I'm only just getting into reading DC, and I'm noticing that a lotta people don't really tend to recommend comics from before the 80s.The very most I tend to see recommended from before CoIE are:>Golden Age Wonder Woman, Plastic Man, and Captain Marvel>Kirby's Fourth World, Silver Age Doom Patrol>Bronze Age Batman, Swamp Thing, Moore Superman, New Teen Titans>(I've heard some people say Silver Age Jimmy Olsen/Lois Lane is maybe fun, but do they hold up if you read the whole series, or is it a sorta thing that gets old after couple issues?)Meanwhile, I noticed Marvel fans much more readily recommending stuff from the 60s and 70s.Is older DC stuff really just lesser in quality, or is it good stuff that just appeals to different sensibilities than post-Crisis stuff does?
*after A couple issues, my bad.
>>150701616Storytelling aside, Stan's dialogue has an infectious quality that's easy to read and recommendNothing was really matching that on the other side, although Metamorpho was a blanket attempt to try and it has it's own charm in how insane the attempt was
>>150701616Plastic Man and Captain Marvel were not DC during the Golden Age, but yes, Marvel was generally better during the Silver and Bronze Ages.
>>150701616Silver age DC plots can be pretty samey and the art isn't as dynamic as Marvel but I think a lot of it has charm.People generally recommend Flash, Green Lantern, Legion of Super-Heroes, and the various Superman titles & spin-offs.And any clickbait cover that grabs your attention really.There's not really a big continous story in the 50s and 60s, you were never really supposed to read a bunch of them in a row.That's one of the reasons why Marvel was different, it always end with telling you to buy the next unmissable issue of the on-going story.>>150701688>Stan's dialogue has an infectious quality that's easy to read and recommendI think it's the opposite, silver age Marvel is phenomenal art undone by crappy dialogue.
Also just generally noticing that people don't tend to recommend many full runs, mainly just minis. I kinda get why, Marvel by comparison doesn't have many decent minis anyway, but I do find it a bit odd that I don't see more full DC runs recommended as often.
>>150702400Because DC has done a great job of keeping stories in digestible chunks and naming those chunks wellIt's easier to tell you to read "The Longbow Hunters" than "Grell's Green Arrow"
>>150702442>>150702400It's because until semi recently DC has totally sucked dick at putting out collected editions. Yeah you might get a bunch of minis or iconic stories in a trade but good fucking luck getting anything more long term. Thankfully now we can go see read whatever finest collection or the tiangle years omnibus or whatever the fuck else.
>>150702442I guess so. But to my mind like, when someone says something like that, does that mean the entire Grell Green Arrow run isn't worth reading, or that the entire Grell Green Arrow run IS worth reading but that one story happens to be the highlight? People don't usually give the full context, in my experience.
>horse pussy
>>150702400Back in the Silver Age runs didn't really exist as we understand them today, writers and artists weren't credited, in some cases the writers aren't even known, different writers would trade off issues in the same series, and single issues would have multiple stories by different writers. Marvel was pushing into more serialized ongoing stories, while DC was still focused on standalone stories with little character development. I recently read the Superman Silver Age omnibus, there's a lot of good stories in there, but it's very much not a modern comic in the way that Marvel was becoming in that same time period. You have to approach it in a different way than you're probably used to.
>>150702846That's about what I thought, okay, I just assumed DC would've gone the serialized path much sooner in that case (and that they would've started crediting their folks at around the same pace as Marvel, that part's surprising. I assumed that was mostly just a golden age/early silver age thing).Would you say it's fair to call DC comics, in general, stronger when they're more episodic? Or do you think the shift to making all their characters more serialized was on the whole a net improvement? I'd describe even a lotta more modern DC comics I've read as pretty episodic personally, combined with the popularity of minis and all that too.
>>150703653Each has their upsides and downsides. For Silver Age stuff it's fun to just be able to dip into issues that are all cool stories that can go off into sci-fi weirdness from a familiar status quo, it can get repetitive though. For more serialized stuff the relationships and characters get to grow and change, though the company wide serialization can get a bit too convoluted with events, and crossovers and shit. I'd like to read more Bronze Age stuff because that was where those two styles were still overlapping, lots of wackiness with a little realism and more continuity. I want to read Bronze Age Superman but it's really poorly collected. I'm not a comic expert this is just my observations from jumping around DC history a bit.
>>150701616Comics got truly good in the 80s and DC fully matured and grabbed the decade by the horns and continued it in the 90s. Marvel for the most part remained outdated in the 80s. Basically, you don't see much pre 80s DC recommended because when recommending DC there's a higher standard compared to Marvel.
>>150701616Superman had a commercial truck license ?Damn
>>150701616Marvel is generally considered better throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, while DC was better in the 90s. Still plenty of great stuff from each during any period though.I personally find Stan Lee’s dialogue to be a chore to read, but it is fun. The real quality to it though, which also comes out in the art (the artists being the real storytellers for SA Marvel, if you know the Marvel Method) is that every character has a pretty distinct personality. They were created to be flawed humans, “heroes with hang-ups” as Lee said. Compare this with SA DC characters, and they’re all very traditionally heroic. I read someone say once, with a page from SA Justice League, that you could swap any speech bubble with any hero, and it would feel the same. I remember reading some early issues of Green Lantern, and found myself annoyed by how unquestioning Hal was of the Guardians and their bullshit, like a soldier following orders.Additional to what you mentioned, >>150701907 mentioned some great SA stuff (Legion remains good right through to the 90s, and was the prototype to Claremont’s X-Men). Superman titles had the benefit of having Otto Binder, the primary writer of the amazing Captain Marvel comics from the Golden Age, as well as Superman’s creator Jerry Siegel writing things. Writer credits are harder to come by though. Especially worth noting are the various Superman stories labeled “Imaginary Stories” which were a predecessor to Elseworlds, telling one-off out-of-continuity. The Death of Superman and Superman Red & Blue were stories done in the Silver Age way before their more popular usages for modern ones.
As >>150702514 said, a big reason you don’t hear as much about DC during the 60s and 70s is because of how poorly collected it is. Marvel has had their Epic Collections going for over a decade now, and there isn’t a lot left that they haven’t since re-released. DC has finally started their DC Finest lines to match, so Bronze Age stuff will become more attainable. But for a general overview, on top of what you mentioned, Aquaman had some great storylines in the early Bronze Age, and Jonah Hex was great all the way through. One writer I haven’t delved into yet but very much interests me is Cary Bates. He did over 100 issues each of Superman and The Flash between the late 60s to mid 80s. He even wrote the story from the OP image, as well as The Death of Iris West and The Trial of the Flash storylines. What I’ve heard is probably more than anyone, his style blends the wacky Silver Age sensibilities with the more gritty Bronze Age, rather than shifting completely into it.
>>150701616I like the 70s Teen Titans comics. Bob Haney is corny silver-age fun, then you get Wolfman and Wein trying to push boundaries and getting shot down by management.https://web.archive.org/web/20171019195327/https://www.titanstower.com/secrets-behind-teen-titans-20/
Man, the old Lois lane comic had some nice cheese cake covers for the time. Lots of skirts and legs and midrift.
>>150705064Like, that is some real nice thighs / hips. Very subtle how they are both athletic but there is some fat build up around the butt and the hip adjacent to the butt.Its really nice while being subtle and not exaggerated. Also a little bit a product of its time. The indention around this mid section looks kind of like the indent you'd see from women in Vegas at the time who still used corsets to create an hour glass figure without body fat. Its really different from today where hip, butt and breast size are used for creating an hour glass.
>>150702400Nah, in terms of runs DC has higher highs and has more quality runs. It's just that Marvel doesn't have a lot of great stand alone minis.
A lot of people simply never read them, Marvel was dominating sales-wise.There are quite a number of great pre-crisis DC Comics though also quite a number of boring comics with boring art.Handful of recommendations on top of what you listed: Deadman's initial run in Strange Adventures, Bat Lash, Joe Kubert's Enemy Ace, Jonah Hex, the Adventure Comics Spectre run, Aquaman: Death of a Priince, and Cary Bates's long Flash run.
>>150701837>but yes, Marvel was generally better during the Silver
>>150701616Older comics are much different than newer ones.Back in the 60s and prior, these are principally kids media. They haven't 'grown up' to match their audience.Also the dialogue was written differently, it's not believable lines you'd expect a character to say, it's very stilted and unusual.>Do Jimmy Olsen/Lois Lane hold up if you read the whole seriesI certainly wouldn't marathon them. Those were meant to be read a month or more apart from each other. I think if you binged them, they'd get tiresome. Though the same can be said about most comic runs which go on for over a hundred issues, like they did.I recommend reading them. They are really silly, a good laugh. Marvel, when they debuted in the 60s, were aiming at an older demographic of children, and they were less scrutinized by the comics code.This makes Marvel from the 60s much more digestible and recognizable for the modern reader than DC comics from that era.But I will say once you get firmly into the 70s, the difference fades. There are plenty iconic 70s runs for major DC characters. Batman was quite solid then, Green Lantern/Green Arrow is a classic. Wonder Woman finally stopped being terrible and instead became subpar. (She had a low point from the late 40s all the way until the 80s) The Flash was better in the 70s, too.
>>150703653A lot of Silver Age DC was more in line with Archie, or newspaper comic strips, than it was with what comics would go on to become in the 70s/80s and beyond.It's all self-contained, episodic stories with no real character development. Marvel was already pioneering the modern format, more serialized story telling, more in line with a soap opera.
>>150705027>Image Man, how things have changed
It's not worth it. It's boring as hell, despite the good artwork. My problem is that no one here on this board is a boomer, at most, someone was born in the late 80s. So it's just misplaced nostalgia. I prefer to read books inspired by that period of time, rather than the current books themselves. I only read because I'm a completionist.
>>150706177Marvel made most of their money on the east coast. DC still had business in the Midwest/South. So they had to appeal to those areas. It's my headcanon, but over the years, it seems to be ringing truer.
>>150706177This guy put it best.>>150706823And this guy as well. The Silver Age was an absolute wellspring of creative ideas and colorful characters, but the process of reading them is pretty taxing. If you aren’t a completionist, I would recommend at most to just read any key issues that may interest you (like first appearances for certain characters) rather than going through the chore of reading them.
>>150707152I'd say there are still a handful of books like Enemy Ace and Jim Shooter's Legion (which was intentionally written to be more like a Marvel book - Shooter read a bunch of Marvel and DC books when he was sick and then applied to DC because he believe they needed the help) that hold up well enough.
>>150701616I would disagree with a lot of the people here who are essentially implying that Silver Age or Golden Age DC was written as 'kiddie' stories; in both WWI and WWII, comics were often shipped off in care packages to USA soldiers fighting in foreign wars. This continued through the 1950s for the Korean War. There were plenty of adults and older teenagers reading DC comics from the get go. I've read some of the DC Chronicles and DC Archive books - which would be a form of binging them, but never say read an entire HC in one sitting - but then again, I've never done that with modern books either. I do think you can read some 1940s-1950s books in batches but even as someone whose read, and enjoyed, for example, The Amazing Transformations of Jimmy Olsen, which is a collection of stories from the Silver Age run, or the Kirby collection of Jimmy Olsens once he wrote it, I would not sit down and read, from start to finish, SPJO issue 1 through where it ends (100+ something). I've never done that for anything and I wouldn't recommend it. I did it once for the entire New Krypton saga, which was many cross over issues, and it was more of a headache and pain than anything else. Especially since I tried to read it in chron order and as collections and not all of it had been collected when I did this. I think this person has the most accurate (and fair) take of all the comments here: >>150704181
>>150707371The silver age superhero books were for the kids, the writer of the Flash put himself into the story and said as much.
>>150707561>Don't tell you me you still read comicsNot the tone I would take with the statey pulling me over....
>>150707561That's a Bronze Age comic, shithead. That kind of metatextuality was unknown in the Silver Age.
>>150706177A lot of the reduction in quality difference in the 70's has to do with the fact that many of the writers were working at both of the Big Two by the middle of the decade.
>>150709038It varied, but bronze Age DC skewed more mature in its subject matter, Bates himself took Flash in a more mature direction in the 80s. But it's telling you something when he's saying Flash comics are for kids. The silver age stories were even less mature.
I enjoy many Silver Age Marvel and a few DC comics, unironically. I have been reading early ASM and the dialogue just doesn't bother me the same way it seems to most readers.>>150706823There are more than a few anons in their 50's on /co/.
>>150707561>My sonSure thing officer.
>>150701616Enemy AceBat Lash
>>150707561
>>150709348>There are more than a few anons in their 50's on /co/.That's really sad.
>>150701616There is not a single pre-1970s non-Legion DC comic worth reading. The entire reason Shooter got his start in comics was because he realized that DC's comics were dog shit compared to Marvel's and if a 13 year old boy can recognize how bad they were at the time that says a lot.
>>150705064>77 coffinsThat's as many as seven elevens! And that's taquito!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkwwAaQEZ38
>>150712333As mentioned earlier in the thread, Enemy Ace, Bat Lash, and Deadman are classics. They got the Harlan Ellison stamp of approval of "great comics that most people didn't buy because they're only interested in slop."
>>150712473Forever People is the least renowned of Kirby's Fourth World titles but it has some of his best writing on the philosophical undertones of the whole project.
>>150707561This is a pretty common gag, anon.The cop is hiding the fact he reads comics by saying his knowledge cones second hand from his son.
>>150706660Wein and Wolfman were two progressive well-meaning liberals who with only a couple writing credits putting out what they thought was a good "ally" comic.If it came out it would have been like the "Asgard is my Hood" Miles Thor What-If.
>>150712732Fourth World sucks. Kirby was nothing without Lee or Simon.
>>150713151Wrongest opinion ever.
>>150701616>s it a sorta thing that gets old after couple issues?)This sums up much of golden and silver age DC.
>>150713151This. As bad or worse than Mr. A but the characters and concept had enough potential for other writers to keep revisiting it
>>150713151To hear opinions like this is a drag because the Demon proves this cunts a fag.
>>150713082The guy who writes comics thinks it's absurd that an adult is reading them.
>>150713151Anon I don't think you'll find many readers who would agree with you on that, but I guess we're all entitled to our opinions.
>>150713151True. I'm convinced Kirby is so highly rated by 60s/70s comic fans and artists because he created their "MUH CHILDHOOD" and they are unable to view it critically even over half a century later.
silver age is fun but marvel at that time was destroying dc, the 80s and 90s DC comics are fantastic and absolutely the peak for DC comics comics
>>150713718>muh childhood
Silver and bronze age Flash is so fun, especially when the Rogues are together.
>>150713718A lot of the hype was from comic pros/journalists yeah. The sales of the Fourth World were terrible, Kamandi was the only DC book of his that had any legs and that's since become a book that only Kirby superfans talk about.
>>150713364>DemonYou mean the series and concept that Kirby scribbled out in 5 minutes on a napkin and hated/didn't give a shit about?>>150713718A lot of it is more an anti-Lee thing and him being held up by the artsy types like Groth or some of the '70s creators like Gerber who had either ideological or personal axes to grind against Marvel. Kirby, for them, became a kind of living martyr whose name could be invoked to symbolize how Marvel was an evil, soulless corporation that drained creatives like a vampire.
Kirby haters have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me.
>>150705001>The Death of Iris West and The Trial of the Flashthose are not good though.
>>150706852it was the distribution too, dc was ahead.
>>150712090haha why, this is the best place to discuss comics. now that is sad.
>>150713730nah. dc and marvel were simply too different.btw marvel didn't have a top ten book till 1969, it was all supes, bats and ducks.
>>150715142>marvel didn't have a top ten book till 1969Marvel was distributed by DC until 1968.
>>150712473I should check Deadman out, only one of the bunch I haven't yet.
>>150715429There's a DC Finest collection coming out in the near future iirc
>>150715104Poor geriatrics surrounded by shitty ass beanmouth and toddler cartoons. That's sad.
>>150714706They got one giant claw?
>>150713151> fourth world sucks> easily better than his entire Marvel outputIt's actually really good
>>150717784They walk sideways
>>150716783You're going to get old.
>>150714706It's weird, because they desperately need to explain away why people like Kirby>Anti-Lee>Muh childhood>artsy types>it's all a lie, poor sales (based on ancient unverifiable numbers) tell the whole story. >Ax to grind with Marvel>Blah blah, stop liking what I don't like!Obviously, it's not possible that anyone could have different tastes, it must be some kind of trick other than scam.
>>150707371Reminds me of an episode of McHale's Navy.>"Beer in the torpedo tubes, what's next, comics in the ammo boxes?">"Hey, they DO have comics in the ammo boxes. Oh hey, Mighty Mouse!"
