperGay,” chap. 9.

Andy Mangels, “Out of the Closet and into the Comics: Gays in Comics: The Creations and the Creators Part 1,”

Amazing Heroes #143, June 15, 1988, 39.

Aluminum Age as more queer characters were introduced and given more significant roles in

mainstream publications.

The first attempt to include explicitly queer characters in a mainstream publication from

either Marvel or DC came in the pages of The Hulk Magazine #23 when a pair of men attempted

to rape Bruce Banner in the showers of a YMCA. Written by Jim Shooter, this story was called

“sick and twisted in its sexuality” by writer Marv Wolfman, and it sparked a number of letters to

Shooter, most of which expressed a negative attitude toward the story.

Independent

publications, such as Sabre from Eclipse Comics, had better responses to both their inclusion of

gay characters and the quality of the representation provided by those characters, and Sabre in

particular featured the first instances of same-sex physical affection in a mainstream comic in

1983.

It would take another nine years for gay characters to make their way into the world of

the superheroes. It was not until 1992 that the first openly gay superhero appeared in comics.

Northstar revealed he was gay in Alpha Flight v.1 #106 after becoming attached to a child born

with AIDS.

Between 1979 and 1992, writers John Bryne and Bill Mantlo made several indirect,

easily ignored references to Northstar being gay. The most obvious reference to Northstar’s

sexuality before he officially came out as gay came in the form of a “mysterious illness” that he

first started displaying symptoms of in Alpha Flight v.1 #44. Mantlo believed that enough hints

were dropped that the readers would be able to determine for themselves that the disease that

afflicted Northstar was AIDS, but he was careful to never call the disease “AIDS.” When

Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief, Jim Shooter, heard about the plot, he forbade Mantlo from both killing

Mangels, “Out of the Closet Part 1,” 40.

Mangels, “Out of the Closet Part 1,” 40-41.

Scott Lobdell (w), Mark Pacella (p), and Dan Panosian (i), “The Walking Wounded,” Alpha Flight v.1 #106

(March, 1992), DC Comics.

Northstar with AIDS, and from portraying Northstar as an explicitly gay character due to the

potential for controversy among more conservative readers. As a result, any hint of

homosexuality or AIDS was scrubbed from the story.

Marvel would not allow Northstar to live

as an openly gay man, but they also would not allow him to die from a disease that was only

circumstantially linked to the queer community.

3.2.2 Sales Gimmicks

At the height of the Great Depression, comic book publishers began offering their wares

as supplements in bigger, more useful mediums such as almanacs, and such comics often acted

as advertisements for causes, politicians, or products. Eventually, these promotional comics

came to be used as a tool for education as well as advertising a particular product or service. The

1970s and 1980s saw a boom in the use of comic book characters being used as advertising tools.

“Every product imaginable seemed to have a licensing deal with a comic book character, usually

one of the prominent flag bearers of the Big Two, Marvel or DC.”

For instance, Captain

America worked with the Campbell Kids, while Superman used Radio Shack computers to help

a class of computer students defeat a villain. Other promotional comics were used for

educational purposes as superheroes warned children about the dangers of smoking, drugs,

and

even the AIDS Crisis.

The Dark Age brought promotional and special edition comics back to the forefront of

the collector market via the use of polybags. Comic books that came in a polybag essentially

Mangels, “Out of the Closet Part 1,” 43-44.

Arnold T. Blumberg, “Promotional Comics: The Marketing of a Medium,” in The Overstreet Comic Book Price

Guide, 48

ed., ed. Robert Overstreet (Hunt Valley, Maryland: Gemstone Publishing, 2018), 308.

Captain America addressed the War on Drugs in a series of free promotional comics aptly called “Captain

America Goes to War against Drugs,” from 1991, and DC’s Teen Titans were featured in three promotional comics

published in cooperation with the President’s Drug Awareness Campaign in 1983.

DC Comics ran a series of ads in 1993 that featured popular heroes educating children about the realities of the

AIDS Crisis and combatting the misinformation that readers may have encountered.

ensured that collectors would buy two copies of the same book, one to open and read and one to

keep in pristine condition, and such books usually came with a trading card or poster as a bonus.

Easily the most famous polybagged book was Superman v.2 #75. It was in this issue that

Superman “died” in his final battle against the monster Doomsday, and the issue came packaged

with a number of extras for collectors: a black armband for those who wanted to mourn the death

of the Man of Steel, a poster, a trading card, an obituary, and stickers. Though most polybagged

comics came only with a poster or trading card, some were extremely extravagant and justified a

higher cover price. For instance, the polybagged edition of Batman: Shadow of the Bat #1

included a “three-dimensional Arkham Asylum popup, an Arkham blueprint, two posters, and a

special edition bookmark,” meaning that the polybagged edition was bound to have a higher

cover price than the “vanilla” edition.

Alongside polybags, comics from the Dark Age often featured a series of increasingly

elaborate cover enhancements and extras that could be used to artificially inflate the price and

rarity of a given comic. These cover enhancements generally took the form of metallic foil or

holographic pictures or words on the cover, though the Superman family of comics after

Superman’s death in 1992 (Superman v.2 #78, Superman: Man of Steel v.1 #22, The Adventures

of Superman v.1 #501, and Action Comics v.1 #687), featured cover enhancements in the form of

a die-cut hole in the covers in the shape of Superman’s iconic shield.

The comic book market

of the Dark Age used polybags and cover enhancements to cater almost exclusively to

speculators and completionist collectors.

From the very beginning, death was a part of the Dark Age. From Barry Allen’s death in

COIE and the six-page destruction of an entire city at the end of Watchmen, to the death of

Voger, The Dark Age, 130.

Superman in the early 1990s, it soon became apparent that no character—no matter how beloved

or profitable—was safe from death in the Dark Age. One of the most famous deaths in the Dark

Age of comic books was that of Jason Todd. In 1983 Jason Todd became Robin, Batman’s

sidekick; in 1988, Jason Todd was killed by The Joker after readers voted by phone on whether

the 15-year-old should survive or succumb to the Joker’s attack. This came as part of a

concentrated effort by DC Comics to make Batman a darker, more serious figure that was

sparked by the success of TDKR.

Over the following years, attempts to deconstruct the character of Batman in the same

way that Frank Miller had in TDKR simply led to writers increasing body counts until even

Batman’s own allies were no longer safe from harm. Most fans of Batman seemed to think that

these dark storylines legitimized their hero in some way. By making the stories darker (often

both metaphorically, through the content, and literally, as the artwork darkened to fit the tone of

the story), fans believed that Batman comics were going to be taken seriously. “Sure, Batman

may have been created for children, but Frank Miller […] had brought him into the real world, a

place of bloody violence and stark sexuality, and now, finally, everybody would see him for the

badass the fans had always known him to be.”

Jason Todd’s death haunted Batman through the

next few years, and the event was used to explain why Batman was suddenly becoming such a

dark and serious book. In fact, though Dennis O’Neil oversaw the killing of Jason Todd, Miller

was at least partially to blame as he introduced the idea of Jason dying in TDKR as part of the

reason his version of Batman was so dark and tortured. Fans leapt at the chance to see part of

Weldon, The Caped Crusade, 146.

Miller’s work become canon in the main comics, and Jason’s fate was sealed before he had the

chance to fight back.

Even Batman himself was not safe from the trend of murdering or crippling characters as,

in Batman v.1 #497, the villain Bane broke Batman’s back in a now iconic image. With his back

broken, Bruce Wayne was unable to continue in his role as Batman, so he gave the costume to a

Jean-Paul Valley who, until taking up the role of Batman, was the anti-hero Azrael. Dennis

O’Neil was pleased with the boost to sales that Valley’s appearance gave Batman, but he feared

that this version of Batman would become more popular that Bruce Wayne’s version. “Azrael

was always meant to serve as an object lesson, a sarcastic comment on the predominant mood,

not to become the Sensational Character Find of 1993 [sic].”

“KnightSaga,” as fans christened

the event, spanned over one hundred issues of eight different comic series before its end. Despite

being a larger event in terms of the number of series and issues involved, KnightSaga failed to

garner anything close to the media attention generated by the death of either Superman or Jason

Todd. It seemed that crippling Batman was simply not dramatic enough to attract outside

attention or even to hold the attention of those within the insular comic book culture. Even the

death of the most famous superhero of all time would prove to be insufficient to maintain the

interest of finicky fans.

According to Superman’s writers at the time, killing the Man of Steel was an idea that

they pitched annually as a joke. In 1992, however, the writing team found themselves at a loss of

what to do with Superman. DC editorial forbade them from marrying Superman and Lois Lane

despite the fact they were engaged because of the profit potential in having Superman get

Weldon, The Caped Crusade, 150.

Weldon, The Caped Crusade, 193.

Weldon, The Caped Crusade, 194.

married in the comics at the same time he got married in the television show The New

Adventures of Lois and Clark. Without any major event in Superman’s life to write about, the

writers decided to go ahead with their joke idea to kill Superman.

In a world that embraced

antiheros and cynical worldviews in their comics, Superman did not hold the same popularity

with comic book readers that he had in 1938. Readers took him for granted and shunned his

unfailing wish to do good in favor of gritter, more “realistic” heroes, so DC took him away to

allow readers the chance to remember why the world fell in love with Superman in the first

place.

100

The rumors that Superman was going to die sparked a media frenzy. Nearly every

national newspaper and news station picked up the story, and Superman v.2 #75, where the

titular character drew his final breath, had the largest single day sale of any comic, with the

initial print run of over three million copies selling out the same day they premiered, and six

million more copies being printed later in the month. Superman’s death was exactly what the

four series that starred Superman needed to pull their sales out of the slump in which they found

themselves in 1992.

101

The Death of Superman is often seen as one of the best marketing stunts in history, but

was there some deeper meaning to the storyline? The story was published at the height of the

speculator boom, and it featured multiple editions of the issues involved and included cover

enhancements that enticed collectors. Passing the story off as being all flash and no substance

would be easy.

102

However, Joseph Darowski argued in the essay “Searching for Meaning in

Tye, Superman, 243-244.

100

Tye, Superman, 246.

101

Tye, Superman, 244-248.

102

Joseph J. Darowski, “Searching for Meaning in ‘The Death of Superman,’” in Ages of Superman: Essays on the

Man of Steel in Changing Times, ed. Joseph J. Darowski (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc.,

Publishers, 2012), 167-168.

‘The Death of Superman’” that the events of the storyline and the characters introduced therein

were a representation and a reaction to the anxieties facing Americans in a Post-Cold War world.

According to Darowski, “‘The Death of Superman,’ and the subsequent rise of four replacement

Supermen came along at a historical period when America was having its own identity crisis.”

103

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States found itself with no major external threat to

define itself against, and America’s place on the world stage changed dramatically. At the same

time, America was facing the dawn of the Information Age, with technology rapidly changing

the way in which people worked, commuted, and communicated. Darowski argued that the four

Supermen could be divided into pairs, with one pair representing America’s place on the world

stage, and one pair representing the dawning Information Age. One member of each pair

represented the hopes and the other represented anxieties that Americans held about the aspect of

the early 1990s that the pair represented.

104

Superboy and the Eradicator represented America’s undefined position in the world.

Superboy stood for an age of transition and uncertainty. He was a brand-new teenage character

with unimaginable levels of power but none of the experience needed to use that power wisely.

The Eradicator also had none of the experience held by the original Superman but had all of his

power. In always acting for the greater good, the Eradicator often used unreasonable methods to

achieve his goals. As the only nation to have used the atomic bomb in a war, the United States

held a lot of power and, with the Soviet Union no longer acting as a balancing force, some feared

that America could use its power in dangerous ways. Steel and the Cyborg Superman therefore

represent the Information Age, with Steel representing the hope that technology could be used to

aid humanity, and Cyborg Superman representing the fears that technology would become

103

Darowski, “Searching for Meaning in ‘The Death of Superman,’” 171.

104

Darowski, “Searching for Meaning in ‘The Death of Superman,’” 171-172

dehumanizing and all-consuming. “The Reign of the Supermen” ended on a hopeful note with

the return of the real Superman and the immigrant, small-town values his original creators

instilled in him. The two Supermen that represented America’s fears, Eradicator and Cyborg

Superman, are destroyed, while Steel survives because of his human drive and spirit, and

Superboy is allowed to mature and grow into a hero in his own right.

105

Thus, “The Death of

Superman” can be read as acknowledging the challenges facing Americans in the early 1990s

and reassuring Americans that those fears can be overcome through the use of the same tools that

propelled the United States earlier in the century.

Prices of comic books from the Golden and Silver Ages skyrocketed in the 1980s and

1990s as one-time comic fans became nostalgic for the books they had enjoyed in their youth.

When The Flash was reintroduced to comics in 1956 a question arose concerning the numbering

of the new Flash’s first issue. The Golden Age Flash had ended after 104 issues. Would this new

Flash series start numbering at #1 or #105? A DC Comics editor at the time decided that the

series would start at issue #105 because if a customer were to look at two comics, they were

more likely to buy the one that had been publishing for 104 issues, not the one that was just

getting started. If one were to reverse that logic, then one could begin to understand the logic

behind the actions of many comic book collectors and publishers in the Dark Age. As Mark

Voger explains, the prevalent theory in the Dark Age “went something like this: ‘Since Action

Comics #1 (1938) is worth tens of thousands of dollars, then I should buy lots of copies of Pitt #1

and wait until the year 2048, at which time I’ll become a millionaire!’”

106

The fault in this logic lay in a misunderstanding of why Action Comics #1 and other

books from the Golden and Silver Ages were so valuable. Their value came not from the fact

105

Darowski, “Searching for Meaning in ‘The Death of Superman,’” 172-175.

106

Voger, The Dark Age, 145.

they were #1 issues or the first appearances of two of the most famous comic book characters in

the world, or even because they were old; rather, it was because such books were not built to last,

and many had been destroyed or thrown away over the intervening fifty years. Those few that

survived were rare commodities to collectors. The very act of buying multiple copies and

preserving them in mint condition would drive down the price of the books investors and

speculators were so desperate to sell. Publishing companies weren’t afraid to take advantage of

this trend, however. Start-up companies like Image Comics reaped the benefits the most as their

first issues were—of course—#1s. Accordingly, more established companies had to either

develop new titles, or start publishing a myriad of mini-series to create more #1 issues for the

collectors to obsess over.

Speculators and collectors were undoubtedly part of the equation that resulted in the

collapse of the comic book market in the mid 1990s, but the impact of the larger comic book

market could not be ignored. Publishers and suppliers interpreted the increase in sales of

superhero comics as an increase in demand and subsequently increased their supply to meet that

demand. The success of Image Comics also led to an increase in smaller companies such as

Malibu and Defiant publishing superhero books. The number of superhero comics being

published skyrocketed in 1993 even as the speculators came to realize “that the rules of scarcity

that legitimately raise the price of collector’s items were not going to apply to comics with

enormous print runs.”

107

Such comics lacked the resale market that most speculators were

anticipating. April of 1993 was the last month of significant growth for the speculator boom.

108

Fueled, at least in part, by the release of Adventures of Superman #500, this boom soon became a

107

“Industry Sales Records in 1993 Shadowed by Collapse of Speculator Boom,” The Comics Journal #166,

February, 1994, 28.

108

“Industry Sales Records,” 32.

bust and, by 1994, the writing was on the wall for the market that had built up around the

collectors. Sales numbers that had swelled with events like the Death of Superman and

KnightFall tumbled in their aftermath, and the only way that Batman made it into the Top 100

comic books was to team up with another franchise such as The Predator or Spawn.

109

3.3 The End of the Dark Age

Had the comic book market crashed later in the 1990s, it would have been a fitting end to

the Dark Age. Despite the chaos caused by the burst of the speculator bubble, very little changed

in the comic books themselves. Sales suffered, and publishers made changes to their distribution

methods, but the narrative trends in the books remained the same. The changes brought to the

comic book industry by Image Comics were so profound that the Overstreet Comic Book Price

Guide considers 1992 to be the start of what they call the Copper Age, meaning that, to the

Overstreet Guide, the Dark Age only lasted seven years. However, given the rise in the number

of creator disputes with editors, the ways that Image exploited the market trends of the 1980s and

1990s, and the continuing rise of superstar creators that first started with Alan Moore and Frank

Miller in 1985 and 1986, the founding Image Comics and the books it published represented a

logical progression of the trends already underway in the Dark Age rather than the beginning of a

new age.

110

While the beginning of the Dark Age was readily apparent, its end came gradually as the

dominant mode of storytelling began to change. In response to the dominance of purposeless,

gratuitous violence in comics, some creators sought to rebel against revisionism by returning to

the joy and wonder that was once prevalent in comics. “This counter-reformation coalesced […]

109

Weldon, The Caped Crusade, 194.

110

Robert M. Overstreet, ed., The Overstreet Comics Book Price Guide 48

ed. (Hunt Valley, Maryland: Gemstone

Publishing, 2018), 212.

into a movement of its own” through the publication of works like Marvels and Astro City, both

by Kurt Busiek.

111

This movement, called reconstructionism, abandoned the realistic quality of

revisionism while preserving its literary intelligence.

112

Naturally, there were those who resisted

the turn towards reconstructionism, including the writer Warren Ellis. Ellis spent much of the

1990s ignoring the existence of reconstructionism in favor of preserving realism in his work. As

reconstructionism became the dominant mode of storytelling, however, Ellis’s work began to

look outdated and angry in comparison.

113

Revisionist comics, as a general rule, utilized violence

for the sake of being violent and, with the turn towards reconstructionism, the use of violence

with no larger purpose in the narrative seemed to be a childish throwback to the comics of the

1980s.

Published by Marvel Comics in 1994, Marvels examined the early years of Marvel

Comics through the eyes of a fictional journalist, Phil Sheldon. The story proceeded

chronologically through the Golden Age, Silver Age, and early Bronze Age of Marvel Comics,

from 1939 to 1974 with Phil Sheldon bearing witness to the biggest events of those years,

including the arrival of Galactus (seen in Fantastic Four v.1 #48-50 from 1966) and the death of

Gwen Stacy (originally seen in The Amazing Spider-Man v.1 #121-122).

114

Though it

represented a marked departure from the underlying themes of other Dark Age stories, Marvels

was a massive success and spawned a number of sequels and spin-offs, none of which were

nearly as successful as the original series. One spin-off from Marvels merits special attention.

Ruins was the complete opposite of Marvels in every way. In Ruins, Bruce Banner was turned

into a living mass of cancerous tumors after being exposed to radiation from a gamma bomb

111

Thurman and Darius, Voyage in Noise, 36, Kindle.

112

Thurman and Darius, Voyage in Noise, 36, Kindle.

113

Thurman and Darius, Voyage in Noise, 37.

114

Kurt Busiek (w), Alex Ross (a), Marvels (New York: Marvel Comics, 2009).

rather than becoming the Incredible Hulk,

115

and Peter Parker contracted a mutant radioactive

virus instead of gaining spider powers.

116

Ruins was realism taken to the extreme as each of Marvel’s most loved and most famous

characters met a variety of gruesome fates. Instead of documenting the wonders and marvels

presented by the superheroes, Sheldon spent the last years of his life travelling the United States

looking for the catalyst for the horrors he saw. Marvels reveled in the possibilities presented by

men and women who could fly, but Ruins not only pointed out every logical flaw in the

superhero genre, but also concisely demonstrated how easily the reconstructionist narratives

could be dismantled with the application of a little real-world politics and physics. The

popularity of Marvels was originally thought to be a fad, but by 1997 reconstructionism

dominated the industry, and Ruins “looked like an odd throwback to the revisionism of the 1980s

– one that failed to understand that Marvels had been a portent of things to come.

117

Though Marvels was written too early to represent the end of the Dark Age, it did signal

the beginning of the end. The story featured a reversal of a number of themes that were common

in Dark Age comics while eschewing the dominant mode of storytelling. For instance, Marvels

was decidedly realistic both in terms of the style of artwork and the content of the story, but that

realism was used to celebrate the possibilities posed by superheroes rather than impose

restrictions on their powers or expound on their various psychosis. DC’s Kingdom Come

expounded further on the themes featured in Marvels. Like Marvels, Kingdom Come followed a

civilian in his interactions with superheroes and villains in an attempt to demonstrate the wonder

and joy that revisionist comics neglected. Written by Mark Waid and drawn by Alex Ross,

115

Warren Ellis (w), Cliff Nielsen and Terese Nielsen (p,i), “[Untitled]” Ruins #1 (August, 1995), Marvel Comics.

116

Warren Ellis (w), Cliff Nielsen and Terese Nielsen (p,i), “[Untitled]” Ruins #2 (September, 1995), Marvel

Comics.

117

Thurman and Darius, Voyage in Noise, 37.

Kingdom Come represented pushback against the cynical, nihilistic messages found in comics

published in the late 1980s and 1990s.

118

Kingdom Come was never meant to fall into the trends

of realism and revisionism that dominated the Dark Age and instead sought to act as a

commentary on the cynical, overly violent tones that superhero comics took in the 1980s and

1990s. Though few changes were seen in the types of stories told in 1996 and 1997, Kingdom

Come, like Marvels before it, acted as heralds of the end of the Dark Age and the end of the

dominant storytelling trends of realism and revisionism.

Despite the changes in narrative and artistic forms introduced by reconstructionist

comics, there were no widespread changes in most mainstream comic books until 2001. In 2000,

Marvel Comics launched a widescale re-imagining of their fictional universe with Ultimate

Spider-Man. While DC started the Dark Age by undertaking such a re-imagining in Crisis on

Infinite Earths, Marvel avoided any large-scale changes to their continuity and characters, save

for a failed attempt in the Heroes Reborn series in 1996. The Ultimate Universe, as Marvel

called this re-imagining, featured modernized versions of Marvel’s most popular heroes. One of

the main problems with the comics of the Dark Age had been the overwhelming amount of

continuity into which modern comics were required to fit. Because comics were written to appeal

to already existing fans, it was nearly impossible for new readers to get a foothold in the long-

running series. The Ultimate Universe sought to rectify that issue by reintroducing the characters

as young heroes that were just beginning their careers.

119

The stories published under the Ultimate Universe were independent from the main

series, so Ultimate Spider-Man could tell the story of the hero’s earliest days divorced from the

118

Mark Waid (w), Alex Ross (a), Kingdom Come (New York: DC Comics, 1997).

119

Abraham Riesman, “The Secret History of Ultimate Marvel, the Experiment That Changed Superheroes Forever,”

Vulture, last modified May 25, 2015, accessed March 11, 2020, www.vulture.com/2015/05/secret-history-of-

ultimate-marvel.html.

main universe’s continuity while the main Spider-Man series continued to tell stories deeply

rooted in the forty years of continuity that already existed. Marvel hoped that fans of Ultimate

Spider-Man would eventually also start reading the main Spider-Man series. Though the

reintroduction of characters was nothing new, the Ultimate Universe helped bring Marvel out of

the sales slump and Chapter 11 bankruptcy they suffered during the 1990s. Ultimate X-Men

appeared in 2001 when the imprint proved to be a success and was the first major hit of the

reboot. Other series followed, including Ultimate versions of the Fantastic Four and the

Avengers and, by the middle of the decade, the Ultimate Universe regularly dominated the sales

charts and had single handedly saved Marvel Comics.

120

The Dark Age was a time when comics sold in higher numbers than ever before and the

art form became more respected than it ever had thanks to complex and compelling stories.

However, those benefits came at a cost as the collapse of the speculator market nearly destroyed

the entire industry, and more emphasis was often placed on sales gimmicks than creating

valuable stories. As a continuation of the evolution of the comic book, the Dark Age was

necessary, but there have been too many changes in the industry and the art form since 1985 to

realistically argue that the Dark Age has continued into modern day.

The Dark Age came to an end in 2001 not only because of the beginning of Marvel’s

revitalization efforts, but also because of a fundamental shift in the narrative contents of

mainstream comics following the September 11

attacks. Additionally, the success of comic

book stories outside of the realm of comic books, in the form of movies and television shows, in

the twenty-first century demonstrated a marked departure from the lackluster movies and campy

television shows that defined comic book adaptations in the second half of the twentieth century.

120

Riesman, “The Secret History of Ultimate Marvel.”

The Dark Age was necessary, but its time passed long ago, and putting present day comics in the

same grouping as comics from 1986 does a disservice not only to modern day comics, but also to

Dark Age comics. A new age began in 2001: the Aluminum Age.

4 “THE SENSE OF ESCAPISM COMIC BOOKS HAVE PROVIDED NO LONGER

EXISTS; THE FANTASY WORLD MUST GIVE WAY TO THE REAL ONE”: THE

ALUMINUM AGE (2001-PRESENT)

Today, the Dark Age remains one of the most well-known ages in the comic book

classification system. Comics published in the Aluminum Age were more diverse than their Dark

Age counterparts, and the reactions of comic writers and artists to the terrorist attacks on

September 11, 2001 caused several changes in the narrative conventions of the industry. When

coupled with the rise of the comic book film industry and the creation of Marvel’s Ultimate

Universe, these changes demonstrated a fundamental shift in the comic books that warrants the

creation of a new age, which I have conceived. Today’s comic book age, which began emerging

in 2001, should be known as the Aluminum Age.

The changes to the comic book medium and industry described in this chapter

demonstrate the differences between comics published in the Dark Age and comics published in

the Aluminum Age. As is the case with other ages in the classification system, these differences

warrant the creation of an addition to the larger system. The Aluminum Age began in 2001 when

changes to the comic book medium and industry took hold. Including Aluminum Age books in

the Dark Age—as the current classification system claims—does a disservice to both ages.

4.1 Gender Diversity

One of the hallmarks of the Aluminum Age is greater diversity in comic books. The

introduction of minority characters in comics was an ongoing process since the 1970s. The

advances in diversity that came in the Bronze and Dark Ages focused mainly on racial

minorities, while the Aluminum Age introduced more queer characters in comics from

mainstream publishers. Marvel Comics’ Northstar made history in the Dark Age when he came

out as the first openly gay superhero in mainstream superhero comics in 1992. He dd not,

however, have any sort of visible romantic relationship until 2008, and other gay superheroes

failed to manifest in any meaningful way in the main publications from both DC and Marvel.

Marvel Comics in particular struggled to include queer representation in its comics and would

not see an on-panel same-sex kiss until 2009 when two minor X-Men, Julio Richter and

Shatterstar, were revealed to be in a same sex relationship.

121

Originally introduced in the Silver Age as a love interest for Batman, Batwoman in the

Aluminum Age was no longer interested in Batman romantically. Instead, she was a lesbian.

122

Batwoman has generally been considered good representation for the lesbian community, but DC

Comics shied away from putting her in any long-lasting romantic relationship. The authors of the

Batwoman comic series left the series in 2009 when DC refused to allow Batwoman to get

married despite the fact that proposed to her long term girlfriend.

123

The largest names in the

comic book industry were happy to pay lip service to the queer community for much of the early

2000s by including characters that were nominally queer but never engaged in queer activities

and were never allowed to have long term romantic relationships for fear of angering certain

readers. For better representations of queer characters, one has to turn to a somewhat unexpected

source.

121

Peter David (w), Valentine De Landro (p), Marco Santucci (p,i), and Pat Davidson et al. (i), “[Untitled],” X-

Factor v.3 #45 (August, 2009), Marvel Comics.

122

Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Ruka, et. al. (w), Keith Griffin and Ken Lashley (p), Marvin Mariano and

Greg Parkin (i), “Going Down,” 52 #7 (August, 2006), DC Comics.

123

Cavan Sieczkowski, “‘Batwoman’ Authors Exit, Claim DC Comics Banned Gay Marriage Storyline,” Huffington

Post, last modified September 5, 2013, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/batwoman-dc-comics-gay-

marriage_n_3873508

Created by Warren Ellis in 1999, The Authority was, at first glance a Dark Age series that

largely conformed to the tropes, conventions, and clichés of the age. This series was unusual,

however, in that it was, among the first comics that came close to being considered

“mainstream” with a long-term homosexual relationship prominently featured. Midnighter and

Apollo from The Authority were unique among the few gay characters present in mainstream

comics in the Dark Age as they were allowed to be openly intimate with each other, even going

as far as getting married and adopting a child together on panel. Some fans would argue that

Northstar’s wedding to his boyfriend, Kyle, in Astonishing X-Men v.3 #51, from 2012,

constituted the first gay wedding in mainstream comics, but Midnighter and Apollo were married

ten years earlier in The Authority #29 from 2002, and that comic provided much better

representation for LGBTQ+ individuals. Apollo and Midnighter remained prominent in

Wildstorm’s comics following their wedding, while the same could not be said for Northstar and

Kyle in Marvel’s comics. Compared to other queer characters available in comics at the time,

Apollo and Midnighter were revolutionary in terms of both their on-panel intimacy and the fact

that they both remained traditionally masculine whilst in their relationship, something that could

not be said for other gay characters in mainstream comics at the time.

124

Though queer characters

have been slow to be introduced to mainstream comics due to both prejudice and the restrictions

of the CCA, the industry at large became more accepting of queer identities in the Aluminum

Age as exemplified by both the mainstream backing of Love is Love and the recent surge in the

inclusion of queer characters.

124

Rob Lendrum, “Queering Super-Manhood: Superhero Masculinity, Camp and Public Relations as a Textual

Framework,” International Journal of Comic Art 7, no.1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 291-293.

4.2 September 11, 2001 and the De-escalation of Violence

Popular media underwent a fundamental shift following the terrorist attacks on the World

Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. As the inevitable comparisons to the

attack on Pearl Harbor began, it would be natural to assume that producers of popular media

would rush to defend America’s shared national values, but the comic book industry world

changed between 1941 and 2001. Comics, once the perfect tool for the dissemination of

propaganda, were now the domain of a cynical, nihilistic, morally relativistic subculture. As

historian Bradford Wright wrote, “September 11

forced comic book markers to step back and

reevaluate the place of their industry in American culture. Some found it difficult for a time to

find anything relevant to say with super-powered heroes in tights. Others called for a new moral

direction in comic books.”

125

Artist Jim Steranko in particular called for an end to the cynicism

and nihilism that overtook the comics industry in the 1980s and 1990s in a press release put our

two weeks after the attacks.

126

In December 2001, the attacks appeared in the storylines of mainstream, ongoing comics.

Amazing Spider-Man v.2 #36 was the first mainstream comic to address the attacks. It

emphasized unity and hope in the face of tragedy while making it clear that even if superheroes

were unable to stop terrorist attacks, they would be there to help however they could. The

narration called upon the reader to “draft a covenant with your conscience, that we will create a

world in which such things need not occur. A world which will not require apologies to children,

but also a world whose roads are not paved with the husks of their inalienable rights.”

127

The

goal of the Spider-Man story was to present a hopeful message of recovery and honor those who

125

Wright, Comic Book Nation, 287-288.

126

Wright, Comic Book Nation, 288.

127

J. Michael Straczyski (w), John Romita Jr. (p), and Scott Hana (i), “Stand Tall,” Amazing Spider-Man v.2 #36

(December, 2001), Marvel Comics.

died in the attacks. Ultimately, the so-called “Black Issue” of Amazing Spider-Man was a

touching tribute to those who died in the attacks, but it was distinctively hands-off, with no

political message outside of patriotism. It was meant to address the tragedy without ever

commenting upon it.

Costumed superheroes were not the best icons to stand in immediate aftermath of the

attacks. Robert Wilonsky, a writer for SF Weekly noted in October 2001 that:

In a post-Sept. 11 world, even the phrase “Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!”

sounds different; its awe has been replaced by shock and revulsion. The sense of

escapism [that] comic books have provided no longer exists; the fantasy world must give

way to the real one.

128

Comics never shied away from commenting on real world events. Still, comics published in the

wake of 9/11 seemed to show traditional, mainstream superhero comics confronting a real-world

event more explicitly than before. Superhero comics published during the 1940s addressed

World War II but, in order to maintain suspension of disbelief, they rarely addressed particular

wartime events. In contrast, some comics published after 9/11 not only depicted superheroes as

helping with clean-up efforts, but some also addressed the underlying political and social

atmosphere surrounding the attacks. The first story in Captain America volume 4, which began

publication in April 2002, was rewritten following 9/11 in order to allow the writer to properly

address the attacks. The story deals with Captain America hunting down a fictional terrorist

named Faysal Al-Tariq who organized a terrorist attack on a small town seven months after the

September 11

attacks because of American military actions in the Middle East.

129

128

Robert Wilonsky, “The Brave and the Bold - October 3, 2001,” SF Weekly, last modified October 3, 2001,

accessed October 21, 2019, www.sfweekly.com/culture/the-brave-and-the-bold/.

129

John Ney Rieber (w), John Cassaday (p, i), Captain America: The New Deal, ed. Stuart Moore and Joe Quesada

(New York: Marvel Comics, 2018).

The covers of the first six issues of Captain America v. 4 were suitably patriotic, but the

tone of the comics themselves was not nationalistic. Rather than indiscriminately proclaiming

that America had done no wrong, Captain America v.4 addressed the underlying political and

social issues that motivated the terrorists, which meant that occasionally the terrorists were

shown in a somewhat sympathetic light. Though Al-Tariq was undeniably the villain of the story,

his motivations served to highlight some of the complexity surrounding the September 11

attacks and the subsequent War on Terror. John Cassaday, artist of Captain America v. 4,

claimed that “Captain America is a creature born of propaganda. He’s the perfect venue for

what’s going on right now.”

130

Aside from some expected patriotic sentimentality, the first six

issues of Captain America v.4 were not overly propagandistic. Captain America not only

admitted to some of the more atrocious actions of the US Government, but also argued against

the rampant xenophobia and antagonism that could be found in other forms of media. Thus,

Captain America v. 4 featured “a new version of Captain America that was markedly different

from the patriotic jingoism of the early wartime Cap [….] the archetypal superhero sees shades

of grey where he once saw black and white.”

131

At the same time that comics were intersecting with violent real-world events, the

gratuitous violence that characterized the Dark Age saw a marked decline. John Cassaday

observed that in the wake of the attacks, “comics about mass devastation [were] quickly being

regarded as dinosaurs. Inappropriate dinosaurs.”

132

One only has to look at how the destruction

of the World Trade Center was depicted in 1991’s X-Force v.1 #3 and Spider-Man v.1 #16 to

understand the difference between the use of violence in Aluminum Age comics and Dark Age

130

Wright, Comic Book Nation, 290.

131

Geoff Martin and Erin Steuter, Pop Culture Goes to War: Enlisting and Resisting Militarism in the War on

Terror (Plymouth, United Kingdom: Lexington Books, 2010), 207.

132

Wright, Comic Book Nation, 288

comics. In these issues, the destruction of the top half of the South Tower of the World Trade

Center is met with little concern from the superheroes.

133

Granted, these issues came out before

either of the attacks on the World Trade Center, but the lack of concern paid by the superheroes

to the devastation around them was indicative of the Dark Age. By contrast, the two-page spread

of destruction in Amazing Spider-Man v.2 #36, by contrast, demonstrated the Aluminum Age’s

attitude toward gratuitous violence. In the first story, Spider-Man barely acknowledges the

destruction with a humorous “uh-oh,” while in the 9/11 commemorative issue, Spider-Man is

rendered nearly speechless at the destruction. According to media researcher, Liam Burke, “the

most immediate impact of 9/11 on comics was the necessary reworking of the comic book trope

of ‘ever escalating stakes.’”

134

Violence was still present in superhero comics, but the

consequences of large-scale destruction in metropolitan areas were no longer brushed to the side.

Instead, the consequences of mass violence were occasionally vividly displayed.

Written in 2008, Marvel’s Civil War was one of Marvel’s most ambitious storylines to be

published following 9/11. In the story, a group of inexperienced heroes known as the New

Warriors causes an explosion in Stamford, Connecticut that kills over 600 people. Following

this, the US Government passes the Superhero Registration Act, which requires super-powered

individuals to register their secret identities with the government. The conflict over whether or

not to comply with the act eventually tears apart the superhero community.

135

Civil War was a

metaphor for divisiveness among many Americans after the September 11

Attacks, with Iron

Man and his allies representing the call for greater government oversight and protection, while

133

Fabian Nicieza (w), and Rob Liefeld (w, p, i), “Battle Cry (Prelude to Sabotage),” X-Force v.1 #3 (October

1991), Marvel Comics.; Todd McFarlane (w, p, i), “Sabotage, Part 1,” Spider-Man v.1 #16 (November, 1991),

Marvel Comics.

134

Liam Burke, The Comic Book Film Adaptation (Jackson, Mississippi: The University Press of Mississippi, 2015),

chap. 1, Kindle.

135

Mark Millar (w), Steve McNiven (p), Dexter Vines et. al. (i), Civil War (New York: Marvel Comics, 2007).

Captain America and his allies fighting against increasing governmental authoritarianism.

According to Scott A. Cord, “The Registration Act mirrors the Patriot Act, which passed with

almost no opposition and virtually no debate, although it gave law enforcement unprecedented

powers to spy on all citizens.”

136

Thus, the fictional conflict over the registration of superheroes

mirrored the real life conflict taking place during the War on Terror over whether global security

required the sacrifice of one’s civil liberties.

Almost immediately after the end of Civil War, Marvel Comics began publishing Secret

Invasion. The main plot of Secret Invasion involved a race of aliens known as the Skrulls, who

invaded earth by disguising themselves as heroes they had kidnapped, including Spider-Woman,

Elektra, Black Bolt, and Captain Marvel.

137

The overarching theme of this event—the insecurity

of being unable to trust friends and neighbors—paralleled the aura of suspicion and fear that

gripped the U.S. following 9/11. Secret Invasion fell securely within the science fiction subgenre

of the invasion narrative. These types of stories flourished in pulp fiction between the two World

Wars and made their way into cinema in the 1950s. Following the September 11

Attacks, the

invasion narrative was once again dominant in American cinema.

Secret Invasion was unusual among alien invasion narratives, since the invasion of earth

undertaken by the Skrulls was specifically religiously motivated. A religious prophecy from the

Skrull home world prompted the invasion, and the Skrulls’ religion is consistently shown as

different from those of the West and as a direct threat to America. The religion of the Skrulls

could be read as addressing the failings of politicized religion in general. Explicit references to

“Jihad” in the text made it clear that the fundamentalism being criticized by Secret Invasion was

136

Cord A. Scott, “Comics and Conflict: War and Patriotically Themed Comics in American Cultural History from

World War II Through the Iraq War” (PhD. diss., Loyola University Chicago, 2011), 255.

137

Brian Michael Bendis (w), Leinil Yu (p), and Mark Morales (i), Secret Invasion, ed. Tom Brevoort (New York:

Marvel Comics, 2008).

specifically Islamic fundamentalism.

138

For much of their history, the heroes of the Marvel

Universe were defenders of the liberal position as they focused on issues of social justice and

were open to new ideas. The stories published throughout George W. Bush’s presidency

questioned how those ideals would react when the U.S. was directly attacked, and the narrative

arc that stretched from Civil War, in 2005, to Siege, in 2010, reaffirmed the heroes’ liberal

positions. Secret Invasion, however, was a departure from that consensus, since the heroes slid

into paranoia and xenophobia that was more in the spirt of wartime comics than comics from the

Aluminum Age.

139

Secret Invasion was steeped in post-9/11 imagery and attitudes toward those

labeled “other” as previously trusted heroes were labeled complacent in a plot to conquer the

earth, and the paranoia and xenophobia demonstrated by the heroes was all too common in the

American public following 9/11.

4.3 Comics as Transmedial Objects

Adapting mass media from one form to another is nothing new in the world of

entertainment, and comic books were well suited to being adapted into other forms. Superman

first appeared in 1938 and, by 1939, his stories were already being adapted as syndicated comic

strips in daily syndication in newspapers across the country. This strip would continue to appear

in newspapers until 1966, despite the decline in popularity of the superhero genre following

World War II. By 1950, just 12 years after he first debuted, Superman had appeared in a

nationally broadcast radio serial (1940-1951), a novel called The Adventures of Superman by

George Lowell (1942), a series of Max Fleischer cartoons (1941-1942), and two film serials for

Columbia Pictures (one in 1948 and one in 1950). Superman may not have been the first

138

Dyfrig Jones, “Islamic Invaders: Secret Invasion and the Post-9/11 World of Marvel,” (unpublished manuscript,

Bangor University, 2019) 11-12.

139

Jones, “Islamic Invaders,” 15.

superhero to make the jump from comic book pages to the big screen, but he was responsible for

demonstrating just how easily comic book characters could be licensed.

140

The pictorial nature of

comic books makes the characters within them easy to copyright, which made them appealing to

both licensors and corporations. The characters in a comic book are not as abstract as characters

in a novel, making copyright infringement lawsuits much easier to defend.

141

While adaptations of comic books in other forms of media were relatively common in the

second half of the twentieth century, the number of adaptations increased dramatically during the

Aluminum Age. Starting with the release of X-Men in 2001, the comic book film went from an

unimpressive, risky investment to an almost guaranteed blockbuster. The reasons behind the shift

from B-movie to blockbuster run the gamut from improved CGI technology to a cultural need for

simple tales of good overcoming evil in the wake of 9/11.

142

Wider trends in the film industry

played a role in the rise of the comic book film as international audiences for American-made

films grew, and Hollywood producers began searching for pre-branded franchises that would

have a guaranteed audience before the film was even made. Due to this desire for characters that

audiences were already familiar with, superhero comics represented an opportunity to salvage

the struggling comic book industry by orienting it around its intellectual properties rather than

physical goods. According to researcher Shawna Kidman, “the immaterial possession of

intangible characters and stories had become the business’s most valuable currency.”

143

Liam

Burke and Shawna Kidman attribute some of the popularity of the superhero movie to the

cultural trauma surrounding the September 11

attacks, but the movies that sparked the boom in

140

Tye, Superman, 107.; Kidman, Incorporating Comics, 27.

141

Kidman, Incorporating Comics, 21.

142

According to Liam Burke, innovation in the realm of digital technologies is the most often cited catalyst for the

recent boom in comic book adaptations. Some critics argue that better CGI technology attracts larger audiences.

Other claim that comic book adaptations have been waiting for digital technology advance to the point that the

action sequences and superpowers in comics could be convincingly shown.

143

Kidman, Incorporating Comics, 181-188.

comic book adaptations, X-Men and Sam Rami’s Spider-Man, were far into production or even

released by the time of the attacks. Some films, such as V for Vendetta were a clear reaction to

the events of September 11, 2001, but Kidman and Burke assert that the comic book film in often

offered moral clarity that was missing in the polarized post-9/11 atmosphere.

144

Regardless of why comic book adaptations became popular in the Aluminum Age, the

impact such popularity had on the comic book industry as a whole was profound. Thanks to

those adaptations, there are two sides to the modern comic books industry: the popular and the

esoteric. One side, the popular, is designed to appeal to the public at large. It is in this form that

the comic book industry has remained a product of the mass media industry. The esoteric side

appeals only to “a tiny niche audience, a demographic so narrow that the health of comic book

publishing has been under sustained and significant threat.”

145

This duality created a number of

problems for the creative and editorial teams behind modern comic books. These teams must

create content that will retain an extremely finicky, narrow, and notoriously hard to please fan

base while simultaneously appealing to the mainstream public.

146

The ease with which comic

book stories and characters can be adapted to fit other forms of media secured the status of comic

books as transmedial objects while also providing a much needed source of income when the

sales of comic books themselves were not enough to keep the industry alive. Only twenty live-

action films based off comics came out between 1950 and 1990, and none of these movies were

particularly successful at the box office.

147

By contrast, between 2000 and 2010 there were fifty-

two such films released, and a vast majority of them attained blockbuster status.

148

The money

144

Kidman, Incorporating Comics, 187.

145

Kidman, Incorporating Comics, 2.

146

Kidman, Incorporating Comics, 3.

147

Kidman, Incorporating Comics, 183.

148

Kidman, Incorporating Comics, Appendix A.

generated by this new generation of comic book films not only created incentive to write stories

that lent themselves well to big-screen adaptations, but also directed more mainstream attention

at the infamously insular industry. Comics may have been transmedial objects since their

popularity first began in the 1930s, but it was only in the Aluminum Age that Hollywood and the

comic book industry both realized the potential they held for blockbuster movies.

4.4 Prequels, Sequels, and Tie-Ins: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

4.4.1 Doomsday Clock

The emphasis on profit over quality that became so prevalent in the Dark Age continued

into the Aluminum Age as companies began capitalizing more blatantly on the nostalgia of long-

term fans and the iconic nature of a number of the series from the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps the

most obvious and recent example of recycling plotlines and themes in comics is DC Comics’

current 12-issue series, Doomsday Clock, a continuation of Alan Moore’s wildly popular

Watchmen. DC, attempting to capitalize on the success that Watchmen brought them over the

years, brought characters created for a single series into their main universe in an attempt to

recycle the characters in a new setting. DC also relied on the iconic status of the original work to

bring in customers. Issues of Doomsday Clock followed Watchmen’s well known 9-panel grid

layout and were printed on lower quality paper than other current comics to more closely mimic

the feel of the original issues of Watchmen.

149

Recycling involves making something new out of something old, so while DC Comics

increased profits by republishing Watchmen in various collected editions, Doomsday Clock better

represents the recycling of popular culture. Doomsday Clock is not the first series that DC

published in an attempt to capitalize on Watchmen’s iconic status. Before Watchmen was a series

149

Geoff Johns (w), Gary Frank (p, i). Doomsday Clock v.1 #1-12, (November 2017-December 2019), DC Comics.

of comics published in 2012 that acted as a prequel to Alan Moore’s work. Each collection of

comics focused on a single character from the original series and gave each of those characters

more complete backstories.

150

Ultimately, both Before Watchmen and Doomsday Clock would

not have been out of place had they been published in the Dark Age. Both clearly attempted to

capitalize on the success of Watchmen, like so many of the books published during the Dark

Age, but both also failed to achieve the same notoriety due, at least in part, to a fundamental

misunderstanding about the initial message of Watchmen. Initially, Watchmen deconstructed the

idea of a superhero and posited the theory that if superheroes were real, they would be fascists at

worst or massively disappointing at best. Doomsday Clock’s attempt to combine the world of

Watchmen with the core superheroes of DC Comics made for a fun crossover but ultimately fell

flat because DC’s insistence that superheroes are a force for good and are able to be trusted with

the fate of the world is incompatible with the cynical and fatalistic view of super-heroism that

Watchmen employed.

4.4.2 Secret Wars

Sometimes the recycling done by the popular culture industry is overt, but other instances

of recycling in the Aluminum Age are more subtle. Marvel Comics in particular has done less

obvious recycling than DC Comics, but in 2015 they published a fourth series by the name

Secret Wars. The original Secret Wars helped spark the Dark Age with its status as one of the

first event comics, and Marvel quickly followed up on their success with Secret Wars II in the

same year. (The sequel did not attract as much acclaim as the original and has since faded into

obscurity.)The third story to bear the title Secret Wars appeared in 1988 and consisted of only

150

Darwyn Cooke, Brian Azzarello, et al. (w), Amanda Conner, J.G. Jones, et al. (p,i), Before Watchmen (2012), DC

Comics.

two issues of the Fantastic Four series.

151

This short installment is also largely forgotten and

ignored by fans.

Rather than being a marketing scheme for a line of action figures, as the original Secret

Wars was, 2015’s Secret Wars was better planned and arguably more fulfilling than the

original.

152

The most recent Secret Wars differs greatly from the original, but the inclusion of a

place called Battleworld and the use of the same title dispels any doubt that Marvel was

attempting to capitalize on the sparse similarities between the two and evoke nostalgia within

older members of its fan base to increase sales. Additionally, a parody tie-in mini-series to

2015’s Secret Wars called Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars revealed that the infamous mercenary,

Deadpool, took part in the original Secret Wars.

153

It is important to know here that Deadpool did

not appear in comics until The New Mutants v.1 #98, which was released in 1991, nearly seven

years after the publication of the original Secret Wars.

154

The retroactive inclusion of Deadpool

in 1984’s Secret Wars not only invoked a sense of nostalgia for the original series while actively

tying the old series to the new one. There would be very little to link 2015’s Secret Wars with the

series from 1984 aside from the basic premise and title if it weren’t for the inclusion of

Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars, which is currently regarded by both fans and the industry as a

tie-in story to both 1984 and 2015’s Secret Wars. Despite having very little to do with the

original Secret Wars, the 2015 series used the same title as the 1984 series to entice fans. The

repeated use of the title “Secret Wars” created certain expectations in long term fans and, though

the 2015 series had very little connection to the 1984 series, long term fans were more likely to

151

Found in Fantastic Four v.1 #318-319.

152

Jim Shooter, “Secrets of the Secret Wars,” JimShooter.com - Writer. Creator. Large Mammal., last modified 4

Apr. 2011, accessed April 11, 2019, jimshooter.com/2011/04/secrets-of-secret-wars.html/.

153

Cullen Bunn (w), Matteo Lolli, and Matteo Buffagni (p, i), Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars (New York: Marvel

Comics, 2015).

154

Rob Liefeld, Fabian Nicieza (w), Rob Liefeld (p, i), “The Beginning of the End Part 1,” The New Mutants v.1

#98 (February 1991), Marvel Comics.

be interested in the story if they thought it would be connected in some way to the 1984 series.

Thus, comic producers could create an audience for the series without providing any information

about it.

4.4.3 Infinite Crisis

Published in 2006, Infinite Crisis was the sequel to Crisis on Infinite Earths and recreated

the multiverse that had been destroyed in CoIE. In recreating that multiverse, Infinite Crisis also

reintroduced the Golden Age version of Superman to the main DC Universe. The Golden Age

Superman comes to believe that the modern world in which he finds himself (i.e. the current

incarnation of the main DC Universe) is irredeemably flawed and must be replaced with the

universe he remembers. In the course of this decision, the Golden Age Superman questioned the

choices made by Americans since 1986 and lamented the existence of more realistic, grittier

heroes that have risen since the publication of CoIE while embracing the values of older comic

books.

155

In the opening pages of Infinite Crisis, DC’s core trinity of heroes have drifted from

what they originally were. Batman was turned overly dark and cynical following the trials of the

Dark Age. Wonder Woman became violent and warlike, and Superman was ineffectual and

uninspiring. By reintroducing the Golden Age incarnation of Superman, Infinite Crisis was able

to call into question the qualities that made a hero and examine the ways that those qualities have

changed since Superman’s introduction in 1938.

156

Part of the reason why Superman was able to endure as a character for over 80 years was

the fact that he changed to fit the zeitgeist. The Golden Age Superman in Infinite Crisis was

unable to adapt to the modern world and thus attempted to make the modern world adapt to him.

155

Geoff Johns (w), Phil Jimenez et. al. (p), Andy Lanning, et. al. (i), Infinite Crisis (New York: DC Comics, 2007).

156

Johnson, “This Isn’t Your Grandfather’s Comic Book Universe,” 201.

At the same time, the modern Superman was unable to adapt to the needs and wants of a Post-

9/11 society and had thus been unable to inspire anyone in the DC Universe since he died in

1992. Following his death and resurrection, the storylines in books starring Superman had been

strained as he married Lois Lane, revealed his secret identity to her, became a blue energy-based

hero and split into two different versions of himself, before finally returning to normal. None of

those gimmicks caught the public’s attention the way his death had. Following the September

Attacks, it seemed like the modern Superman was in danger of becoming as outdated as his

Golden Age counterpart.

157

Infinite Crisis’s role as a sequel to CoIE is less important than its

commentary on the state of contemporary comics. The overly violent, gritty heroes of the Dark

Age came under attack from both the past and present as the Golden Age Superman saw them as

being unworthy of the mantle he created, and modern heroes were unable to move on from the

tragedies they experienced in the Dark Age. Infinite Crisis acts as a template for Aluminum Age

comics: Its heroes make the decision to move on from their darkest moments while still allowing

the past to affect them, without causing them to stand still.

4.4.4 Dark Nights: Metal

Some of DC’s recent mainstream series would qualify as part of the Dark Age had they

been published 20 years ago, such as Dark Nights: Metal which featured a dark, twisted version

of the DC multiverse living on the underside of the main multiverse—that is, the collection of

universes in which DC Comics’ stories take place. Unlike other Dark Age books, this series did

not embrace a fatalistic view of super-heroism that characterized so many Dark Age books and

ended on an optimistic note for the future rather than a pessimistic view of humanity and super-

heroism. Dark Nights: Metal found a balance between the hopeful nature of the DC universe and

157

Johnson, “This Isn’t Your Grandfather’s Comic Book Universe,” 204-207.

the cynicism and nihilism espoused by books like Watchmen. The DC Multiverse is made up of

every possible permutation of the DC heroes, while the Dark Multiverse was brought into being

by the fears of those living in the main Multiverse.

158

Had this series been published in the Dark

Age, these fears may have succeeded in overtaking a number of characters, but the days of

revisionism were behind comics at this point, and reconstructionism dictated that the inherent

strength of superheroes would be more than enough to overcome the fear and cynicism caused

by the Dark Multiverse.

Perhaps more important than the themes presented in the main Dark Nights: Metal series

was DC Comics’ use of the Dark Multiverse as an opportunity to revisit previously published

events. This Tales of the Dark Multiverse series is made up of single issues, each looking at a

different earth of the Dark Multiverse where one of DC’s most famous events occurred slightly

differently than was previously shown. For example, Tales of the Dark Multiverse: Knightfall

took place in a world where Bruce Wayne was unable to defeat Jean-Paul Valley to take back the

mantle of Batman, and Valley was able to take over Gotham City as “Saint Batman” to rule it

with an iron fist.

159

In Tales of the Dark Multiverse: The Death of Superman, Lois Lane came to

resent the fact that rest of the superhero community left Superman to die alone and took the

power of Superman from the Eradicator. Lois fought both Superboy and the Cyborg Superman

before the original Superman made what was to be his triumphant return only to be immediately

killed again.

160

158

Scott Snyder (w), Greg Capullo (p), Jonathan Glapion (i), “[Untitled],” Dark Nights: Metal v.1 #4 (February

2018), DC Comics.

159

Scott Snyder and Kyle Higgins (w), Javier Fernandez (a), “Tales from the Dark Multiverse: Batman: Knightfall,”

Tales from the Dark Multiverse: Batman: Knightfall #1 (December, 2019), DC Comics.

160

Jeff Loveness (w), Brad Walker (p), Andrew Hennessy and Norm Rapmund (i), “The Death of Superman,” Tales

of the Dark Multiverse: The Death of Superman #1 (December, 2019), DC Comics.

All of the Tales from the Dark Multiverse one-shot stories were careful to keep the tone

of the original event while altering the content of the story to investigate other ways the event

could have gone. These one-shots thus identify contact points within comics that could have

made the series change dramatically if certain events had happened slightly differently. These

stories are some of the best examples of recycling plots in the Aluminum Age. First, the tone and

title of the work invoke a sense of nostalgia on the part of the consumer. Also, DC released $1

editions of the most famous comics in the relevant event. The publication of these new editions

of iconic comics allowed DC to make more money off of the nostalgia the story invoked. Dark

Nights: Metal, and its subsequent tie-in issues represented a unique aspect of the Aluminum Age

where elements of past events are revisited or retooled to fit a new theme as needed.

4.4.5 Other Notable Texts

Some of the most obvious examples of recycling previous plots and gimmicks came from

single issues. In 2008 DC Comics released Booster Gold v.2 #0, a tie-in to the 1994 event series

Zero Hour: Crisis in Time. Like the Deadpool tie in to 1984’s Secret Wars, Booster Gold v.2 #0

added another point of view to an already ancient event without making much of an impact on

the event itself. However, Booster Gold v.2 #0 was a prime example of the retroactive canon that

was popular throughout the Aluminum Age. It was an issue that ultimately served no larger

purpose other than to reference an event that gained fame among comic book fans and give those

fans the chance to see a well-liked villain once again without causing any real alterations to be

made to the past event.

Some comics have become well known enough among long-time fans to warrant their

own anniversary celebrations, either in the form of new collected editions of the series or in the

form of a continuation of the original series published a number of years later. To celebrate the

twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Marvels, Marvel released a one issue epilogue to

the 1994 series that was written and drawn by the original creative team. The epilogue continued

to follow Phil Sheldon in his interaction with superheroes in the years since 1974, including his

encounters with Chris Claremont’s team of X-Men and hero Nova. Marvels Epilogue allows the

series to end on a hopeful note—unlike the decidedly depressing note that the series originally

ended on—and it bridges the gap between the original series and one of its tie-ins, Marvels: Eye

of the Camera more completely.

161

Comic book producers have attempted to encourage new fans to read older series. Both

Marvel and DC have begun publishing facsimile editions of their most famous issues. For

instance, Marvel published a facsimile edition of New Mutants v.1 #98, which featured the first

appearance of the character Deadpool, while DC published a facsimile of Green Lantern v.2 #85,

the issue where Green Arrow’s sidekick is revealed to have been taking drugs. Everything about

these facsimiles is identical to the original issues, except, of course, the price tag. The facsimiles

retail for the same price as modern comics (between $3 and $5), while the original issues cost

much less. In addition to gaining interest in older series, the facsimiles allow DC and Marvel to

make a profit with next to no investment as they do not have to pay writers or artists to draw and

write new stories and can instead make still more money off of an already published and adored

story.

Despite recycling a number of the plotlines from the Dark Age and earlier ages, the

Aluminum Age represented a departure from a number of the narrative and artistic conventions

of the Dark Age thanks in no small part to the introduction of Marvel’s Ultimate Universe.

Societal and cultural shifts following the September 11

Attacks put an end to the ever-

161

Kurt Busiek (w), Alex Ross (p, i), “[Untitled],” Marvels Epilogue #1 (September, 2019), Marvel Comics.

escalating forms of violence that characterized the Dark Age, and the boom in comic book films

altered the types of stories that the larger industry told. The unprecedented levels of mainstream

attention directed at the comic book industry in the Aluminum Age encouraged the continued

increase in diversity that developed throughout the Dark and Aluminum Ages, but a lot of comic

books still adhere to traditions in order to please what is still an incredibly insular sub-culture.

The recent use of comic books as transmedial objects has opened the comic sub-culture to the

wider world in recent years and exposed its problems to that wider world, but comic fans still

tend to shun the mainstream, so efforts to make comics appeal to more casual movie fans have

been slow to bear fruit.

This recycling of characters, situations, and storylines paints a distinctly postmodern

picture of the comic book industry. Comics in the Aluminum Age developed a form of literature

in which the characters and storylines could be recycled and retold countless times through

transmedial adaptations and additions to the original text. Adding the Aluminum Age to the age

system allows researchers to more closely examine the ways in which Aluminum Age comics

interact with the culture in which they were produced. In this way, comics are elevated from a

piece of popular media to a form of literature worthy of the same examination that is given to

other genres. Comic books and superheroes were an integral part of American culture by the

twenty-first century, and the distain with which they have been treated by the academic world

has led to the neglect of their significance in the study of popular culture and American culture.

As comics continue to be informed by the world in which they are created, the more they will

inform the culture around them.

The lack of any centralized, concentrated effort to organize the history of comic books

made determining when ages began and ended difficult. Most ages ended because there was a

shift in the types of stories being told in comic books. For instance, the Golden Age ended

because superhero comics were abandoned by readers and producers in favor of other genres,

while the Silver Age came to a gradual close as writers and artists began to include more realism

in their stories. So it was for the Dark Age. Narrative conventions that were staples of the

medium for over ten years became less prevalent in 2001. Comics became less violent and more

diverse. Hollywood took full advantage of comic books as a source of blockbuster films. These

changes make the differences between books published in the Dark Age and Aluminum Age

readily apparent. The changes to comic book narratives and the industry that began in 2001 more

than justify the start of a new age, and attempting to include Aluminum Age books in the Dark

Age does a disservice to both ages.

5 CONCLUSION

The age system was created by mistake in a little-known fan publication from 1961.

Before comic book fans filled convention halls in San Diego, discussions between them were

relegated to the pages of science fiction fan publications. In the 1960s a concentrated effort was

made to connect comic book fans through both fan publications and the letters pages of

mainstream comics. Through these early connections, fans were able to communicate well

enough to create a system that could be used to discuss the books they loved so much. Over the

following fifty years, the system grew to become the dominant method for organizing the history

of comics. This growth was undertaken by fans who often never met or consulted with each

other before unknowingly naming an age. Later, ages were named through concentrated efforts;

Mark Voger, for example, gave the Dark Age its name. No one ever formed a committee,

however, to vote on the name of a new age, however. Compared to other areas of academic

study, comic book scholarship has been remarkably decentralized. The level of control that fans

have had on the ways that comic book history is organized is unheard of in other areas of study.

Much of the earliest comic book scholarship was undertaken by amateur scholars and

comic book collectors. Until the 1980s, the academic world had not realized the potential in

studying children’s literature, and comics were widely thought of as something that all but the

most immature individuals would grow out of. As such, the publications put out by early, self-

taught comic book scholars/fans were not directed at the academic world.

162

These fans created

organizational system that suited their needs with little to no interference from the larger world

of academia. The age system was later adopted by the industry itself as a convenient way to

organize their own books, and some academic scholars use the system for their own research.

Efforts to bring any real standardization to the age system have repeatedly failed, due to the

diffuse nature of comic book scholarship. Additionally, efforts to apply academic language to the

age system have failed to grasp what made the age system appealing to fans in the first place. By

applying inaccessible academic language to the age system, academic scholars lock the same

people that created the system out of any additions to the system. Scholarly additions to the age

system also tend to focus heavily on the content of comics that fall into any given age rather than

taking into account the context in which a comic was published. Any additions made to the age

system must be made with the original intentions of the creators in mind. Above all, the age

system must continue to work for the people for which it was created. If an addition to the age

system is of no use to the fans, then it is of no use to the system as a whole.

From the medium’s first faltering steps in the Platinum Age, to the surprising success of

superheroes in the Golden Age and the unprecedented sales numbers seen at the height of the

162

Greg M. Smith, et.al., “Surveying the World of Contemporary Comics Scholarship,” 139.

speculator bubble in the Dark Age, the changes in the content and form of comics makes a

continuous, unbroken history difficult to maintain. The existing ages have been separated from

each other by both major changes in the comic book industry and changes in the real world,

which had immediate impacts on the realm of comics. By separating the history of comics into

ages, researchers could better track the ways that comics have developed, and the steps that were

taken to evolve the medium over time. The twentieth century transformed the comic book from a

cheap advertising opportunity, to a massive transmedial entertainment industry with branches in

nearly every form of popular media. The ability of comic book characters and stories to

transition easily from one form of media to another created a new type of comic book industry

that was more focused on creating stories that could be adapted into other media forms.

Given the popularity of stories from other ages, the recycling of storylines that gave the

Aluminum Age its name should come as no real surprise. The Dark Age has not fully left

modern comics as a number of Dark Age storylines came to be considered iconic among fans

and were optioned for movies in the early twenty-first century. The Dark Knight Rises, the final

film in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, pulled heavily from Batman storylines from the

Dark Age, while some of Marvel Studio’s most recent blockbusters, such as Avengers: Infinity

War and Avengers: Endgame, rely on the iconic nature of the Infinity Saga from the 1990s to

“click” with hardcore comic fans. The biggest names in comic books began to take chances in

the later years of the Aluminum Age but still relied heavily on nostalgia and pre-existing

knowledge within their fan bases to fuel a number of their projects. The trend toward

sensationalism has also been on the decline recently but, given the number of books that rely on

the nostalgia of the fanbase, such sensationalism is far from dead.

While the themes and trends of the Dark Age continue to influence and be recycled into

the media being produced during the Aluminum Age, changes to that media, including the

addition of minority characters and innovative art and narrative techniques, led to a shift from

realism to revisionism as a narrative form, and creators have begun drawing from other sources

for inspiration. The trend toward reconstructionism over realism and revisionism began in the

Dark Age with the publication of Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s Marvels. What started as a

rebellion from the violence and hyper-realism present in revisionist comics from the Dark Age

soon became the dominant mode of storytelling in the Aluminum Age. The introduction of the

Ultimate Universe by Marvel Comics streamlined the sixty years of narrative that often acted as

an obstacle to recruiting new readers.

When coupled with the increased use of comics as transmedial objects, the differences

between the Aluminum Age and the Dark Age become apparent, and the need for an addition to

the age system of a whole is made obvious. These changes have made books published during

the Aluminum Age different enough from the books published in the Dark Age to warrant the

addition of a new age to the already established system of ages used to organize the history of

comic books. So, the argument is not whether or not the age system should be used, but whether

or not the age system needs to be updated to better reflect the changes made in both the comic

book industry and the content of the comics published since 2001. Comics published in the

Aluminum Age address topics pertinent to twenty-first century America by commenting on

queer issues and the U.S.’s reactions to terrorist attacks. More than that, however, storytellers in

the Aluminum Age used comics to pioneer new modes of storytelling in which characters can be

reconstructed, resurrected, and recreated time and time again. As their own form of literature,

comics can now be studied in relation to American culture, and the themes in comics—which

inform and are informed by American culture—can be better analyzed and used to make sense of

the world.

The Aluminum Age was characterized by a recycled plotlines and increased references to

previous issues and events, a reduction in the amount of general violence found in comics, the

use of comics as transmedial objects, and an increase in the diversity of characters, particularly

in the realm of Queer characters. Though many of these characteristics had their roots in the

Dark Age, the Aluminum Age took those characteristics to extremes previously unimagined. The

shift from to reconstructionism was well underway by 2001, and the surprising success of the X-

Men and Spider-Man films, both released in or around 2001, foreshadowed the immense success

now enjoyed by the comic book film. The new age “Aluminum Age,” not only upholds the long-

held tradition of “metallic” names for comic book ages; it also underscores the degree to which

comic book stories from the recent past are easily recycled into multiple different mediums for

new audiences.

The addition of the Aluminum Age separates the comics of the early twenty-first century

from the comics of the late twentieth century. Comics in the Aluminum Age evolved to be

different from those in the Dark Age in the ways described above, and the social commentary

found in those comics reflects that evolution. By adding the Aluminum Age to the larger age

system, better analysis of the comics published between 2001 and 2018 can be undertaken, and

larger trends in the comic book industry can more easily be identified. The Aluminum Age is

necessary for better comic book scholarship in the twenty-first century. By adding to the existing

organizational structure for comic book history, scholars can better organize their research

without excluding the earliest comic book scholars: the fans.

REFERENCES

Primary Sources

Comics – Individual Issues

Broome, John (w), Gil Kane (p), Joe Giella (i). “S.O.S Green Lantern!” Showcase v.1 #22

(October, 1959). National Comics Publications [DC Comics]: [2-7].

-----. “[Untitled].” Marvels Epilogue #1 (September, 2019). Marvel Comics.

Cameron, Don (w), and Jerry Robinson (p,i). “Swastika Over the White House.” Batman v.1 #14

(January, 1943). Detective Comics Inc. [DC Comics]: [35-48].

David, Peter (w), Valentine De Landro (p), Marco Santucci (p,i), and Pat Davidson et al. (i),

“[Untitled],” X-Factor v.3 #45 (August, 2009). Marvel Comics.

Ellis, Warren (w), Cliff Nielsen and Terese Nielsen (p,i). “[Untitled].” Ruins #1 (August, 1995).

Marvel Comics.

-----. “[Untitled].” Ruins #2 (September, 1995). Marvel Comics.

Englehart, Steve (w), Frank Robbins (p), and Frank Giacoia (i). “Nomad: No More.” Captain

America v.1 #183 (March, 1975). Marvel Comics.

Englehart, Steve (w), Herb Trimple (p), Frank Giacoia and Mike Esposito (i). “Cap’s Back!”

Captain America v.1 #184 (April, 1975). Marvel Comics.

Englehart, Steve (w), Sal Buscema (p), and Vince Colletta (i). “Before the Dawn!” Captain

America v.1 #175 (July, 1974). Marvel Comics.

Finger, Bill (w), Martin Nodell (p, i). “The Origin of Green Lantern.” All-American Comics v.1

#16 (July, 1940). All-American Comics, Inc. [DC Comics]: [2-9].

Fox, Gardner (w), Mike Sekowsky (p), Bernard Sachs (i). “Metamorpho Says – No!” Justice

League of America v.1 #42 (February, 1966). National Periodical Publications Inc. [DC

Comics].

Johns, Geoff (w), Gary Frank (p, i). Doomsday Clock v.1 #1-12. (November 2017-December

2019). DC Comics.

Johns, Geoff, Grant Morrison, Greg Ruka, et. al. (w), Keith Griffin and Ken Lashley (p), Marvin

Mariano and Greg Parkin (i). “Going Down.” 52 #7 (August, 2006). DC Comics.

Liefeld, Rob and Fabian Nicieza (w), Rob Liefeld (p,i). “The Beginning of the End Part 1.” The

New Mutants v.1 #98 (February, 1991). Marvel Comics.

Lobdell, Scott (w), Mark Pacella (p), and Dan Panosian (i). “The Walking Wounded.” Alpha

Flight v.1 #106 (March, 1992). DC Comics.

Loveness, Jeff (w), Brad Walker (p), Andrew Hennessy and Norm Rapmund (i). “The Death of

Superman.” Tales of the Dark Multiverse: The Death of Superman #1 (December, 2019).

DC Comics.

Todd McFarlane (w, p, i). “Sabotage, Part 1.” Spider-Man v.1 #16 (November, 1991). Marvel

Comics.

Nicieza, Fabian (w), and Rob Liefeld (w, p, i). “Battle Cry (Prelude to Sabotage).” X-Force v.1

#3 (October 1991). Marvel Comics.

O’Neil, Dennis (w), Neal Adams (p, i), and Dick Giordano (i). “Snowbirds Don’t Fly.” Green

Lantern v.2 #85-86 (August/September-October/November, 1971). National Periodical

Publications Inc. [DC Comics].

Schiff, Jack (w), Bob Kane (p), and Jerry Robinson (i). “The Two Futures.” Batman v.1 #15

(March, 1943). Detective Comics Inc. [DC Comics]: [33-46].

Siegel, Jerry (w), Wayne Boring (a). Superman. February 16-19, 1942. McClure Syndicate.

Snyder, Scott (w), Greg Capullo (p), Jonathan Glapion (i). “[Untitled].” Dark Nights: Metal v.1

#4 (February 2018). DC Comics.

Snyder, Scott and Kyle Higgins (w), Javier Fernandez (a), “[Untitled].” Tales from the Dark

Multiverse: Batman: Knightfall #1 (December, 2019). DC Comics.

Straczyski, Michael J. (w), John Romita Jr. (p), and Scott Hana (i). “Stand Tall.” Amazing

Spider-Man v.2 #36 (December 2001). Marvel Comics.

Comics – Collections

Bendis, Brian Michael (w), Leinil Yu (p), and Mark Morales (i). Secret Invasion. Edited by Tom

Brevoort. New York: Marvel Comics, 2008.

Bunn, Cullen (w), Matteo Lolli, and Matteo Buffagni (p, i). Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars. New

York: Marvel Comics, 2015.

Busiek, Kurt (w), Alex Ross (a). Marvels. New York: Marvel Comics, 2009.

Cooke, Darwyn Brian Azzarello, et al. (w), Amanda Conner, J.G. Jones, et al. (p,i). Before

Watchmen (2012). DC Comics.

Johns, Geoff (w), Phil Jimenez et. al. (p), Andy Lanning, et. al. (i). Infinite Crisis. New York:

DC Comics, 2007.

Millar, Mark (w), Steve McNiven (p), Dexter Vines et. al. (i). Civil War. New York: Marvel

Comics, 2007.

Rieber, John Ney (w), John Cassaday (p, i). Captain America: The New Deal. Edited by Stuart

Moore and Joe Quesada. New York: Marvel Comics, 2018.

Waid, Mark (w), and Alex Ross (a). Kingdom Come. New York: DC Comics, 1997.

Magazine/Newspaper Articles

“Comic-Book Hearing to Start Tomorrow.” New York Times. April 20, 1954.

“Comic Book Hearings Set.” New York Times. May 27, 1954.

“Industry Sales Records in 1993 Shadowed by Collapse of Speculator Boom,” The Comics

Journal #166. February, 1994.

Lupoff, Dick. “Rebirth.” Comic Art v.1 #1, 1961.

Mangels, Andy. “Out of the Closet and into the Comics: Gays in Comics: The Creations and the

Creators Part 1.” Amazing Heroes #143, June 15, 1988.

Online Sources

Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. “The Comics Code of 1954.” Accessed October 16, 2019.

cbldf.org/the-comics-code-of-1954/.

Shooter, Jim. “Secrets of the Secret Wars.” JimShooter.com - Writer. Creator. Large Mammal.

Last Modified 4 April 2011. Accessed April 11, 2019. jimshooter.com/2011/04/secrets-

of-secret-wars.html/.

Secondary Sources

Books

Burke, Liam. The Comic Book Film Adaptation, Jackson Mississippi: The University Press of

Mississippi, 2015. Kindle.

Duncan, Randy and Michael J. Smith. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. New

York: Continuum International Publishing Group Inc., 2009.

Khoury, George. Image Comics: The Road to Independence. Raleigh, North Carolina:

TwoMorrows Publishing, 2007.

Kidman, Shawna. Incorporating Comics: How the Business of Comics Became the Business of

Hollywood. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019.

Levitz, Paul. 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking. Koln, Germany: Taschen,

2010.

Martin, Geoff and Erin Steuter. Pop Culture Goes to War: Enlisting and Resisting Militarism in

the War on Terror. Plymouth, United Kingdom: Lexington Books, 2010.

Nyberg, Amy Kiste. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. Jackson, Mississippi:

The University Press of Mississippi, 1998.

Overstreet, Robert M. ed. The Overstreet Comics Book Price Guide, 48

ed. Hunt Valley,

Maryland: Gemstone Publishing, 2018.

Rosenkranz, Patrick. Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975. Seattle,

Washington: Fantagraphics Books, 2008.

Stevens, J. Richard. Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence: The Evolution of a National

Icon. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2015.

Thurman, Kevin and Julian Darius, Voyage in Noise: Warren Ellis and the Demise of Western

Civilization. Edwardsville, Illinois: Sequart Research & Literacy Organization, 2013.

Kindle.

Tye, Larry. Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero. New York:

Random House Publishing Group, 2012.

Voger, Mark. The Dark Age: Grim, Great, and Gimmicky Post-Modern Comics. Raleigh, North

Carolina: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2006.

Weldon, Glen. The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. New York: Simon

and Schuster, 2017.

Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.

Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Young, Paul. Frank Miller’s Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism. New Brunswick, New Jersey:

Rutgers University Press, 2016.

Journal Articles/Book Chapters

Blumberg, Arnold T. “Promotional Comics: The Marketing of a Medium.” In The Overstreet

Price Guide, 48

ed., edited by Robert Overstreet, 305-308. Hunt Valley, Maryland:

Gemstone Publishing, 2018.

Darowski, Joseph J. “Searching for Meaning in ‘The Death of Superman.’” In Ages of

Superman: Essays on the Man of Steel in Changing Times. Edited by Joseph J. Darowski,

166-176. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc., Publishers, 2012.

Dittmer, Jason. “Captain America’s Empire: Reflections on Identity, Popular Culture, and Post-

9/11 Geopolitics.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, no.3 (Sep.

2005): 626-643.

Hall, Justin. Introduction to No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics. Seattle,

Washington: Fantagraphics Books, 2013.

Hayton, Christopher J. and David L. Albright. “Oh Captain! My Captain!” In Captain America

and the Struggle of the Superhero: Critical Essays, edited by Robert G. Weiner, 15-23.

Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2009.

Johnson, Jeffrey K. “This Isn’t Your Grandfather’s Comic Book Universe: The Return of the

Golden Age Superman.” In The Ages of Superman: Essays on the Man of Steel in

Changing Times, edited by Joseph J. Darowski, 199-208. Jefferson, North Carolina:

McFarland & Company Publishers Inc., 2012.

Kvaran, Kara. “SuperGay: Depictions of Homosexuality in Mainstream Superhero Comics.” In

Comics as History Comics as Literature: Roles of the Comic Book in Scholarship,

Society, and Entertainment, edited by Annessa Ann Babic, 141-156. Lanham, Maryland:

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. Kindle.

Lendrum, Rob. “Queering Super-Manhood: Superhero Masculinity, Camp and Public Relations

as a Textual Framework.” International Journal of Comic Art 7, no.1 (Spring/Summer

2005): 287-303.

Smith, Greg M. “It Ain’t Easy Studying Comics.” Cinema Journal 50, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 110-

112.

Smith, Greg M., Thomas Andrae, Scott Bukatman, and Thomas LaMarre. “Surveying the World

of Contemporary Comics Scholarship: A Conversation.” Cinema Journal 50, no. 3

(Spring 2011): 135-147.

-----. “Guarding the Home Front.” In Batman: The War Years 1939-1945, edited by Michelle

Faulkner and Frank Oppel, 135-136. New York: Chartwell Books, 2015.

-----. “In for the Duration.” In Superman: The War Years 1938-1945, edited by Michelle

Faulkner and Frank Oppel, 197-198. New York: Chartwell Books, 2015.

-----. “The Home Front War.” In Batman: The War Years 1939-1945. Edited by Michelle

Faulkner and Frank Oppel, 100-101. New York: Chartwell Books, 2015.

-----. “Victory.” In Batman: The War Years 1939-1945. Edited by Michelle Faulkner and Frank

Oppel, 284-285. New York: Chartwell Books, 2015.

Tilly, Carol L. “Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications that Helped

Condemn Comics.” Information & Culture 47, no. 4 (2012): 383-413.

Walton, David. “‘Captain America Must Die: The Many Afterlives of Steve Rogers.” In Captain

America and the Struggle of the Superhero: Critical Essays, edited by Robert G. Weiner,

160-175. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2009.

Dissertations/Theses

Jones, Dyfrig. “Islamic Invaders: Secret Invasion and the Post-9/11 World of Marvel.”

Unpublished manuscript Bangor University, 2019.

Scott, Cord A. “Comics and Conflict: War and Patriotically Themed Comics in American

Cultural History from World War II Through the Iraq War.” PhD. diss., Loyola

University Chicago, 2011.

Online Sources

Ohanesian, Liz. “DC Comics Writer and Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns Explains the Comic

Books That Inspired Him.” L.A. Weekly. Last modified, 24 May 2016.

www.laweekly.com/arts/dc-comics-writer-and-chief-creative-officer-geoff-johns-

explains-the-comic-books-that-inspired-him-4184145.

Riesman, Abraham. “The Secret History of Ultimate Marvel, the Experiment that Changed

Superheroes Forever.” Vulture. Last modified Mary 25, 2015. Accessed March 11, 2020.

www.vulture.com/2015/05/secret-history-of-ultimate-marvel.html.

Sieczkowski, Cavan. “‘Batwoman’ Authors Exit, Claim DC Comics Banned Gay Marriage

Storyline.” Huffington Post. Last modified September 5, 2013.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/batwoman-dc-comics-gay-marriage_n_3873508.

Wilonsky, Robert. “The Brave and the Bold - October 3, 2001.” SF Weekly. Last modified

October 3, 2001. Accessed October 21, 2019. www.sfweekly.com/culture/the-brave-and-

the-bold/.