Monday, September 05, 2005

The Silver Age Comicspeak Glossary

Back in the silver age they used to employ a certain amount of hyperbole in their editorial comments and a lot of the banner headlines used on comics tended towards the extravagant. Stan Lee in particular was a total drama queen, but Robert Kanigher also had his moments. So for those youngsters who may be confused by some of the things you might find on old comics, here's a translation.

Because you demanded it! : because we felt like it but we thought you might not like it, so we are going to claim that it was your idea and we reluctantly agreed to it.

The battle of the century! : a fight scene.

A novel length epic! : a story that fills the whole comic. A hangover from the days when comics were 52 pages and contained several 12 page stories and filler, so devoting the entire comic to one story seemed like a big deal.

A truely titanic thriller in the magnificent Marvel tradition!! : Oh look, Marvel have published another comic.

The greatest action thriller of all time!!!: 12 pages of people in tights hitting each other.

This epic doesn't need any hard sell! It's one of Marvel's greatest! : we couldn't think of anything to say about this issue.

The world will never be the same again! : Oh yes it will.

An imaginary story : An out of continuity story which, had it been written 40 years later would be published as a stand-alone volume at twice the price and labelled "Elseworlds".

Not an imaginary story! : it's all a convoluted trick to fool some alien invaders but we're not going to tell Lois/Jimmy. Either that or one of them is having a bad dream.

Not a dream, a hoax, or an imaginary story! : Everything will be back to normal next issue.

More deadly than ever before! : We gave him a makeover, but he's still going to lose.

4 comments:

Snard said...

Thank you, Marionette, for the best laugh I've had all day. :-)

Anonymous said...

If you watch interviews with Stan Lee he still talks this way.

I don't know if he always spoke that way long, long ago before he started working for Timely comics, but now it seems like the only thing that comes out of his mouth is alliterative hyberbole.

Yail Bloor

Jon Silpayamanant said...

this post just made my day!

Ragnell said...

This site was worth visiting for this post alone.