75 Years of Characters Proves It's an Heroic Age for the Comic Book

  The popularity of superheroes has reached the masses with movies and more television adaptations but what about the root of it all, the comic book? What makes it still appealing 75 years later? Professor of Television and Pop Culture at Syracuse University, Bob Thompson, believes it was comic book’s imagination that made the Golden Age so unique.

“Film and television were to some extent limited to what you could photograph and until we got computer graphics, which doesn’t come in a big way until the latter part of the 20^th century, but you were limited. Something sort of had to have actually happened that you could take a picture of. Comics you can draw anything. The tendency was then to go after the things that no other medium can do.”

And comics were able to do that for a while. It wasn’t really until around the 2000s where computer graphics were used prominently in superhero films.

  Comic expert, Dominick Lloyd, believes the popularity of the characters Green Lantern and the Flash were derived from classic mythology.

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  “There is a godly quality to DC. The original Flash, he was meant to look like Mercury. You know the helmet; he had a very skin tight suit so that almost looked like you know Greek clothing. When you look at the design for the original Green Lantern, he has a very flowing cape, he looks like a wizard evoking the sort of ancient archetype that has been in most cultures and human history.”

Author Terrence Wandtke, who wrote The Meaning of Superhero Comic Books, believes these characters biggest contribution to comics is science fiction.

“With the Flash this embrace of the multiverse. We start with a story like The Flash of Two Worlds. The Green Lantern is an intergalactic police officer and has endless possibilities where we start to broaden it out with these you know rainbow colors of lanterns and start to develop it in a way that you’ve seen before with Star Trek and Star Wars.”

Jay Garrick was the first incarnation of the Flash to be put into the comic book. With the ability of super speed, he left a legacy for future speedsters to take over and Alan Scott was the first Green Lantern and harnessed a ring that could create anything he imagined.

Modern technology has been able to take these abilities and put them on the television and the big screen but has the movie industry taken away the magic of the comic book? Hollywood has 30 plus movies slotted from now through 2020. Terrence Wandtke now believes the movies overshadow the comic book.

“My concern for comic books, particularly superhero comics books, is that these companies might just treat this comic books as research and development. What are we going to do with these superheroes that might work in the next movie.”

Professor Bob Thompson believes that Hollywood has gone with the corporate approach.

“To me I really enjoyed how these worlds emerged organically but now that I see this total kind of corporate, it’s almost a Wal-Mart business planning meeting taking over these worlds, they become in many ways less fun.”

Even with questions of what Hollywood is doing with the superhero genre, no one can really doubt that the awareness that it’s raised and no one has appreciated more than the owner of Cloud City Comics, Jeff Watkins.

“The movies are popular because they are condensed versions of what we’ve been reading for decades and it’s accessible. It’s a modern day mythology, it’s how we as a species dictate to each other you know how we should live. They are we dream we could be, their fallible, their still us.”

While the movies have the glamour, it’s the comic book that is the true artifact. The Flash and Green Lantern are versions of godly figures that we know, Mercury and Apollo. These characters are our humanized versions and we have to thank the Golden Age of Comic Books for that.

HOLLYWOOD HAS AN AMBITIOUS SCHEDULE OF MOVIES FOR COMIC HERO FANS

Hollywood’s Comicbook Movie Timeline through 2020

·       2015:

·       May 1: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Marvel)

·       July 17: Ant-Man (Marvel)

·       August 7: Fantastic Four (Fox)

·       2016:

·       February 12: Deadpool (Fox)

·       March 25: Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice (Warner Bros.)

·       May 6: Captain America: Civil War (Marvel)

·       May 27: X-Men: Apocalypse (Fox)

·       August 5: Suicide Squad (Warner Bros.)

·       October 7: Gambit (Fox)

·       November 4: Doctor Strange (Marvel)

·       2017:

·       March 3: Wolverine 3 (Fox)

·       May 5: Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (Marvel)

·       June 2: Fantastic Four 2 (Fox)

·       June 23: Wonder Woman (Warner Bros.)

·       July 28: Untitled Spider-Man film (Sony)

·       November 3: Thor: Ragnarok (Marvel)

·       November 17: Justice League, Part 1 (Warner Bros.)

·       2018:

·       March 23: The Flash (Waner. Bros)

·       May 4: Avengers: Infinity War, Part 1 (Marvel)

·       July 6: Black Panther (Marvel)

·       July 13: Unkown X-Men Movie (Fox)

·       July 27: Aquaman (Warner Bros.)

·       November 2: Captain Marvel (Marvel)

• 2019:

·       April 5: Shazam (Warner Bros.)

·       May 3: Avengers: Infinity War, Part 2 (Marvel)

·       June 14: Justice League, Part 2 (Warner Bros.)

·       July 12, 2019: Inhumans (Marvel)

·       2020:

·       April 3: Cyborg (Warner Bros.)

·       June 19: Green Lantern (Warner Bros.)