One very weird bit of golden age supergirls

It reminds me of both the simple charm of the Golden Age, and also that the comics were really simple(minded) then. Written for kids.

I'll stick with the 80s and 90s as the interesting period. Great art and better writing -- for a comic book. It ain't literature.

Shadar

Woodclaw wrote:

shadar wrote: It reminds me of both the simple charm of the Golden Age, and also that the comics were really simple(minded) then. Written for kids.

I'll stick with the 80s and 90s as the interesting period. Great art and better writing -- for a comic book. It ain't literature.

Shadar

Funny you mention that because the '80s saw the rise of the comic book to a recognized form of literature. I think it was Frank Miller's Dark Knight's Return the book that broke the taboo.

The comicbook industry was very smart. They realized that comics were regarded by nearly everyone as something you outgrew. Kids stuff only. This very interesting old comic that Woodclaw posted is an example. When I was young, anyone past the age of discovering girls who still read comic books was regarded as weird. Somehow a little broken.

So basically, their market was limited to a percentage of kids in the country. And after the baby boom, kids have not been a growth market.

The trick was to keep the comic book readers hooked as they grew up, and to do that the stories had to become more sophisticated and often morally ambiguous. That drew in some pretty good writers (compared to before). Eventually, some books were even classified for older ages. (Admittedly Frank Miller was searching for the furthest boundaries of moral ambiguousness.)

But once you start talking about the human psyche in all its range, the inner workings of the human machine, the agonies of moral choices, now you're talking literature.

Of course, not all comics went there, but they all got better. More real world. But the comics that were clearly literature lifted the whole genre.

And now, full-grown people can enjoy comic books and related material right out in the open. More so every year.

Now it's hard to believe that buying and reading comic books by adults was like thumb-sucking... It was something you were supposed to grow out of.

Thank you to the 1980's.

Oh... and this was the artwork at various points in the 80's:






Shadar

DC had these Perfect characters, but Stan Lee at Marvel brought to comics these flawed folks who had all kinds of conflicts and it caught on with the college crowd and others. It forced DC to change.

I'll say i kinda of like the comic.

obviously modern super strength stories and superheros evolved at the same time in comics-but there are werid off shoots at the begging. In modern comics-the DCS and the marvels, have kind of codifyed the kind of story you can do with super beings, the kinda of good girl vs the evil etc.There are variations, obviously and not everyone wears a cape.

I kinda of likes golden age comics ability to have werid little stories like this. The 40s where are a great period for crime storys-'Crimes by Women' , and i like how the story combines something really film noire with super strength stories. There is something to this kind of dark little tale of strengh squandered. Yeah shes kinds of dumb-but thats kinda of a feature of Film Noire stories.

i can't imagine a story like this being published today-and what more i would have a hard time seeing this on this site. and that says something.

Sounds like Dumb Bunny, a member of The Inferior Five, IIRC. Strong as an ox, and almost as smart