ABSTRACT
Historians and theorists have not settled on a suitable name for the post-Silver Age of sf comics, largely because it is difficult to delineate or analyze a cultural era which is, arguably, still current, and because, as we shall see, post-Silver Age comics are often defined by their attitude toward the Silver Age. Each time comics enter a new phase of their existence, they also attain a new level of narrative sophistication. The Golden Age resulted from a combination of pulp sf tropes with the illustrative qualities of adventure strips, brought together in the figure of the superhero. Beyond the historical, sociopolitical and technological repercussions of the shift from Eisenhower to Kennedy administrations, the influential factor behind the move from the Golden to the Silver Age was the playful grandiosity and innovative characterization of work by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. In the 1980s and 1990s, three interconnected factors gave Anglophone comics a new, post-Silver Age sophistication.
