Sunday, April 26, 2009

The Definitive Guide to the History of the Comic Book Industry

==Important==
I've moved this post over to my new WordPress blog, you can comment on it here.



While doing some research for a personal comic project, I had to create a spreadsheet that documented the history of the comic industry.
After compiling it, I found it contained a lot of info that I thought people would find interesting. I hope you enjoy it

3 comments:

Torsten Adair said...

I've added some more columns, and made a few edits.

Golden and Silver Ages have somewhat agreed starting and end dates. (There are some empty spaces between when one age ends and another begins.)

I suspect the Bronze Age begins with the publication of The Amazing Spider-Man; issues #96–98 (May–July 1971), which led to the revision of the Comics Code Authority, which allowed an influx of horror comics and other themes.

A bit light on Underground Comics. No mention of Showcase #4, which began the Silver Age.

The price column... what are you using as a source? I'd suggest you use Action Comics and Fantastic Four as bellweathers.

Also, you should set the sheet to archive every hour (or whenever the sheet is edited, whichever is fewer), and you should have the ability to lock cells. Otherwise, it becomes like Wikipedia WITHOUT any oversight. If you can, have Google highlight each change made.

This is a cool idea. As it grows, you may wish to move each column to a specific sheet.

Payton said...

Torsten...Thanks for the new columns and edits. I like what you added.

Google Docs does archive the spreadsheet any time someone makes an edit. Just go to File > Revision History to see what others have done.

Because of the nature of my project, I focused primarily on DC and Marvel. I began to add the independents last weekend.

The price column came from the actual comics themselves. I based the price of the early years on mostly DC (Batman & Superman) and the later years mostly on Marvel (FF & Spider-man). I think that there should be a different price column for each company. During the late 70's, DC priced its comics higher than Marvel for a while.

Each age is a rough estimate. Some easier to see than others. I set the Modern Age at 1985 instead of 1986. I think that the Dark Knight and Watchmen really couldn't have happened without Crisis. I've had someone else ask me why I didn't start it with Miller's Daredevil. I think that Miller's work was the start of the Modern Age but it was the spark and Crisis/DK/Watchmen were the fire.

The development of The Definitive Guide is up to anyone who wants to help. I just don't have the time to devote to it as I would like. I look forward to seeing what happens to it.

The Groovy Agent said...

A major bit of fact checking here:

The actual DC Explosion/Implosion, (as well as the 44 pages for 50 cents price increase) happened in the summer of 1978 under publisher Jenette Kahn. The "explosion" of 75 (actually just a nameless deluge of new titles) was during Carmine Infantino's reign as publisher.

Just me tryin' to help out the cause! :D