Unca Cheeks the Toy Wonder's Silver Age Comics Web Site!

a review of DC’s SILVER AGE event
by Quentin Long

So: Unca Cheeks dropped me an invite to this little online clambake, and I re-read the Silver Age books (with no little pleasure, believe you me)... and I started thinking about ‘em.

And I kept coming back, time and again, to one simple question:

How did it sell?

The covers: lovingly crafted to re-create that distinctive 1960s DC ambiance. You got your old-school DC logo (big red “DC” in the font Cooper Black, surrounded by some black text in VAG Rounded; a font which certainly works in this context, albeit I don’t recall if it actually existed back then); your (to contemporary eyes, anyway) weirdly oversized Comics Code Authority seal; the actual title logos used on actual published comics of the era; art by people who drew covers of the era (Infantino, Cardy, Fradon, Mooney), or by later artists who display clear Silver Age influence (Bolland, Templeton); even the price, given as a three-digit number of cents, is presented in a 1960s style.

To repeat: DC has done an excellent re-enactment of vintage Silver Age cover styles. But -- and I’m sure you could see the “but” coming -- enticing people to buy the book is the purpose of a cover. And these covers would, I’m confident, have done so quite nicely, back in the era they evoke.

Of course, some things which worked way back when would be laughed off the face of the Earth today; even the kiddies tend to be more cynical, nowadays, than they used to was in the 1960s.

Sure, the underlying virtues of Silver Age comics will never be outdated; but, at the same time, you’ve got to admit that some of the stylistic trappings of those comics (e.g. “girls are icky an’ just plain wrong. And so are women.”) would never work in today’s market. All of which kinda begs the question: how well did the covers work?

Or, in other words... how did it sell?

Moving right along: the interiors are almost as Silver Age-y as the covers. Consider the layouts, chock-full of design elements common to the era’s books: splash pages too symbolic to actually contribute to moving the plot along. Stories whose chapters end in truncated pages. 1/3-page house ads to fill out the remainder of the truncated pages. Chapter titles that occupy space like the banner ads of contemporary web page, except less annoying. Even the 1960s-enough-to-induce-flashbacks Direct Currents “coming attractions” pages.

Really, the only thing I found contemporary enough to be jarring was the overuse of full-page bleeds in SHOWCASE and the “backup story” in FLASH; bleeds which, while not entirely absent from comics of the time, are far more evocative of a later era's books.

The content of the stories was likewise consistent with the era, for the most part. While the pointless slaughters (both of them!) we saw in the JUSTICE LEAGUE book were (presumably) intended to establish that yes, these guys are Evil, and (thus) credible threats... the mass murders were far, far too “kill ‘em all just to watch them die” for a Silver Age-inspired storyline. I can’t help but feel that Mark Millar, the guy what wrote this issue, was trying for a Silver Age version of that other book he writes -- THE AUTHORITY -- which is stuffed floorid to the gills with the old ultraviolence, oh me droogies.

Moving right along to happier observations: all the characters were as the audience would reasonably be expected to know them... which may be why Lex Luthor was the Corrupt Businessman of modern times, rather than the Mad Scientist of the Silver Age; in all probability, most of today’s readers don’t know nothin’ about Luthor the Mad Scientist; or, in the case of new characters (see also: the new Shining Knight), we know all we need to know about them because the story told us what we need to know.

More to the point, the authors cheerfully threw continuity to the wolves whenever they damn well felt like it. This was most blatantly evident in THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD, written by genuine Silver Age scripter Bob Haney. Face it, there’s no way in Hell that any present-day writer could possibly get away with a caption like : “And soon, after programming the ancient spell into Doc’s machine...” (!!).

Think about that one for a moment, if you will. Sure, it’s not unreasonable for Doc Magnus to have suspected that magick might be involved, when he saw his pet robots inexplicably transformed into flesh-and-blood... but: how would he have known which spell? And exactly how does one go about “programming [an] ancient spell into [a] machine”, anyway? I’d pay good money to eavesdrop on that tech support call!

(“Magnus Robotics, here. We’re running BSD Unix version 3.5 on a 150-MHz 80486 chip with 75 megs of RAM.” -- Yeah, those specs are wimpy by today’s standards, but the Silver Age event was clearly set at the Dawn of Time, when the internet was just barely started, so cut me some slack here, willya? Anyway -- “The problem started after we installed NEWTSeye gimel and the latest beta version of Pentagram Pro, that’s the one with the new CrystalBall scrying feature we’re testing for IBM...”)

That, of course, was just a throwaway caption; hardly worth the words I expended on it. Another, far more significant offense against Continuity in said issue of B&B, however: when Penguin reverted back to his usual self, how come Green Arrow and Black Canary weren’t affected at the same time? Well, since Green Lantern was responsible for shuffling everyone’s minds back into their proper bodies, maybe the power ring was late for its 30,000-parsec scheduled maintenance or something.

(Speaking of Green Lantern, you all noticed that Sonar fought him in the sound-free vacuum of outer space, right...?)

That’s the (real) Silver Age for you: plot points that don’t stand up to a moment’s thought in the cold, harsh light of day... but the story carries you along so insistently, like a mighty river, that you don’t notice until after you've finished the book. Or at least, the story carries you along if you let it; I can’t help but wonder, are today’s (continuity-conscious, footnote-everything-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life, no-loose-ends-allowed- to-any-author-not-named-Claremont) fans willing to cooperate with the author to that extent?

As well, today’s fans pay -- and pay quite a bit -- for 22 full pages of story. How many contemporary fans will appreciate the author wasting one of those expensive pages on a symbolic splash that does nothing to advance the plot? How many will feel cheated by the encroachment of those 1/3-page house ads into space which, by rights, ought to be taken up by the story?

All together, now --

How?

Did?

It?

SELL!?

At this point, I want to declare that I liked the SILVER AGE books.

I liked them a whole lot.

See, I’m okay with letting the story carry me along. I’m up for cooperating with the author, to coin a phrase. I don’t need the author to spoon-feed me every little thing, or cross-index all the flavor out of a story; when I notice a discrepancy in a story, I am perfectly capable of explaining minor plot glitches all by myself, the way God and Stan Lee intended.

Which is, basically, a roundabout way of saying that no, I didn’t think about any of this stuff while I was reading the Silver Age books. All this stuff came up later, when (at Unca Cheeks’ request) I sat down and had myself a session of good old skull sweat on the topic of What About That There SILVER AGE Event, Huh?

The books were great fun, no question; but, in thinking about them, I couldn’t help but ponder larger issues, such as the continued fiscal health of the American comics industry; and Where Have All The New Readers Gone; and like that. Issues which touch, at least tangentially, on the sordid topic of How Did The Sucka SELL, Awready.

That, for me, may be the worst part of the whole Silver Age event (and it’s certainly not Mark Waid’s fault!): in the process of reviewing a clutch of awfully good comic books, I found it impossible to stick to the merits (or lack thereof) of the art and writing, because my train of thought kept on being boarded by a question which, by rights, ought not be there at all:

How did the performer-of-incestous-rape SELL, for the love of Odin?

The SILVER AGE Limited Series (PAGE TWO)

The SILVER AGE Limited Series (PAGE THREE)

The SILVER AGE Limited Series (PAGE FOUR)

The SILVER AGE Limited Series (PAGE FIVE)

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