Nerd Rage #14: The Dark Age of Comics

"I'M NOT GAY!!!"

This is blog entry #250 for Beta is Dead. Now I honestly don’t think that 250 is a milestone to throw a party over but I still decided to do something a little more personal and a little bigger than my usual entries. Over the years I’ve take a lot of pit shots at what is known as The Dark Age of Comic Books, or to more specific the 90s. This is also referred to as The Iron Age of Comic Books by people who remember this period a little more fondly than I do. Anyway I’ve decided that, if I’m going to crack the jokes, I should explain why I have a problem with this particular era of comics.

For more info on the other Ages of Comics click here.

We should probably start by talking about the era itself. The range of this period is heavily contested however most would agree it began in 1986. This as the year that two masterpieces came out: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. Both were dark, gritty deconstruction of the classic (i.e. “campy”, “corny”) idea of what it is to be a superhero. They were also both really good, especially Watchmen which is a contender for the greatest superhero story ever told. This was also the year that DC Comic’s mega crossover Crisis on Infinite Earths, another beloved classic, was released. The series rebooted the entire DC Universe, cut all ties to the Silver Age and Golden Age and, while not starting from scratch, was supposed to be a more modern interpretation of their world. This was really what this era was shooting for in the following years: a fond farewell to the days where comics were for kids and embrace a more mature, more complex and above all edgier style.

Yeah, that sounds good on paper.

The end of this era is probably the most debated of any other era in comic books. For one many, many people firmly believe that the Dark Age never ended and we’re still there today. However others believe that it ended between 1995 and 1996 as those years saw the debut of Astro City, which was a reconstruction of the good aspects of superhero comics from the Silver Age, and Kingdom Come, which was itself a deconstruction of the Dark Age and the antiheroes that populated it. 1996 was also the year of the Comic Book Crash, which we’ll talk about today. Still others point at 2000, the debut of Ultimate Spider-Man and Marvel Comics’ “Ultimate” line. Either way the idea is that by the late 90s the industry had gotten tired of the antiheroes and the dark and grittiness of the times and were moving back towards a more lighthearted vision of what it means to be a superhero. So now that we know the "when" we should look at the “why”.

Guns, tits, and pouches after the jump.
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