Welcome to Comic Books

Comic Books � The Silver Age

This term is used to describe the comic book era from the late 50s to the early 70s and one sees that this is when quite a few of the typical comic book attributes started coming into existence. Probably the most exciting one was the thread of science fiction being part of the stories. Once this happened, the possibilities of a million themes began. Suddenly, there were no physical boundaries and your imagination was the only limit. So began tales that took you into the great unknown yonder. The artist and writer had free rein over their creativity and the world of the extraordinary came into the comic book world to stay. Even the heroes without super powers like Batman or Robin were somehow out of this world in their adventures.

The canvas of this new breed of super heroes went way beyond the earth as we know it. So they could just board rockets and go to infinite space and worlds beyond in order to have their adventures. They could fight aliens, travel in futuristic space craft, meet the weirdest of space creatures and everything just seemed so possible. Of course, they always fought for the good and triumphed over evil. The villains were usually personification of negative human traits and though they had supernatural powers, good always triumphed. You needed the fights to establish this.

What also prevailed in this new, free world was the factor of metamorphosis. Heroes could morph into strange beings and then come back to their own forms. The weapons they had were out of dreams. However, the heroes were never just robot-like creatures. They were very human as far as their mental and emotional make-up was concerned. The angst that some of the super heroes went through was what probably appealed to the reader and made them more believable. Of course, most had some kind of tragedy in their past as well. This really brought out a very positive response from the audience.

There was a transformation process that the old super heroes went through too. Take the case of Aquaman. From a super hero of not much standing, he was repackaged and presented to the world and suddenly he played a bigger role in the comic book arena. From making his half brother, Ocean Master, his sworn enemy and thereby setting the stage for innumerable conflicts, he changed too in that now he could live inside and outside water making the scope and setting of these conflicts more vast.

Finally, it was what the readers were looking for and ready for that fuelled the change during this Silver Age of comic books. It is this change that made the comic books more relevant and more popular.

Cheap Chick

Lesley Mitchell has been a business reporter at The Tribune since 1997, covering real estate, the retail industry, personal finance and economic development.

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