BW Media Spotlight

Take that, PETA!
{image source: mycomicshop.com}

My first comics came from the tale end of the 1970s. While I was born in 1973, I didn’t get into comics until the 1980s. So my taste in comics were formed by the so-called “Bronze Age“, a period between the super-goofy and the super-serious, where adventures were serious but not too serious. This is what I view as fun stories that new when to get “real”. The Justice League fighting giant animal hybirds? Sure! Batman teaming with eccentric homeless people to solve a murder? Up my alley. Firestorm’s entire concept? Sign me up! It may be darker than the Silver Age and more serious, but it was still fun and adventurous enough for younger readers, like I was at the time, and was accessible to almost any age group. It’s where shared continuity came to DC Comics but still remembered what made DC work for its fans. And when it started getting past the limitations it thought it had (or in some cases actually had) thanks to the Comics Code, and probably why I defend the Code in theory, but not always in practice or application.

That doesn’t mean I’m trapped in a Bronze Age mindset. The first comic I collected was The Transformers, starting at issue #6. The majority of my collection comes from the post-Crisis DC Universe and into the 90s, only in part because that’s when I had a job and spending money. A good story is where you find it and there are easily comics in my collection that would never have flown in the Bronze Age. However, those are the stories that I enjoyed as a kid and probably has the biggest influence on the stories in my head (although Captain Yuletide, by nature, would be closer to Silver Age, many stories from that period I also read as a kid thanks to oversized hardcover trades I used to get at the library long before trades became a big deal in comics).

So when I saw a Comic Book Resources interview with Dan DiDio on YouTube about Convergence I was going to pass it up. Seeing what today’s DC creators are doing with superheroes in general and the DCU in particular I worry that this event will be about updating the classics to something more modern, or like Turtles Forever, a lampooning of the old in favor of the new without realizing what made the old work. However, the interview also featured Len Wein, one of the top writers of the period, and the discussion of the 1970s, one of the timelines featured in Convergence, was actually quite good.

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