This timeline begins with the start of the Platinum Age of Comics in 1897. This is hardly the beginning of significant events in comic book history. For instance, The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck was published in New York. This was a reprinting of Histoire de M. Vieux Bois, a Swiss comic by Rodolphe Töpffer that reached Britain in 1841, then America in 1842. This was the first comic book (here defined as a story told via sequential pictures) to be published in America. The industry we know today is completely separate from Töpffer's work. That's not to say that the individual comic books have no similarity. Töpffer's work was inventive and powerful. It created a legacy that continues to shape the comics being published even today. Another early and influential work was Palmer Cox's The Brownies in 1883.
It's important to note that these eras of the industry are somewhat arbitrarily defined. Each era has general similarities and is characterized by significant events. They are used to form a loose understanding of a time period and aid collectors in their pursuit of finding comic books. While these delineations can be very useful, they are by no means definitive. In fact, any comic book era after the end of the Bronze Age is open to debate and interpretation. The time periods listed here are not a complete list of every existing age in the comic book pundit world, but merely the most significant. These eras are ill-defined and by no means mutually exclusive. The period a comic book is published in is by no means a guarantee of anything, but may provide further insights into the context or content. While it's important to recognize the limitations of this breakdown, it's also important to understand how these eras came to be defined.
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This was the early formative period of comic books. The modern comic book originated as comic strips in New York City newspapers, which eventually became syndicated and then reprinted in independent books. These reprints were the first comic books, so unvalued that they were initially given away not sold. Their popularity eventually led to the publication of comic books with original material. This period is characterized by experimentalism, assembly line comic studios and bold entrepenuership. The Platinum Age began with the publication of the popular comic strip The Yellow Kid and ended with the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1.
Here is the rise of the costumed superhero. Up to and through the war years, men and women in brightly colored outfits battled the forces of evil in black-and-white good vs evil conflicts. As tensions rose, the American war machine made its presence clear in comic book pages as superheroes took a stand in World War Two. Coming out of the war there was a genre boom, expanding past superheroes to encompass romance, crime, westerns, horror, animal, teen humor, and licensed characters, among others. This period was rife with fantasy and mythology: magic, religion, the supernatural, and the alien all tangled to create this era's distinct feel.
Public backlash and self-inflicted censorship nearly killed the industry, spinning the surviving dregs into a less mature, more kid-friendly approach. DC rescued itself with a superhero resurgence: new and reimagined characters brought back in a campy, authority-friendly way. Other publishers quickly followed suit. The second superhero boom coincided with the Space Race and a public obsession with technology. Accordingly, this era moved from the mystical to the scientific; where the Golden Age had fantasy the Silver Age had Sci-Fi, where the Golden Age was vigilantes the Silver Age was proper authorities. This era was also known for it's many superhero teams.
Here, the censorship begins to wane. Creators began to take on social issues such as poverty and crime, exploring the complex socio-political landscape of the 1970s and 80s through flawed characters. Some suffered with addiction, while others dealt with PTSD from Vietnam and still others faced baseless discrimination. The blind faith in authority that was characteristic of the Silver Age began to fail, and nuanced perspectives took its place. For instance, the long running comic book series Green Lantern & Green Arrrow, paired a pro-establishment conservative with a socially liberal vigilante to provide a layered perspective to their superheroic adventures.
Arising from the renaissance of the Bronze Age, social politics and flawed characters ran wild. This age gave birth to the anti-hero as storylines turned tonally dark. Comics were attempting to be topical and mature and so were not afraid to display violence, abuse, and inhumanity. This was called the Grim and Gritty movement, named for the tone and style of comics that it produced. Not all comics in this period were so dark, but the boundaries of the genre were continually pushed farther back. Experiments in colors and inks combined with improvements in printing technology to allow comic book art to develop and better reflect these grisly stories.
Rather than a Dark Age or Iron Age, some perspectives view everything from 1985 to the present as the Modern Age Of Comics. Certain characteristics of the Modern Age, such as the independent publisher boom, antiheroes, reboots, creator's rights, and genre expansion run throughout the entirety of the Iron Age and certainly are "modern" aspects of the industry. The period as defined here is based on artistic and commercial trends. The rise of blockbuster superhero movies helped cement the Big Two publishers as large-scale commercial corporations and accordingly their comic books shifted from experimentalism to safer traditionalism.
This is another era that could be deemed a "sub-age" and subsumed into the Modern Age or Iron Age, but it provides some good insight. This age is separate from the Dark Age's postmodernist movement. This era began with DC's New 52, a complete revamp of all of its storylines. DC took the opportunity to redefine their story telling structure. It's a mark of this age that the actions of a single publisher can be so significant: in the Post Modern Age DC and Marvel have an unprecedented level of influence over the entire industry. Additionally, just as the first superhero movies influenced the Modern Age, the oversaturated market of superhero movies has influenced the Post Modern Age.
A subset of the Silver Age, this was the time period when Marvel Comics really began to flourish. Under the direction of Stan Lee, assisted by the powerful talent of Jack Kirby, Marvel reinvented itself and launched dozens of new characters that were all smash hits. Their popularity was derived from the relatability of their characters: they were the first to consistently show superheroes that had to struggle with rent, racism, romance, or other real world problems. Marvel's stories during this time were also the first to show that superpowers could be a curse rather than a blessing. These unique perspectives cemented Marvel's place as one of the Big Two publishers.
Some perspectives combine the Modern and Dark Ages into a single era known as the Iron Age, where realism was taken to extreme proportions with deconstructionist works that examined the role powered people would realistically play in society. These works often took a darker tone, a natural evolution from the social realism of the Bronze Age, as comics attempted to regain their senes of maturity. The Iron Age includes the Grim and Gritty movement, deconstruction, the British Invasion, postmodernist trends, and reconstruction. In this era, many continuities had become so convoluted that publishers resorted to many reboots and retcons to straighten things out.