Silver Age of Comic Books - Legacy

Legacy

The Silver Age marked a decline in the prominence of comics in genres such as horror, romance, teen and funny animal humor, or westerns, which were more popular than superhero adventures in the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, and fans of these genres see the Silver Age as a decline from that earlier era.

An important feature of the period was the evolution of the character makeup of superheroes. Young children and girls were targeted during the Silver Age by certain publishers; in particular, Harvey Comics attracted this group with titles such as Little Dot. Adult oriented underground comics also began during the Silver Age. Some critics and historians argue that one characteristic of the Silver Age was that science fiction and aliens replaced magic and gods. Others argue that magic was an important element of both Golden Age and Silver Age characters. and many Golden Age writers and artists were science-fiction fans or professional science-fiction writers who incorporated SF elements into their comic-book stories. Science was a common explanation for the origin of heroes in the Golden Age.

The Silver Age coincided with the rise of pop art, an artistic movement that used popular cultural artifacts, such as advertising and packaging, as source material for fine, or gallery-exhibited, art. Roy Lichtenstein, one of the best-known pop art painters, specifically chose individual panels from comic books and repainted the images, modifying them to some extent in the process but including in the painting word and thought balloons and captions as well as enlarged-to-scale color dots imitating the coloring process then used in newsprint comic books. An exhibition of comic strip art was held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs of the Palais de Louvre in 1967, and books were soon published that contained serious discussions of the art of comics and the nature of the medium.

In January 1966, a live-action Batman television show debuted to high ratings. Like pop art, the show took comic-book tropes and re-envisioned them in the context of a different medium. Voiceover narration in each episode articulated the words of comic-book captions while fight scenes had sound effects like "Biff", "Bam" and "Pow" appear as visual effects on the screen, spelled out in large cartoon letters. Circulation for comic books in general and Batman merchandise in particular soared. Other masked or superpowered adventurers appeared on the television screen, such as the popular show . American TV in the winter of 1967 appeared to consist of little else but live-action and animated cartoon comic-book heroes, all in living colour." Existing comic-book publishers began creating superhero titles, as did new publishers. By the end of the 1960s, however, the fad had faded; in 1969, the best-selling comic book in the United States was not a superhero series, but the teen-humor book Archie.