Stuff I learned about the Golden Age

[ctc]

So;

Thanks to the internets I've had opportunity to read TONS of Golden Age comics, and there seems to be a few recurring ideas:

-I have an odd predelection for Archie clones, horror comics and anything with a robot on the cover.

-"Copyright" and "trademark" seem to be new concepts. Seriously; the amount of blatant ripoffs that happened way back when is ASTOUNDING! It's like there were three ideas going around, and everybody sort of tweaked them a bit and slapped a sort of new name on it. And it's not all ripoffs of stuff you'd think it'd be worthwhile ripping off: was "Hoppy the Marvel Bunny" popular enough to warrant the prodigious amount of clones?

-Reprints were big too. I can now understand why "all new!" on the cover of my childhood reads was a big deal. There was a lot of books that would get renamed and rereleased with exactly the same pages. Or they'd tweak the art a bit and print it as a new character.

-Renumbering isn't a new thing either. So many old school books would play fast and loose with the concept of numbering: dropped issues, different issues with the same number, retitling the book and starting over, (but continuing any storeis or series already running) retitling the book and continuing, (which was worse 'cos it made it seem like there were more issues of the new title than there were,) books jumping companies and starting with seeming random numbers.

-HUGE differences in runs. So many books only lasted for 2, 5, 10 issues and died. Then there were books that had runs of 100+.... although some of them seem to have happened because they combined two other books and added the current number of issues printed to get the current book's start point.

I know a lot of the funny numbering was done to screw with the Post Office; but was THIS MUCH monkeying really neccessary? Who'd they get to number the books, Capone's accountants?

-It's funny to see how tastes change over the years. There were SO MANY genres of comic book that are gone now. Romance books were HUGE; now they're nonexistant. Westerns, jungle comics, (SO MANY jungle comics,) the inexplicable "hillbilly" genre, (it's like someone had an Al Capp cloning machine hidden somewhere in the Ozarks....) crime comics. Weird thing is how many of these genres were staples well into the late 70's. (Even 70's Marvel and DC published romance books.... many of which featured slightly retouched stories that'd been in reprints since the early 50's.)

Don C.

[kingdom warrior]

......and everything you mentioned is why I love the Golden Age of comics, heck the pulps were just as fun so getting into those books now as well.

What I seem to love is the endless stream of heroes who had no powers but had cool names or bad costumes with no powers. You can see publishers just cashing in on the "craze of the day" or getting comics out for "the boys in the trenches"

If you look at the covers of many of those books you can see how the trend starts out with heroes then moves to robots then to horror. heck. Captain America at one point was moved off the cover of his books when the horror craze was in.

You're so right, talk about genres that just don't exist yet at one point the stands are over flooded with Horror, Romance and Jungle my head still spins at all those Jungle titles....lol

Also add comics from other countries too. I grew up on a steady diet of El Santo,Kaliman and tons of detective style soap opera comics...that I still hunt in flea markets to this day....

It's really a shame that what's left is the independents to get anything different these days...instead of the superhero stuff,,,,


Steve.

[Adam West]

All of the jungle, horror, romance stuff kind of makes sense to me. There really weren't many other mediums like tv, internet, video games, to compete for eyeballs.

Most newspapers have declined readership dramatically and I expect many to go out of business...even tv is starting to lose viewership as people are spending more and more time on the internet.