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.
![[sprott.jpg]](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Ux1ucye3REo/SfpA9Jo_urI/AAAAAAAAAhA/1Y6h2Ehrbgw/s1600/sprott.jpg)
page from George Sprott by Seth
Labels: comics
posted by Robert Boyd at
4:47 PM
1 Comments:
Yeah, that's right. The golden age, the golden oldies of popular music - all the "golden" stuff, (except the metal) are really about the age of the people thinking it was golden. Not the comics or the music. It's all about the memories, mostly false, that those golden oldies (of whatever genre) evoke in the speakers.
Many of the golden oldies were and are crap. But hey. It was OUR crap, and we were young and we remember it being great. Therefore...
I'm not saying that is a bad thing. Just something to keep in mind, so's you don't expect The Archies to be anywhere near Bach.
jdallen
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