Whoa -- I just noticed something big happening on Comixology. DC has released a few Golden Age issues of Detective comics (issues 34, 35, and this week's 36) in their entirety. Or so it seems, anyway, from the page counts and creators listed. Earlier issues have just reprinted the Batman stories -- 28-29, 30-31, and 32-33 are sold together for 99 cents, in fact. But these are $1.99, and clock in at 60 pages. So that means that there should be some stories here that have never been reprinted before!
I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.
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I'd love to see full Golden Age books, specifically to see the back-up features that are never reprinted. I'm sure most of them are terrible, but they are history, and we should know our history. What would be extra awesome is if they had credits!
Amazon made quite a few Golden Age books (especially Catman) available to read in their kindles, as well as some stories from the Silver Age (Groot's story in Tales to Astonish#13, for instance, but not the rest of the issue.)
Good to hear it, Ron!
And as an update, I've managed to purchase the Detective issues from Comixology, and they *are* the complete books. And most of the strips are at least partially credited on the title page, Cap! (Even though on at least one "Spy" story, Jerry Siegel's name was spelled "Siegal.")
This is going to be such a boon to comics historians.
Yes, we can see the evolution of comic books from their comic strip origins to the birth and rise of the super-hero!
And we'll also see a lot of false starts, failed experiments, characters modeled on successes in other media that don't work, and stuff thrown against the wall that doesn't fit into our pre-existing narratives. That's the stuff I find fascinating -- seeing weird stuff and trying to figure out why the creators thought it would work.
That's the stuff that fascinates me. Even recently. Just think about if certain aspects of the New52 had sold better -- can you imagine a DCU with OMAC, Frankenstein, and I. Vampire as important cornerstones? Had they sold better, it coulda happened.
It's pretty easy to imagine a DCU where Johnny Thunder was long forgotten. If he hadn't been included in the Justice Society, he probably would've been -- after all, Black Canary squeezed him out of his own strip!
It'll be interesting to see what other diamonds-in-the-rough fell by the wayside -- and how these early comics chased trends they might not have even been able to identify, at first.
Captain Comics said:
Most Golden Age heroes I've read, it seemed like their series got really bad (or just plain weird) at the end, making their cancellation not very surprising. Be interesting to see if they all got bad or weird at the end, and, if they didn't, what caused them to fail along with the ones that were bad or weird. I know Johnny Thunder lost his thunderbolt and became an even less interesting non-super character. It was surprising somebody didn't kick him out long before Black Canary showed up.
Yeah, the Dr. Fate Archives are a weird experience in seeing a publisher take a unique property and just slather on layers of drab, until he was indistinguishable from any other costumed crimefighter.
I hadn't thought of it that way, but you describe it perfectly.
Rob Staeger (Grodd Mod) said:
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