Tried reading a silver age X-Men issue my dad gave me

I thought it would be a classic, cool origin story. Instead, it was 20 pages of the team sitting around a table talking about their feelings and then fighting a giant purple guy. Learned that older comics are a whole different beast than modern ones, has anyone else had that shock going back a few decades?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_jesse28d ago

A lot of those old comics just had to fill pages because they were part of a newspaper syndication deal, so the writing was padded to hit a word count. The fight was probably just an excuse to sell more copies that month.

tessa_kim328d ago

Did you ever read that book "Men of Tomorrow" by Gerard Jones? I picked it up a few years ago and it goes deep into how those old newspaper syndicates basically ran the whole comic industry. They'd force writers to churn out these insane amounts of copy every single day, and yeah, a lot of it was just filler to keep the strip running. The fight scenes were definitely a quick way to fill up space and get people talking at the newsstand. I remember one chapter talked about how the writers would sometimes just copy old plots from other strips and change the names because they were so burned out. It's crazy how much of that stuff was just thrown together to meet deadlines and sell papers, not because anyone actually cared about the story.