A New Era: Infinite Crisis, Civil War, and the End of the Modern Age of Comics

February 22nd, 2008 | by admin |

Original Post here: Snikkkt!

As anyone who has been paying even slight attention to comic books can tell you, the last two years have been periods of unprecedented turmoil and upheaval. Marvel and DC in particular have been challenging the limits of their universes, not to mention the wallets of their fans, with epic and world-altering storylines. With a massive buildup and supporting title list, these events culminated in DC’s Infinite Crisis and Marvel’s Civil War. While the narrative landscape of these two companies has been forever altered for the fan on the suspension-of-disbelief-level, there has been an even more shocking development on the meta-level when examining comics as a medium and superhero storylines as a genre.

These recent events and their thematic implications certainly indicate a break with the previously established paradigm, and the resulting discontinuity represents the beginning of a new age in the comic book medium. By examining the changes in the superhero mythos resulting primarily from Infinite Crisis, Civil War, and their tie-ins, it’s clear that the Modern Age has ended. It has been replaced by what can for now be generically dubbed the Postmodern Age. A new era in superhero comics has begun.

The comic book world is divided into many ages, whose delineations represent changes in the way comics stories are told and what they represent. So we have the Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, and Modern Age. We have to be careful when examining these periods and what they mean for a couple of reasons. First, they are generalizations that are useful guideposts to talking about comic history, but they have exceptions which often blur their borders. Second is the point argued by Dr. Peter Coogan in his book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, noting that the Golden Age is really the only age that applies to comics as a medium; the rest refer specifically to the superhero genre. The terms “Modern Age” and subsequently “Postmodern Age” have problems that need to be addressed as well. For the sake of clarity, I will continue using these terms with the caveat that I use them generically until a more accurate label is accepted.

With those clarifications, my argument focuses the way these sweeping changes in superhero comics have altered the way we talk about those comics. While my focus is on DC and Marvel specifically, I feel that they constitute the largest and most influential work currently being produced in the genre, and therefore continue to drive the discussion.

Before we can understand the thematic changes indicating the Postmodern Age, we must first look at the Modern Age and some of its defining minutia. While there are many characteristics that define this period—such as the increase of adult-oriented content, the rise of the X-Men to the status of dominant intellectual property, and the reorganization of the industry’s distribution system—two comics are generally accepted as encapsulating the spirit of the Modern Age: The Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. These books represented a fundamental shift from the Silver and Bronze Ages that came before. Their deconstructive and dystopian re-envisioning of iconic characters and the worlds that they live in represented a break with the previously established mythos.

In Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Batman is forced to make a place for himself in a world where conservative politics and liberal social values are taken to their opposing extremes and the resulting chaos has brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Simultaneously, the social order is unable to sustain itself against the forces of anarchy. While the book isn’t necessarily a deconstruction of the Batman character, it does significantly alter the environment in which Batman lives, forcing him to change in order to continue his war on crime. In one of the most important moments in comics’ history, the book climaxes with a brutal fight between Batman and his former friend and sometimes competitor Superman, who has now become a symbol of the decadent and corrupted status quo. This book challenged the way comics could be told, and showed the massive potential in altering the 40-year continuity of these major characters.

While Miller’s work has secured a place not just in comics but in popular fiction as well, Alan Moore’s The Watchmen went even further in its explorations of the superhero realm. Moore’s 13-issue series placed superheroes into a “real world” context. The characters were not motivated by noble ideals and cartoonish platitudes, but instead were driven by darker and more sinister forces. Nihilism, egotism, family pressures, lack of personal actualization, sexual dysfunction, and outright insanity are some of the prevailing issues at work in this complex morality play. One of the most powerful moments in the entire series comes when the character Rorschach reveals to his prison psychologist the true source of his war on crime. He explains that after seeing evidence of humanity’s depravation, he realized that there is no underlying truth or morality to the world; there is no god, there is just flawed mankind. All meanings are analogues to the Rorschach inkblot test: definitions imposed upon random shapes that have no inherent truth. While this is just one example of the book’s brilliant character innovations within the genre, all of the characters are defined by traits that stand in complete contrast to the more traditional superheroes of the Golden and Silver Age template.

While there are other aspects associated with the Modern Age, the contributions of The Dark Knight Returns and The Watchmen are the two most significant with regards to the epistemological grouping that delineates the old age from the new. While these ages only reflect a portion of the comic world, albeit a significant one, and are generalizations at best, they are significant to the history of comics because they represent fundamental changes in the way comic characters, in this case superheroes, are created and defined. Miller and Moore’s works, while not the first to necessarily redefine or deconstruct superheroes and their world, altered the way people understood what a superhero was. Put simply, we read superhero comics differently after these books achieved their success.

Read the rest…

ShareThis

Bookmark It