Blog: Comics | Histories

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Last week there was a knock at the door, and that knock was knocked by The Postie with a special package for me what had come all the way from Germany, containing THIS:



As you can hopefully see from the above, this is a book called Comics | Histories (I'm not sure what the "|" is for) what has been published by Rombach, edited by Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto, Felix Giesa and Christina Meyer, and I received a copy because my chapter Periodizing 'The Marvel Age' Using the Production of Culture Approach is very much in it!

I am EXTREMELY pleased that this book is out as my chapter is the FINAL SLICE of my PhD to be published, and it is quite a BIG slice. As fellow Comics Aficionados will be aware, American superhero comics have traditionally been divided into AGES. The Golden Age starts with Action Comics #1 in 1938 - the debut of Superman - and is when most of the really big DC superheroes were first invented. The Silver Age starts in 1956 with the introduction of the new Flash in Showcase #4, and saw revised versions of most of those heroes plus, in 1962, the debut of The Fantastic Four. PEASY!

After that, however, it all gets a bit confusing, with The Bronze Age starting somewhere in the early 1970s, sort of, and then... um... well, nobody seems to agree WHAT happens after that. It's all very inexact and unsatisfying, especially when you're trying to do an empirical analysis of a corpus of comics BASED on ages, so I decided to SORT IT OUT by developing a DIFFERENT classification, based on empirical methods rather than just "this is when a comic I like came out".

The POINT of this, for my PhD, was that it gave me a way to select a CORPUS of comics, cartoons, radio shows etc featuring Doctor Doom that all appeared during this period, which I called "The Marvel Age". However, when I was putting together the BOOK Data and Doctor Doom, describing how all this worked was starting to DERAIL everything else, so I decided to EXCISE the full explanation and put it somewhere ELSE, and THIS is the place where I put it.

I am therefore REALLY EXCITED that it is now OUT in the world because, as stated above, it was a HUGE part of the PhD that didn't really get into the book, and I think that ACTUALLY DEFINING what "The Marvel Age" MEANS (rather than just SAYING it, as everybody seems to) could be Quite Useful for The Comics Studies Community.

I am EVEN MORE EXCITED to realise that you can actually READ my chapter for FREE by accessing it on the Nomos e-library! Do go and have a look if you can, it is NOT TOO LONG and does explain quite a LOT about how all this works!

posted 4/10/2024 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

"John Byrne’s reboot of Superman in Man O Steel" -- that makes sense, as it focused on Krypton, Krypton is green, kryptonite is green, and so it follows that Superman landed in Ireland as a babbie to become the Man O'Steel. Able to leap Giant's Causeway in a single bound, a costume of orange and green...
posted 10/10/2024 by Dermot Morgan would have brought gravitas to the role of Connor Ceannt

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