When were superheroes gloomy and harsh?

The conditional periodization of American comic books about superheroes implies decline. The formation years of the genre, 1938-1945, are called the Golden Age. Then – after a ten-year hiatus, when superheroes were eclipsed by other genres such as horror, detective stories, and love stories – a DC Silver re-launch of Flash in Showcase No. 4 opened in October 1956 by DC Comics. This period, marked by the revival of DC Golden Age superheroes and the reign of Marvel Comics, continues until 1970, when it is replaced by the Bronze Age. A new phase has recently appeared in this history of decline, dubbed the Dark Age of Comics. Unlike the phrase “New Time”, used to refer to the same period, “The Dark Age” suggests a figurative fall in the comics about superheroes to the level of cultural impoverishment, which is associated with stereotypes of medieval Europe. The irony is that the Dark Age was marked by a series of revolutionary publications that helped improve the cultural position of superhero comics. The most famous of these iconic comics are Watchmen (1986–1987) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986). These serious, autoreflective texts that set new standards for the formal and thematic possibilities of the genre can, in fact, be considered as texts characterizing the Dark Age, which, according to some formulations, continues from the mid-1980s to the present. Thus, despite its name, the Dark Age of Comics marked the emergence of real masterpieces and the Continue reading →