Which Dark Age are we talking about??? The one that came following Wertham's "Seduction of the Innocent", which led to the comics code authority, or the 90's Dark Age, which was created due to trying to be "dark and edgy", (following Watchmen and DKR) and caring more about the artwork than the actual story itself???
Not inevitable. The Dark Age of comics was created because the industry was taken over by a bunch of investors and business men in the 1980's thanks to the feel good laissez faire of the Reagan era. Those individuals did not care about comics and, looking back at the collect-ability and cost of comic issues past thought "Hey, let's produce a bunch of collector's issues every three days and then people will buy these in droves and the market will be explode because of all these collectible issues". Same junk they did with baseball cards. Problem with that is simple logic. The reason older comics were collectible is that the market was not flooded and the most collectible among them were rare. If you produce a kagillion "X-Men Number One", it isn't worth a damn. Therefore, nobody cared about writing, which sucked or was tired or boring, the artwork sucked thanks to Rob Leifeld and his influence over every artist (which was unrelated to these economic issues, btw, but came at a bad time for the industry because of those), and eventually the bubble collapsed because of those simple economics, just as it did with baseball cards. I believe editors also took power away from writers (which is still an issue today), leading to horrifically bad and/or boring stories.
No Comic Code might help.
means we'ld probably skip most of the silver age and go straight into Bronze.
SirAshfordFanrico said:And perhaps not letting go of the creators of Image Comics, which helped sell the "style over substance" trend with their bloated extravaganzas, as well as push the "Collector's Item" bait trap as well.
Then you end up with less superhero comics and more horror and sci-fi stuff, but that "edginess" crap could still get in.
I don't have anything constructive to put forward, but I will say that apart from creating Cable (who's fucking awesome), Rob Liefeld can suck my nuts.
In my case, prevent "Crisis on Infinite Earths". That was when comics started to go downhill for me. Nothing like watching your favorite characters die (The Flash, and Supergirl) or history rewritten (The Justice Society, and the All-Star Squadron) to kill interest.
No Comic Code might help.
means we'ld probably skip most of the silver age and go straight into Bronze.
Actually the existence of the Comic Code helped put away the dark age... The evidence is that theNo Comic Code might help.
means we'ld probably skip most of the silver age and go straight into Bronze.
Actually the existence of the Comic Code helped put away the dark age... The evidence is that the
dark age only came when the Comic Code lost importance.
Much of the strategy of the so-called "edgy" writing was to fill
the pages with baser, cruder storylines... and trust the readers
baser instincts to keep them interested. With a fully-functional
comic code that strategy would be seriously impaired and
non-edgy, non-hackwriting writers would retain a lot of influence.