Golden Age Comics

Little Man With A Big Punch: Al Pratt, The Original Atom
Little Man With A Big Punch: Al Pratt, The Original Atom
Little Man With A Big Punch: Al Pratt, The Original Atom
Who is the Atom? If you said Ray Palmer, or Ryan Choi, or "that guy from the Justice League who changes size," or Brandon Routh on Legends of Tomorrow, you certainly wouldn't be wrong. But there was an Atom who came before all of them. His name was Al Pratt, and while he's not the most well-remembered Golden Age hero, he was an early version of a far-reaching archetype: the unstoppably tough undersized scrapper.
Give 'Em Elle: The Golden Age and DC's Reboot Habit
Give 'Em Elle: The Golden Age and DC's Reboot Habit
Give 'Em Elle: The Golden Age and DC's Reboot Habit
Welcome to Give 'Em Elle, a new weekly column that hopes to bridge the gap between old school comics fandom and the progressive edge of comics culture. In the future, I plan to take questions from readers and answer them in this column. I’ll solicit them on Twitter, where I’m @anotherelle if you want to go ahead and follow me. But since this is the very first edition, I’m on my own. So in the absence of a direct question, I want to talk about something that I hear discussed in comics all the time, and offer an explanation that I’ve never quite heard from anyone else. Specifically, I want to talk about the Marvel Universe and the DC Universe, and what makes them different. The big difference, in terms of continuity and structure, is that the DC Universe has been rebooted several times, with drastic changes to its history, and the Marvel Universe never really has. To be sure, the Marvel timeline gets messed with now and again (most recently with 2015’s Secret Wars), but it always defaults back to “things happened the way you remember, but nobody’s getting old.”
Ask Chris #172: 'The Problem'
Ask Chris #172: 'The Problem'
Ask Chris #172: 'The Problem'
Q: You mentioned "The Problem" in last week's column. So, what is "The Problem?" --@green2814 A: Last week, I dug in a little into the idea that even though they share prominent creators and have influenced each other back and forth over the course of the last 50 years, the DC and Marvel Universes have some fundamental differences in the way they're structured. One of the thing
Ten Golden Age Sidekicks Whose Names Sound Like Gross Sex Moves
Ten Golden Age Sidekicks Whose Names Sound Like Gross Sex Moves
Ten Golden Age Sidekicks Whose Names Sound Like Gross Sex Moves
In the Golden Age of Comics, which ran from roughly the late 1930s until the early 1950s, it was not unusual to see a superhero given either a kid sidekick or a bumbling adult friend, either so the hero had someone to talk to or as comic relief. While a few of these characters—Robin, Bucky, Speedy, Aqualad—have survived in comics readers' consciousness to the modern day, here are some characters whose names alone would make you feel sure you had accidentally hit the “random” button on Urban Dictionary.
The Golden Age Bakery Recreates An Entire ‘Stardust The Super Wizard’ Story On Delicious Cookies
The Golden Age Bakery Recreates An Entire ‘Stardust The Super Wizard’ Story On Delicious Cookies
The Golden Age Bakery Recreates An Entire ‘Stardust The Super Wizard’ Story On Delicious Cookies
A while back, I wrote about a Kickstarter for the Golden Age Bakery, a business in Chapel Hill built around making edible versions of classic Golden Age comics by printing them on cookies. I can think of no better cause. In that article, I mentioned that I'd really like to see a set of cookies featuring a story by the relatively obscure (and legitimately insane) Fletcher Hanks...