Reading the article about the History and Importance of Green Lantern: Rebirth, I had this thought. DC history is long and our perspective shifts over time. That’s a given. As a very long time DC reader, I sometimes get irked that “things aren’t like they were in the old days.” I started reading comics in the Bronze Age and sometimes find almost anything that happened after the original Crisis on Infinite Earths somewhat alienating. But, this is a wrong view.
To put it this way, when I started reading Green Lantern comics, Hal Jordan had been a character for less then twenty years. Almost as much time has now passed since the GL Rebirth Mini Series was published. More time than that has passed since Parallax or another couple additional decades since Hard Traveling Heroes. So, my focus on the comics I read as a kid is such a tiny slice of DC history that to focus on it is absurd. That’s not to say I won’t always have extra fondness for the comics of that era, but it’s like leaving a movie half an hour after it starts while thinking that you’ve seen the whole thing.
The lesson I take away from that is to the appreciate all the characters that I like in their more modern incarnations and appreciate the creativity that has gone into them and that these characters are still around to point to the heroic way of doing things. I appreciate DC Universe helping me to see this. It’s a big picture out there.
I grew up in the DC Silver Age. And of course, I tend to compare and measure standards by that era. However, I do realize that the Silver Age was not the beginning, and there were those back then that longed for an earlier DC era and complained about the changes made in the Silver Age. It is how it goes. It is like who was the best Doctor Who pretty much depends on who your first Doctor Who was (Tom Baker for me), rather than the actual first Doctor Who.
So yes, I do grumble about some, or many, of the changes DC has made to characters and story lines, but I do actually like some, or many, of the changes over time. I do get rather disgusted with too many dark themed stories, that tend to flood all too many stories, TV shows, and movies today, but even then, not all dark stories are bad. I think it is more the sheer number of them that feel oppressive and hard to take for me, coming from an era the painted itself as more pure than it really was.
I also have to admit that story telling is vastly better in this modern era. Comic books of my childhood were often very simplistic, and often rather campy, and I knew that even then. But the loss of that pretend innocence kinda hurt. But at the same time, it was also nice to see things from a more realistic perspective, and from a more adult point of view, as I was become more of an adult, so were DC comic books.
Well said and you raise a good point regarding storytelling technique. It is much better and much more sophisticated now, and I appreciate the more serial approach to storytelling that has evolved over the years. I think that allows the stories to be much more immersive.
A good point, although can’t entirely relate. I got heavily into comics in the very late 80’s and early to mid 90’s. And while that era is not without it’s good material I would never claim that todays comics are not as good at back then. I mean the 90’s were a rough decade on comics. lol
I went through different comic book collecting times. I started my collection in 1974, but had been reading them before that, just not saving them. We moved a lot when I was a kid, so it was hard to keep up the collecting, but even still, in a few years I was already building a good sized stack of them. Then as a young adult, I became too busy to collect comics for several years, during vocational training and military time, and such, and then marriage. But right about 1985 or 1986, I started collecting again. Things were changing then, and it was a good time to see those changes going on. But as DanTheManOne1 said, the 90s hit and those stories started getting weird and darker than hell. So at some point, I stopped collecting again. I think I did start collecting again before the end of the 1990s though. But then stopped again by about a decade or so ago. More of a cash flow problem that last time, but again some of the changes were not to my liking anyway.
Now, I look at all my boxes and half boxes and see that I just do not have room to store any more new comics in my collection. So I have bought a few samples of modern comics in digital form, but I hate paying that much for digital comics. Not fond of paying that much for paper comics either. Comics were $0.20 when I first started collecting comics, or had just changed to $0.25. Modern prices just seem rather excessive to me.
So, I still just sample a few titles now and then, but love to catch the live action shows and movies.