When it comes to raw creativity and volume of new superhero properties created, the sixties just can't be beat. It's when some of the talents we regard as the greatest and most influential ever were in the very prime of their careers -- Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Wally Wood, Curt Swan, Stan Lee, Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, Gardner Fox, Neal Adams, etc.

But outside of the work of Jack Kirby, I think my favorite approach to superhero comics overall happened in the 80s. There was still some of that Silver Age sense of superhero fun and accessibility, but the beginnings of more interesting and adult themes being explored. The style for dialogue and narration started feeling more mature and less expository and stilted. Superheroes hadn't yet descended into the comically overblown ultra-violence, testosterone, and lack of actual stories of the early 90s just yet (though they were heading there). Nor was the never-ending event book cycle, navel-gazing and self-referential meta-fiction, bloated decompression / writing-for-the-trade, shock event / status quo shake-ups, etc. of the new millennia upon us just yet.

I don't know, there was just this really nice balance of all-ages and adult content within the various superhero titles.

Anyway, to kick off this thread, I'll link to a blog I randomly just found covering Eclipse Comics' output. This guy apparently is reading everything Eclipse ever put out. Check it --

https://totaleclipse.blog/

And he has a similarly awesome one called Totally Pacific (recall that Eclipse purchased the titles of Pacific and kept them going).

https://pacific.kwakk.info/

I have a complete set of Alien Worlds and Twisted Tales (that's two titles). So there's that. They are some of the best EC-style books ever. Though they do have lots of nuditity.

Beautiful female nudity, or disgusting male nudity?

I first got heavily into comics in 1988. My Uncle gifted me a large portion of his collection around that time; he must have done a lot of heavy buying in 1984, since that's where a lot of the stuff he gave me seemed to fall.

So 1984/1988 is my golden age, which seems to fall squarely where you're talking about. In Baltimore, I think Jay and I talked about how Secret Wars was the event that marked the end of his early collecting days ... but my entre into collecting was partly via comics that were pretty much contemporaneous with Secret Wars. (As I recall, more than one of the comics my Uncle gave me ended with the main character coming to Central Park and disappearing into the big machine, and the caption, "Continued in Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars, on sale in January!" or some words to that effect.)

It was a weird juxtaposition too. One cool thing about that era (for Marvel at least), in addition to the qualities you mention in the top post, was how mutable everything seemed. Lots of stuff was changing in 1984, and then changed again in 1988, so to read a 1984 issue of a particular title back-to-back with a 1988 one tended to really fire the imagination. In 1984, you had Spider-Man in a new costume; She-Hulk joining the FF; Tony Stark was a drunk while Jim Rhodes wore the Iron armor; Daredevil was in a moderately dark and gritty phase, post-Elektra but pre-Born Again; the Hulk was completely mute, wandering the Crossroads ...

Then in 1988, Spidey was back in the traditional costume but now he was married; no She-Hulk in FF, but no Reed or Sue either, and the Thing had spikes; the Hulk was a grey-skinned enforcer in a Vegas casino; Tony Stark was clean sober and back in the armor (but soon to lose the use of his legs); Daredevil had gotten into some weird stuff with Typhoid Mary.

And the differences between the X-Men in 1984 vs. 1988 ... well, we'd be here all day, am I right?

It all really fired-up my imagination and made the whole thing feel like an epic saga where nothing was fixed and the status quo could be up-ended at any point. I'm not sure if I ever would have gotten as hooked as I got, if my introduction to Marvel comics hadn't been juxtaposed simultaneous glimpses of two distinct periods in the characters' lives.

The former, and none of the latter.

I think the continuing narratives and references to older stories create that sense of a larger, more epic tapestry. For me, what did that was Marvel Tales -- I didn't realize they were reprints, but it felt like there was all kinds of different versions of these heroes out there. You'd also see books collecting Silver Age stuff, which felt like a million years old at the time (and not merely 25-30 years ago).

You don't have to sell me on them, I already think they are great.

My Golden Age of comics is from about 1977 through 1988, when I discovered beer, music and girls.

Did you discover all three on the same day? Man, that must have been quite the Saturday night.

My first day of college life was pretty epic.

The early 1980s were when I got into superhero comics. I loved them. Looking back at them with older and more mature eyes, I can see that there was much that was mediocre and juvenile about them. Nothing really wrong with that--they were made to entertain youths. When I look back at them I find them at least readable, even if they no longer thrill me like they did my younger self. Far preferable to so much of the nastier juvenile stuff that claimed to be "mature" from the late 1980s on.

Walt Simonson Thor
John Byrne Fantastic Four
Roger Stern Avengers and Spider-Man
Peter David Hulk
Frank Miller Daredevil
Chris Claremont X-Men
Wolfman and Perez Teen Titans
George Perez Wonder Woman
John Byrne Superman
Mike Baron Flash
Alan Moore Swamp Thing
Baron and Rude on Nexus and Badger
Howard Chaykin American Flagg
John Ostrander Grimjack
Dave Sim Cerebus

Marvel Superhero Secret Wars
Squadron Supreme
Crisis on Infinite Earths
Watchmen
Dark Knight

I am sure I am forgetting something.

I bought a ton of Eclipse comics.

Li'l Jay, when did the Bronze Age end?

Miller/David Mazzucchelli: Batman: Year One was pretty good.
I probably need to read Barry Smith's Machine Man 2020 again.
I recall Power Pack being pretty good.
Warrior Magazine in general.
Maus.
Marvel Graphic Novels in general.
Groo the Wanderer
Rocketeer.

I started off reading B&W reprints of older stuff - both Marvel and DC - from the 60's and 70's. There was also stuff from the early 70's that was reprinted in these big B&W digest things that various companies in Australia had somehow gotten the rights to (mostly by the 'Yaffa Publishing Group' and a company called 'Newton Comics'). So I was reading stuff in 1976 that was as recent (then) as 1974, concurrently with Carmine Infantino issues of The Flash. I was also reading Rich Buckler issues of the FF while reading Lee & Kirby issues, as well as POTA stuff and Man-Thing and Neal Adams' Batman along with Silver Age Batman and Robin stuff. I was reading Wayne Boring Superman stories in the same huge 'phone book' alongside 1950's Wonder Woman stuff, then the next thing I'd read would be a Denny O'Neil Wonder Woman story (where she's in the white jumpsuit), followed by a Neal Adams Superman story (you get the idea). You could span several decades within one single digest. There wasn't much in the way of continuity except that you'd get three or four issues of something in a row within one digest. Sometimes you got a whole story arc, sometimes you didn't.

I guess it was comparable to the experience Doot describes of jumping around within the span of each character's entire history all at once.

So there were issues of ROM in these B&W digests that were only a year or eighteen months behind the current storyline featured in the (more expensive) colour comics on the news stand. I read about Adam Warlock in B&W in the same huge comic that also had stories about the Black Panther from Jungle Action Comics. I was reading about Ghost Rider in B&W while there were still American issues (a year or so ahead) coming out. To my parents it was just a matter of the B&W ones being much cheaper - with vastly more pages - so they were seen as being better value for money I guess.

I'd somehow manage to figure out the who, why, where and what of things by piecing together stuff in my imagination. You could figure things out by how things had changed in what I knew to be the more recent ones; the art was the giveaway. You could tell that the art styles changed so you could tell instantly what era a story was from just by looking at it. I started to remember the names of artists I liked, etc. I eventually got How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way and then got heavily into drawing stuff from life (for some reason). I was never good at Superhero art.

Comics were a big part of my life, and I love the stuff from the 60's and 70's most of all, but by the time the late 80's arrived I had a job that allowed me to get stuff as it was coming out (from a comics shop called Minotaur Books in Melbourne), and I was very particular about what I did and didn't buy. My preferences were, I think, heavily influenced by what I'd read in those B&W comic digests - for example, there were characters (like Daredevil or The Punisher) who I didn't know much about so I tended not to buy them once I was getting into comic book collecting more seriously. I was more interested in stuff like the FF, Hulk, Spider-Man, Dr. Strange,Thor, The Avengers, Iron-Man, Man-Thing, Morbius, Ghost Rider, ROM and Howard the Duck (who I knew from the B&W comics). I also loved anything with monsters, apes and robots. There were always familiar characters and titles with things that appealed to me, so I never ran out of stuff to enjoy. I also collected back issues in the late 80's and throughout the 90's, so I was heavily into What If? and HTD and older issues of The Hulk (among other things like Marvel Age and Marvel Fanfare, etc)

I didn't know as much about DC's continuity as I did Marvel's since the bulk of the stuff in those digests were Marvel comics. I didn't dislike DC, I just hadn't read as much of it.

Some links about those old comics - although none of the info seems complete to me. There was stuff Newton comics published that I clearly recall that's never mentioned, or seems to have been forgotten about. There were B&W issues of Marvel and DC titles that none of these websites even mention, and I know I read them as they were the only comics I read for many years as a kid. There seems to have been a lot of illegality involved in their publication, so I guess it's no surprise the info is incomplete.

https://ausreprints.net/publisher/225

https://www.comics.org/indicia_publisher/404/

http://comicsdownunder.blogspot.com/200 ... -book.html

This book looks like it'd be interesting, too, and might clear up some of the missing pieces of the puzzle -

https://www.pozible.com/project/23150

So I kind of missed the version of the 80's Hanzo's talking about. I was aware of it, but was more interested in older stuff than in what was currently going on. By the time Mcfarlane was drawing Spider-Man I sort of tapped out of new stuff entirely. I didn't like his art and sort of gradually drifted away from comics. There was no actual moment where I decided to stop buying them, I just sort of slowly drifted away.

I bought a lot of Pacific comics, too.

I learned of the existence of the 1980s independent publishers like Eclipse and Pacific from reading Jeff Rovin's Encyclopedia of Superheroes. It was so cool to know that there were other comics publishers! But where to find them? We still had comics in grocery stores locally, but no shops anywhere in the region that carried a bigger selection. Then the local grocery store stopped carrying comics. On a trip to New Mexico I caught a glimpse of a place that carried a wider selection of titles. It was exciting and tantalizing.

Then I went to college and discovered a newsstand a couple of blocks from campus that carried comics. It wasn't a huge selection, but I was back in business at least. Unfortunately grim-and-gritty was now in fashion. It was around that time that J--n B---e made a mess of my favorite title, "West Coast Avengers."

Then came the 1990s, and I stopped getting new comics entirely. At least by then I had moved to a place near a big comics shop with lots of cheap back issues. Even a hungry grad student could afford to buy a few.