CHAPTER 7
The Funnies, 1933–1938
The comics of the Golden Age can be defined in two words: simple fun. The “simple fun” tales woven in the Golden Age laid the foundations for the most vibrant of American art forms. It’s from these nascent fever dream stories that the comics medium grew into the expressive and vital storytelling medium it is today.
The Golden Age was a time of experimentation, of searching for (secret) identities. It was the time that arguably the greatest contribution to storytelling of the past hundred years was born—the superhero, a cocktail of the archetypes of mythology and the power fantasies of male teenagers emerging from the Great Depression.
What no one knew at the time was that they were ushering in the age of superheroes, ...
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