Was there ever an ad that better showcased the gulf between comics as they had been and comics as they would become? Around 1970, with the influx of fresh, young talent, intent on moving the medium forward, things began to change. “Relevance” had arrived — and things would never be the same.
Here we see the ‘old’ represented by our dearly beloved carrot-topped cub reporter, Jimmy Olsen. In one of the very last Mort Weisinger edited issues, we see him fiddling about, surgical style — they really gave their reporters a diverse training back then! — with Superman, having turned him into a “superhuman computer”. Fun, certainly, but very much yesterday’s news.
Meanwhile, Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams ring in the changes, and send Green Lantern and Green Arrow on a road trip across modern America to highlight the ills of society. It was daring and controversial, and touched on very real concerns. For good or ill, the future of comics had arrived.
©2010 DC Comics
. . . and I know which I’d rather be reading! Bugger helping the blue people!
And you wonder why more blue people don’t read comics!
I’m with you, Mart! For many years I thought comics needed to be more “sophisticated” and welcomed all attempts at darkening things. But I now see the error of my ways. Comics should be fun, first and foremost.
The pendulum always swings to extremes, doesn’t it? At the time, yeah, the “old guard” needed changing. I was disappointed at the time that DC almost immediately dumped those changes.
DC took longer to change than Marvel, but then Marvel always had a more “sophisticated” approach than DC. DC never really caught on to the whole continuity thing until the early-1980s. And then the rot set in.
I first started reading comics some years later when a family friend gave me a big box of old comics to read while I was sick. All were Marvel and DC from around 1968-1975.
I preferred the DC books to the Marvel comics because the DC tales were lighthearted and often funny. Real life was dark enough. “The Legion Chain Gang” was about as hard core as I wanted to get.
There’s plenty of room for different styles of comics. I love Watchmen, but I don’t want to read it all the time.
Back then — and I acknowledge it was a lot to do with age — comics were exciting and special. A magical world of make believe to which you could escape again and again, as you flew through the clouds with Superman, visited other worlds with Green Lantern, or swung through the city with Spidey.
They say you can’t go home again, and that may be most true of comics.
And a lot cheaper too. Plus a thrill of not knowing what you’re going to come across when looking in a newsagents.
I hear a lot of superhero fans say that they gravitated to either Marvel or DC as kids, but I always bought both. Happy-go-lucky suburban husband Barry Allen and angsty urban teen Peter Parker were both ok by me.
I bought both equally too — although here we had the Marvel UK titles in addition to the US ones, whereas DC was limited to a partial selection of the line. And no UK line — well, not until the late-70s with a series of Superman and Batman Pocket Books (card cover digest size 100-pagers), and, in the early-80s a black and white magazine called DC Superheroes that reprinted three US issues, focussing largely on Superman and Batman tales. This had beautiful painted covers, mainly by Alan Cradock.
I still have 12 of the 17 issues of DC The Super Heroes. They were published in two volumes. Vol#1 was 10 issues and vol#2 7. One of the best things about it was that the painted covers were also on the back cover minus logo. Apart from vol 1#1 which had an Alan Craddock wrap round cover, with no less than 106 DC characters on it. Issues 3(which reprints Frank Miller’s first Batman work) & 4 of the same vol had covers by Bryan Talbot. It had a nice mix of stuff from the 50′s to the 70′s.
The magazine, Pocket Books and annuals were all from the same pubisher, London Editions Magazine (formerly Egmont Pubishing). Some of the Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman annuals had covers by Brian Bolland, Steve Dillon and Dave Gibbons. As well as reprints they had orignal text stories from Grant Morrison, Jamie Delano and Alan Moore.
A small forgotten area of British comics history in a way.
I’m pretty sure there were 12 issues in volume 1. Issue 12 had one of the worst covers of anything ever in comics.
It could not possibly have been worse than the cover of A Distant Soil #2, first edition…
That’s true, it wasn’t quite as bad as that — not far off though.