What is Your Favorite Age of Comic Books?

I just thought I would ask everyone what their favorite age or era of comic books was. The Golden Age? The Silver Age? The Bronze Age? The modern era? This is a difficult question for me to answer myself, as I am drawn to the Golden Age characters, but then I think the stories do leave something to be desired at times. I grew up in the Bronze Age, but while I am very sentimental about that era, I can’t say it is my favorite. I think I might have settle with the Silver Age then, when there was quite a bit of creativity taking place at DC.

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The Golden Age. My second choice would be the 1980s, transitioning between the later years of the Bronze Age and the early Dark Age (before the 1990s ruined everything).

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Early Rebirth was great but current comics are terrible

Bronze Age is consistently good
Characterization good enough
Issues full.of plots which you could understand
Arcs relatively ahort or none at all

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Silver-age fan here.

Each issue was a good story. Heroing was fun! Character didn’t change at a whim with a new writer. Long run without reboots allowed for a character to journey through life, from orphanage to school to college to working life. Only the imagination (and the CCA :grinning:) put limits to the stories. Jumps in time -ok. Have a supercat and a Superhorse -ok. Best friends in the future - ok. Superhypnotism, Superventriloquosm… anything with the prefix Super- is ok.

In one year of comics all manner of crazy things had happened.

At the start of Rebirth it was really good too.

Our current age of comics is the my very least favorite age.

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Small addendum: The YA lines are still good. It’s the main line that have forgotten that comics once were fun and not a dark miserable place of suffering and abuse

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Bronze Age for me, but I’m also sentimental as that was my childhood. I no longer think in ages, but I think in creators and stories. Is it a good story? I’ll read it. Is it a creator I like? I’ll read it. Good content can be found in all ages you just have to look for it.

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Where it all started for me: The Silver Age! And @TravisMorgan, you are so right about creators and stories. From Gardner Fox To Peter Tomasi, the canon of the medium is rich with talented creators.

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@baseballmaniac01.45870 It always surprises me that people are so loyal to a character or a company, but not to artists or writers. It must come with age. :joy:

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I love Bronze Age and early Modern Age stories. Just so fun and clever.

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I would say that my favorite era was the Bronze Age.

I started reading right at the end of the Bronze Age, so it is possible that nostalgia plays a factor in my choice.
The first DC Heroes rpg came out around the same time and it was set in the pre-Crisis era, so a lot of characters got immortalized in the sourcebooks and supplements for me. In particular, the two volume Legion of Super-Heroes Sourcebook became an important addition to my comic collection.

I actually became the most attached to the JLI in the Modern Age. For five years, I read every JLI related title. But because I didn’t really read much of anything else during that time, I don’t think the Modern Age really resonated with me.

The Bronze Age still accepted ‘fun’ in comics, and serious stories were done without all the posturing or pretentiousness that would come after the mid-80s.
And this was even with the Comics Code. Granted, post-1971 the Code was pretty lenient compared to it during the Silver Age.
What’s funny to me is that the call to abolish the Code focused on how the Code was so restrictive in the Silver Age.
The Code we had since '71 was more like a self-restraint to ‘keep it classy’ in public. So different from its original form.

I really like the characters of the Golden Age. I love pulp-ish characters if they’re written as humans. Unfortunately, most of the stories in the Golden Age were quite short and often had crude art.
I would love to see more books like Sandman Mystery Theatre, where they adapt the older stories and expand on them in a similar style.
Batman: Year One had a lot of what I liked about the Golden Age. As did the Roy Thomas written issues of Secret Origins.

The Silver Age had some of the best plots. Amazing plots that embraced the comics medium without shame.
But it didn’t have the depth we would get in the Bronze Age with the Neal Adams influence going strong and the Comics Code allowing for more substantial stories.

The Bronze Age just had the perfect balance of tone and some of the most interesting new characters.
Comics were still fun but also more faceted.

I also think the last ten years has been my least favorite era.
Nothing since 2011 has really interested me, aside from a couple non-DCU titles (Scooby-Doo Team-Up and Batman '66).
I personally call the time from New52 up to the present the ‘Digital Age’, because 2011 is the year that both DC and Marvel went same-day digital. DC actually started their same-day digital releases with New52.

So, yeah, the Bronze Age is my pick.
It’s also the Era of the Satellite JLA. So it gets points for that, too.

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Early 2000s.

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Excellent thoughts @LeonardoMyst! Thank you for sharing. Obviously, I agree about the Bronze Age.

I think the last ten years have also been the independent age with creators producing some of their best work and retain ownership of their characters. Brubaker’s Criminal and Lemire’s Black Hammer come to mind. Jeff Parker and Doc Shaner did great work on Flash Gordon and I have read solid stories on other pulp characters like Doc Savage and the Shadow.

I agree modern mainstream comics are trying way to hard to be relevant by being grim and gritty. I hope the pendulum will swing back towards more fun comics. Until then, I have a lot of Bronze Age comics to read.

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I have to agree that too often today mainstream comics try too hard to be grim and gritty. Now I do appreciate a good “grim and gritty” comic book once in a while, but not all the time! I really enjoyed the days when comic books were mostly fun.

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Controversial stance:

New 52

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Im not the best person to answer this, given my casual nature with DC, however, I think each ‘age ‘ as it wree has different value to it and drawbacks as well. I didn’t get into comics until the last decade or so but the newer comics didn’t really keep me engaged…I read some New 52, over at Marvel I was following Spider-man but when i was a kid in the 90s i was more into video games and baseball cards

So im not really nostalgic for any era, I got more into comics when I discovered I could read Marvel for a small fee a month and DC has soon followed…all the comics I could ever want, read in an order if I chose

Course, ive read other comics outside the big 2, there’s a comic shop nearby but being able to legally read comics digitally was a big thing for me. Im not a collector, i have no space anyway but that’s part why i stayed away too…i had this perception that you were supposed to collect comics rather than read them

Long winded to say on my background, that I try to focus on enjoying the comics, creative runs are important to me (the bronze age is big with this because it starts to emerge with more and more creators who took chances with their work) but i also love the history of comics hence why I will read all golden Age Superman I can on here…same with Batman even if it feels dated and pointless to canon…

And yet, my goals are to read an order and get current with comics (at least that was my goal with Marvel…im in 2016 there but taking a break) I don’t have a distaste for the modern age, possibly because I didn’t grow up reading comics but also, i just try to find some positives in any comic i read…even bad ones

Long story short, I will read any comic but I would say Im partial to the bronze age and a little after that where comics advanced with stories but weren’t too beholden to one style

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It definitely has some great stories like Forever Evil, Amazo Virus, Forever Evil, JLA, Forever Evil, Throne of Atlantis, Forever Evil, Court of Owls, and Forever Evil.

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