THE "PERSONAL GOLDEN AGE"

It's weird how these things go. A month or so back, I was thinking about typing up a debriefing on this year's Comic-Con -- but as usual, while I enjoyed myself, I find that I have very little to put to screen regarding my time there. It was fine, but a lot of the experience for me is simply spending time with friends who I don't see as often as I used to. The con itself is almost secondary nowadays to the hanging around, the games, and the eating out around town.

But as I mulled over whether or not to bother with a recap essay, I mused that the first SDCC I attended was nineteen years ago, in 1999 (and if you think that means I'll find a way to commemorate twenty years of Comic-Con next summer, True Believer, you've got me figured out). I started thinking about what the convention was like back then and the sorts of panels I attended. Then, the kicker -- my iPad wallpaper as I entertained these thoughts was an Avengers image by George Pérez, and I noted the year he'd drawn it beside his signature: 1997 (that's it at right).

I thought some more. We're more than twenty years removed now from the start of the Busiek/Pérez AVENGERS run, the Busiek/Bagley THUNDERBOLTS run, Spider-Man's Clone Saga, "Onslaught", and so forth, and it's been almost twenty years since my first Comic-Con. That got me thinking about the concept of the "Personal Golden Age" of comics, which I've seen now and then on the internet: the idea that everyone has an era where comics captured their imagination more than any time before or after. For some, it was probably right when they got into comics. For others, like me, it came a bit later.

Though the first comic I can recall owning came into my possession when I was around four years old, and though I read plenty of comic books in elementary school, the period I'd define as my Personal Golden Age encompassed all of high school and part of college, roughly ages fourteen to twenty-one. And while it's not a perfectly clean delineation, I can even name where I would consider the "Age" to have begun and ended: X-MEN #20 (May 1993) - AVENGERS #34/THUNDERBOLTS #44 (November 2000).

The beginning is simple. I'd been reading comics books for years; lots of Disney stuff from Gladstone Comics, plus some Marvel. Gerry Conway's WEB OF SPIDER-MAN and SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN come to mind as early favorites, plus SECRET WARS, which I owned in full and read many, many times (it became a ritual of mine that any time I was home sick from elementary school, I would read SECRET WARS that day). Marvel's TRANSFORMERS and some other toy tie-in series would fall on this list as well. Eventually, during middle school (circa seventh grade or so), I started reading AMAZING SPIDER-MAN under David Michelinie and Mark Bagley, and I picked up the X-Men's "X-Cutioner's Song" crossover as well. But it was X-MEN #20 which marked my first issue as a regular, ongoing X-reader, and for whatever reason I consider that to be the point I was no longer a casual dabbler; with that installment I became fully invested in Marvel's universe.

The end is a bit trickier. I kept reading Marvel comics for a long time after AVENGERS 34 and THUNDERBOLTS 44. But for me, that's where my all-encompassing monthly interest in the universe ended. Issue 34 was George Pérez's final installment of AVENGERS, and Bagley would be off THUNDERBOLTS a mere six months later. Spider-Man was well into a poorly-received relaunch at this point, and the X-Men had snowballed downhill with the ill-conceived "Revolution" and "Counter-X" stunts. Both AVENGERS and THUNDERBOLTS would remain quality reads for a couple more years, but the departure of Pérez was a severe blow to AVENGERS from my perspective, and the series never quite felt the same afterward. Ditto Bagley leaving THUNDERBOLTS (and I could just as easily have called T-BOLTS 50 the end of my Golden Age, but Pérez leaving AVENGERS just feels more momentous).

So the middle, the era between those two bookends, is my own Personal Golden Age. I've talked about it before, both here (in my reviews of various X-Men collected editions, plus a few other posts) and elsewhere. As much as I generally prefer the status quos of the Silver and Bronze Ages for many characters, nineties Marvel is "my" Marvel. That includes all the X-Men events of the era, the Clone Saga, Jim Starlin's "Infinity" trilogy, "Onslaught" and "Heroes Reborn", plus THUNDERBOLTS, HEROES FOR HIRE, DEADPOOL by Joe Kelly, and AVENGERS by Busiek and Pérez. All this stuff is what held me enraptured with the Marvel Universe for the bulk of the nineties, through adolescence and into my college years. This is why I generally have complimentary things to say about Scott Lobdell, Bob Harras, and even Howard Mackie, alongside folks like Busiek, Starlin, and Fabian Nicieza -- those creators, among others, brought me more entertainment as a teen than any other human beings I could possibly name.

(I also read a few vintage runs for the very first time during this period, chiefly among them the Claremon/Cockrum/Byrne X-Men and Roger Stern's Spider-Man stuff, cementing both as definitive takes on the characters and situations in my mind.)

And of course there's another aspect of this, which probably helps to explain why I so fondly remember this period over any other in my comic book reading life. As I've mentioned (probably too many times) before, I was big into tabletop roleplaying games as a kid. My friends and I started in fifth grade, dabbling with all sorts of games throughout middle school, but around the eighth grade, we more-or-less settled on TSR's MARVEL SUPER HEROES as our go-to game for ongoing adventures. I was the game master, and in that capacity I tied various Marvel events into our scenarios. Throughout middle school, high school, and into college, the players' characters were tangentially involved in and/or affected by the fallout from "Fatal Attractions", "Onslaught", "Operation: Zero Tolerance", "Heroes Return", "The Twelve", and probably a few others I'm forgetting. Plus, in general, I patterned the "feel" of our ongoing campaign after that of Fabian Nicieza's X-MEN and later, Kurt Busiek's THUNDERBOLTS and AVENGERS -- while also borrowing heavily from the twists and turns of the Clone Saga-era Spider-Man books and Roger Stern's HOBGOBLIN LIVES.

Thus it's a combination of factors that cements 1993 - 2000 as my Golden Age. Obviously, getting heavily into Marvel comics at that time was part of it, and I think my teen years were the prime point in my life for me to really buy into the soap opera aspects of the X-books and the labyrinthine quality of the Spider-books during the Clone Saga. Plus I had friends who actually read comics at the time, so there was a shared interest there as well. Then, Kurt Busiek's THUNDERBOLTS and AVENGERS hit just as I found myself developing a taste for really heavy "continuity porn" (which I'm pretty sure had been awakened just a few months earlier by HOBGOBLIN LIVES in 1996). Add to that the interest in RPGs and the fact that the Marvel Universe was an ongoing source of new plot ideas in "real time", and it was sort of a perfect storm of circumstances.

Plus -- though in retrospect it happened at the very end of what I would now call the Golden Age -- as noted up above, my very first San Diego Comic-Con visit was in 1999 (and I skipped 2000 before returning in '01). So while the dark days of Quesada and Jemas were only about a year away at that point, in July of '99 I was able to at least enjoy one SDCC with the Marvel I'd known and loved for the past few years, which does add something very big to this era even if it occurred extremely late in the game.

Like I said, I'd read comics before and I continued to read them after -- it was nearly a decade after November of 2000 that I finally got fed up enough to stop reading new Marvels entirely (and I've never stopped reading comic books in general, of course) -- but whenever I think about the time in my life when I really, earnestly had the most fun reading comics, when I looked forward to them every month and even found a way to integrate them into my life as something other than mere consumable entertainment, there's no contest. X-MEN #20 through THUNDERBOLTS #44 is my Personal Golden Age.