Old Comic Books

When I first started looking around at comics in the ’80s to educate myself on the history of the comic book, I thought there would be a lot of funny old comics out there, and there really aren’t. The truth is, there are almost no good old comic books out there. Those old comics turned out to be exactly as you’d expect: cheap junk produced quickly to sell to children. (Seth in an A.V. Club interview)

I'm astonished that comics fans consider the 30s, 40s, and 50s to be the "Golden Age." Comics then were almost all terrible. Individual old comics occasionally contain an interesting semi-redeeming feature that stands out because the rest of the comic is so awful. Really good cartoonists in those days did comic strips, not comic books. Of course there are a few exceptions, but for me personally, the "golden age" of comics is now--the age of Asterios Polyp and Black Hole and George Sprott: 1894-1975, etc., etc.

page from George Sprott by Seth