Growing up, a teenager, in the early 80s, we didn’t do things like the generations before. The movies, the music and the comics that thrilled our older brothers just didn’t cut it for us.
Surely 2001, a Space Odyssey was really good, it’s what my father always said, But I knew Luke Skywalker and Obi-wan Kenoby. I just didn’t care for the Monolith. I’m sure Lon Chaney played a neat werewolf, that he didn’t even NEED make up or prosthetic, but after John Landis memorable shape shifting scene, an old BW movie just wasn’t an option.
I knew Led Zeppelin was a great band. My cousin had repeatedly told me so, but after Metallica’s Ride the Lightning, after the Dead Kennedys and Motorhead, it all seemed a little bland.
I really had appreciated the early Silver Age comics, which translated reprints were sold in my native Quebec, back in the days, But at 14 years of age, Carmine Infantino and Jack Kirby didn’t cut it for me. In those days I wanted more FRANK MILLER, more ALAN MOORE.
We couldn’t be happier the see those «lame», established, comic tropes being skillfully dismantled by this new generation of writers and artists. My real world looked much more like Miller’s than like 66’S Batman TV shows.
Of course Harry Osbourne had become the Green Goblin, in the 70s, after an acid bad trip, but Ozymandias became a HERO after eating hash. V was a acid head. Miracleman laid a world where PSYCHONAUTS were respected members of society.
Thus, even though the drugs, the violence, basically the disappearance of the comic code authority, made for great entertainment, it also unleashed a series of inevitable development that ultimately led to the implosion of the medium in the late 90s.
Little did we know, what was happening in our medias was just a microcosmic replica of what was happening in economics on a global scale. Neo-liberalism.
With The Monsters*, out on the prowl again, The Silver Age of comics and its ethics faded in the noise of history.
Or did it ?
Comic books were a niche market before the implosion. Through their pages the Heroes reached only a small part of the population. It is through TV and cinema that those characters really rolled their influence out on the generations.
For us, that grew up between, the classical Batman series and Donner’s Superman movie, the Silver Age and its ethics forever lives in our memory of this time, like some mythical hidden Island buried in our collective past.
But nostalgia is not a plan. We don’t need to sail back to that island. We need to build a new one.
The Silver Age wasn’t naive. It believed that power came with responsibility, that the strong owed something to the weak, and that a hero was someone you could actually try to become. We traded that for irony, for grit, for anti-heroes who looked a lot like the new masters of the economy: efficient, ruthless, alone.
Forty years later, the deconstruction is complete. We know how the machine works. We’ve seen the gears, the blood, the balance sheets. What’s missing now is the reconstruction.
So here is my plea: a new Silver Age. Not a return to the square jaw and the smiling cover, but heroes who have seen everything Miller and Moore showed us, and choose hope anyway. Heroes as a practice, not a fantasy.
That is what this blog, and the Initiative Oméga, are all about. Welcome aboard.
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