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| The Bronze Age goodness of DC Comics Presents (1978) #55 Art by Alex Saviuk |
The Bronze Age of comic books (ca. 1970 to 1985) is an often-overlooked segment of comic's history. It doesn't command the historical reverence of the Golden Age or the sci-fi wonder of the Silver Age, but for many fans like me, Bronze Age comics were our gateway into the four-color fantasy worlds of capes, masks, and the never-ending battles against the forces of evil. The Bronze Age represented many things, chief among them was a turn toward more mature styles of story-telling that reflected real-life social phenomena such as Green Lantern/Green Arrow's "Hard Traveling Heroes era," Spider-Man's "The Night Gwen Stacy Died," and Iron Man's "Demon in a Bottle," as clear examples.
But another hallmark of the Bronze Age was the emergence of the "team-up book" that paired an "A-list" hero with other heroes with whom they usually didn't cross paths. Titles such as The Brave and the Bold (1955) starring Batman, Marvel Team-Up (1972) with Spider-Man, DC Comics Presents (1978) featuring Superman, and Marvel Two-In-One (1974) spotlighting the ever-loving blue-eyed Thing all partnered a megapopular lead character with a less popular, or even obscure character. These books were designed to both explore less traveled regions of their respective fictional universes and to allow well-established characters to give the proverbial popularity "rub" to their ad hoc "B-list" (and sometimes "C-list") partners. As with most Bronze Age titles, the team-up book's stories were usually of the "one and done" variety with only the occasional two-parter in order to expose readers to as many characters as possible. Sadly, by 1986, team-up books were a thing of the past, much like the Bronze Age itself.
But another hallmark of the Bronze Age was the emergence of the "team-up book" that paired an "A-list" hero with other heroes with whom they usually didn't cross paths. Titles such as The Brave and the Bold (1955) starring Batman, Marvel Team-Up (1972) with Spider-Man, DC Comics Presents (1978) featuring Superman, and Marvel Two-In-One (1974) spotlighting the ever-loving blue-eyed Thing all partnered a megapopular lead character with a less popular, or even obscure character. These books were designed to both explore less traveled regions of their respective fictional universes and to allow well-established characters to give the proverbial popularity "rub" to their ad hoc "B-list" (and sometimes "C-list") partners. As with most Bronze Age titles, the team-up book's stories were usually of the "one and done" variety with only the occasional two-parter in order to expose readers to as many characters as possible. Sadly, by 1986, team-up books were a thing of the past, much like the Bronze Age itself.
But fear not, team-up book fans, while DC and Marvel are not currently interested in team-up book revivals, someone out there is trying to recapture the spirit of the monthly multi-hero melees of the past. The Super-Team Family blog has been posting mock cover images for a fictional team-up book named, oddly enough, Super-Team Family...The Lost Issues. The mock covers are created from real comic book cover images that have been assembled and polished to resemble a true professional comic book cover with a look and feel straight from the comic book Bronze Age. But the even cooler aspect of these nostalgia covers is that, unlike the original team-up books, the characters used for Super-Team Family covers come from all different companies, media, and genre's of speculative fiction (i.e. comic books, movies, television series, toylines, etc.). For example, the cover published on the day I wrote this post teamed Star Wars' Luke Skywalker with the Transformers' Optimus Prime! What's even more impressive is that this blog has been delivering daily content since 2010.
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| Image Source: https://braveandboldlost.blogspot.com/ |
Even though Deathstroke the Terminator made his debut during the Bronze Age, he never appeared in either The Brave and the Bold or DC Comics Presents (though he was in the Marvel and DC Present the Uncanny X-Men and the Teen Titans (1982) intercompany team-up one-shot). But thanks to Super-Team Family, as of this writing, Deathstroke has appeared on 15 covers taking on anyone including Black Panther, Daredevil, Black Widow, Deadpool, Moon Knight, the Taskmaster, and even the Hulk. Posted below are just a few of the Deathstroke mock comic book covers.
Click here to check out the rest of the blog; I promise you'll love it. And if you really love it, while there you can make a donation to the blog's Patreon to help ensure that all of the Bronze Age-inspired fun continues on for a long, long time.
