Comic Books..your favorite time.

[RobertScorpio]

Many of us have discussed, over time, how much we liked or still like comic books. Be it Goldern, Silver, Bronze and newer ages...when was your 'epoch', meaning, what era of comics were your favorites and why?

Mine? I got into comics in the early 70s and hung with them until CRISIS OF INFINITE earths. I came back, now and then, but not as a regular reader. I've spent a $1000 in the past year collecting used comic books from that time via EBAY, mainly JLA/Brave and the Bold and other DC teamup magazines.

I still remember getting that large SUPERMAN/SPIDERMAN battle in the mid 70s, with that great cover of those two over new york..I thought that was just a great story and team up, and imo, none of the other marvel/dc crossovers match up..

What about you..when was your comic book peak??

Rob

 

[Nerys Myk]

The 70s and 80s were my favorite decades. Steve Englehart writing Avengers and Captain America. Later writing Batman and the JLA. Steve Gerber on the Defenders and Howard the Duck. The JSA series in All Star Comic by Levitz, Wood, Staton and Layton. Xmen by Claremont, Cockrum, Byrne and Austin. LSH by Levitz & Giffen. Invaders by Roy Thomas. FF by Byrne. Frank Miller on Daredevil. Wolfman & Perez Teen Titans. Superman by Byrne. Wonder Woman by Perez

 

[CaptainCanada]

The 1980s and the 2000s.

 

[RobertScorpio]

The 70s and 80s were my favorite decades. Steve Englehart writing Avengers and Captain America. Later writing Batman and the JLA. Steve Gerber on the Defenders and Howard the Duck. The JSA series in All Star Comic by Levitz, Wood, Staton and Layton. Xmen by Claremont, Cockrum, Byrne and Austin. LSH by Levitz & Giffen. Invaders by Roy Thomas. FF by Byrne. Frank Miller on Daredevil. Wolfman & Perez Teen Titans. Superman by Byrne. Wonder Woman by Perez

Steve Englehart had a great on with JLA, I totally agree. I am reading his JLA stuff to my son, since we recently got a large cache of JLA comic books off of ebay. In fact, all of those names you mention are great..

and did anyone ever draw Powergirl's two best assets better than Staton???

Rob

 

[The Boy Who Cried Worf]

I am still in the discovery stage with a lot of comic titles, but I find myself often a little put off by some of the books from the 60's and 70's whose tone is a little too juvenile. I think the mid-80's to late 90's and the current era are my favorite. I know there is a lot of justified criticism that comics today are too skimpy for their price and there are too many unnecessary crossover titles printed, but I like the grittier more realistic tone that goes on today.

 

[marillion]

It's been up and down for me.. I collected a lot back in the 80's, including Marvel's Star Wars series, Strikeforce Moritori and Alphaflight. In the 90's, I bought sporadically, not collecting anything too consistantly.. I got into Spiderman 2099, but alas, that was shortlived.

My consistant buy through the years has been Asterix the Gaul. While not a traditional comic book, it's always been one of my favorites.

 

[byron lomax]

I think all eras have had good stories, but I love the 80s and early 90s in particular. It felt like a very creative period, especially DC's "proto-Vertigo" series and stories that eventually led to the formation of that label - DKR and Watchmen of course, as well as Moore's Swamp Thing, Peter Milligan's Shade the Changing Man, Morrison's Animal Man and Doom Patrol, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, etc. A lot of the early Vertigo stuff was fantastic too, of course. On the more mainstream level, there was Suicide Squad by John Ostrander, as well as his Spectre series, both of which were fantastic. Over in the UK, this era was definitely a peak for 2000AD and Judge Dredd as well.

I'm something of a Batman fanatic, and I also consider the late 80s/early 90s to be his best era. It's often characterised as the height of "grim n' gritty" Batman, but it was also a very creative period, with interesting takes on the character and his world from various writers and artists. Lots of good, innovative stories that still hold up well, just before Knightfall ushered in the era of the overblown "big event" story arc.

 

[Mr Light]

For DC, the era before and after Infinite Crisis, the whole universe felt unified and going somewhere under the Geoff Johns masterplan. For Marvel, the whole Civil War to Dark Reign period. Again, everything feels unified and important.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I generally like things that nobody else does, but the entire 90's was a blast for me. That was the era that I actually started going to comic book shops and discovered dozens of titles that my local grocery store didn't (or couldn't) carry. Yes, I know the 90's was also the time of the speculator boom and crash, gimmick covers, and the bad girl era, but I didn't care. I collected a lot of fun titles from multiple publishers during that period and I still remember it more fondly than the recently concluded 2000s.

The more I think about it, though, the '90s was also the time I had very few titles from either Marvel or DC. Go fig...

 

[Chaos Descending]

Anything from the early 60's (Lee/Kirby/Ditko) up until the early 90's really.

 

[Nick Ryder]

For me it was honestly the late 80s to the 90s up to maybe 2001 or so. Sure there were "gimmick" covers and "Bad girls" and such, but at the same time I think it was a slightly more accessible time. Other than the once or twice yearly multi-title crossovers - like the X-Men comics and Spider-Man comics did at least a couple of times a year you could pick up any comic, get a story and feel like you had something in your hands. The 70s were like that too, but I liked the later 80s, to the whole of the 90s and at least the first few years of the 2000s - until they got to Avengers Disassembled and House of M. That whole thing just screwed up the Marvel Universe something fierce. Characters were no longer as "heroic"

People bash the 90s with the "grim and gritty" and "big guns" and all that, but honestly most of that was still relegated to a handful of titles. The "Midnight Sons" imprint that included Ghost Rider, Spirits of Vengeance, Morbius, Dr. Strange, Nightstalkers and Blade, were the "Grim, gritty, spooky" end of Marvel. And it was cool because it was like you were treading 'where angels feared to trod' compared to the slightly lighter and more action oriented stuff from the rest of Marvel. DC was pretty good around that era too - okay so Knightfall was kinda sucktacular with John Paul Valley, but then again it was the first time that Bruce Wayne wasn't the Batman for a while. That was actually kinda mind blowing. I remember calling my best friend, Tom, up after I got my copy of the issue where Bane breaks Batman's back and reading him the whole exchange and we were both just shocked that it happened. Or when Superman died. Whoa that was one helluva story. I mean... Superman WAS DEAD! There was media coverage, there was like almost a year of stories until the one true Superman finally returned. Then... it kinda petered out a bit after Zero Hour and the whole Kenny Braverman out of nowhere/Death of Clark Kent crap... I kinda tuned out a bit after that. Then I got back into it around the time of the Wedding of Lois and Clark. But really the early part of the 21st Century was pretty good. It wasn't until all the crisis stories and deconstructionist bullshit that's gone on the past 7 or so years that has really kinda.. made things iffy.

Course I still buy new stuff, I have to admit I did enjoy parts of Civil War... was kinda cool seeing hero vs hero in a slightly realistic way, not just the usual "They must be mind controlled... fight them!" stuff that used to happen.

But y'know the cool thing is... back issues cost next to nothing so if you don't like the current stuff, dig into the back issue bins! I mean my LCS has a whole long box full of old decovered 60s comics that he sells for a quarter! I mean c'mon you can't beat it! And most every comic shop has at least one or two long boxes full of maybe one or two year old comics for a buck or less, so even if you missed out on last year's stuff, you can fill in the gaps for a whole lot less. I rarely if ever pay cover anymore.

 

[TemporalFlux]

For me, the early to mid 80's were the peak of Marvel. The clean art styles and storytelling made for sharp stories that never fade from my memory. The Byrne Fantastic Four run; the Byrne / Claremont X-men; the Bob Hall Iron Man; the George Perez Avengers; the Bill Mantlo Hulk; Rom SpaceKnight. In my opinion, Marvel began to take a dip in the late 80's around the time Venom came on the scene. The initial Venom stories were great; it's just a good dividing point in mind for when the company's output began to really change as a whole (largely due to Jim Shooter's exit).

The early to mid 90's were the peak of DC for me. The Norm Breyfogle Batman; the Dan Jurgens Superman; the Zero Hour "Archie" Legion of Super Heroes; the Paul Pelletier Kyle Rayner Green Lantern; Grant Morrison's JLA; Chronos; The Ray; Resurrection Man; the John Ostrander Spectre and Martian Manhunter series; the Mark Waid Flash; etc. I felt that DC was really on fire through the turn of the millenium, but it became increasingly more shaky as the 21st century unfolded. After a spark of brilliance with Infinite Crisis that ended with the fizzle of "One Year Later", DC hasn't really come back yet in my opinion. For me, that period in the 90's is probably going to be what I always remember as what the DC Comics universe should be.

Of course, none of this mentions my love of Jim Shooter's Valiant in the early to mid 90's. It's my favorite period of the independents.

 

[23skidoo]

In terms of personal interest (as opposed to any consideration of quality, etc), I'd probably say the late 1980s. That was the era of the Giffin Justice League, the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, and a bunch of other titles I remember enjoying. It was also around this time I first read Cerebus.

I fell away from comics in the 1990s. Not that I stopped buying them -- I lived right across the back alley from a comic book shop for much of the decade -- but it just seems I wasn't as interested in them as I was in the 1980s. I came back in the mid-2000s in a big way as the big Infinite Crisis and 52 events captured my attention, along with a number of interesting storylines like the first Waid LSH reboot. I still make the comic book shop a weekly destination and I'm in my 40s.

You'll notice no reference to Marvel here. I did enjoy some Marvel titles back in the 1980s - She Hulk comes to mind - but I've never really been as interested in Marvel as I've been interested in DC. And that has continued into today. I'm following some of the current Black Widow stuff, but except for dipping into the reboot of Ms Marvel when it first started, and buying a few Marvel Zombies issues before the joke got old, I don't think I've bought a dozen Marvel issues since I got back into comics around 2005.

Alex

 

[RobertScorpio]

I'm going with the 70s. Todays comics, with all the zombie crap, are so violent that I wouldn't even let my kid read a modern age comic book. Thankfully the kid has a parent (me) who raised him on Neil Adams and Kirby and Aparo and writers like Englehart and the like.

And, IMO, the 90s ushered in the era of 'gray' characters. Every superhero had to have some 'dark secret' in their past. Superman (earth 2) had it right when he came back in INFINITE CRISIS. The modern heroes had lost all meaning of being a hero. Declining comic book sells can be attributed to many reasons; but one of those reasons, IMO, is because they made escapism fun too cluttered with 'character challenged' heroes, and 'trend' following stories featuring the Mob/Vampires.

Rob

 

[TheSeeker]

The 70s and 80s are my favourite years and to a lesser extent 60s Marvel stuff.

 

[Captain Craig]

I started reading in what some are lobbing to call the Copper Age(early 80's to early 90s), time frame still TBD.

During this time I was able to find backissues of Bronze Age very fairly priced so those early impressionable few years are fondest of course.

I think the 90's was a mixed bag. Overall I felt it was more solid over at DC than Marvel. With Marvel totally frakking it up circa 1996/97 with Onslaught and Heroes Reborn along with the Bankruptcy causing titles enmasse to be cancelled that might otherwise have been kept going(ie Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider). That's right Noble Kale gets a bad rap cause he was GR as it was ending, the plan was to bring Danny back in a story that concluded in issue #100. *Sigh*

Flip the century and Marvel has been better with really only GL has a standout for DC. I don't think recreating the Silver Age in their vision was needed though. Marvel now begins the Heroic Age which is essentially their take on what DC has been doing with the Crisis pt2, Countdown and 52 arcs.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

My favorite time is always right now. There's always something worth reading somewhere.

 

[Mistral]

I think the early 70s with Kirby's Fourth World books and then again when Chris Clairemont took over the X books were my fav eras. After that-I gave up. Too many crossovers and way too many books each month-my budget collapsed and I never tried to rebuild...

 

[TheSeeker]

With Marvel totally frakking it up circa 1996/97 with Onslaught and Heroes Reborn...

You got that right! That's when I stopped reading. I guess I would include the very early 90s as part of my favourite era too now that I think about it.

 

[Chaos Descending]

Thinking on it a little more, I think my absolute favorite part of comics history ever is the stretch of The X-Men from Giant Size X-Men #1 up to (and through) the Mutant Massacre storyline of around 1986, 1987 or thereabouts. That's around the time that we started having too many X-Books (Uncanny X-Men, New Mutants, X-Factor) and the genre was becoming stale. I still enjoyed several other Marvel books at the time (Captain America, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and one of my ALL-TIME favorites, The Silver Surfer), but I think the company was already in serious decline by then.