The Gold Standard
By Adam Murdough
The allegorical contrast being drawn between past and present in Project Superpowers is plain to see, but to their credit, series creator Alex Ross and writer Jim Krueger never allow the series to devolve into a bland, nostalgic morality play. While a certain sentimental bias toward the Golden Age is unmistakable, the message of Project Superpowers is not quite so simple as "Golden Age=Good, Modern Age=Bad." Several of the returning Golden Age heroes have been warped or traumatized by their long exile in the Urn, and are actually less "heroic" now than they once were; other Golden Agers, like the Dynamic Family and the American Crusader, have gone completely over to the dark side. And the tragic figure of the Fighting Yank constantly reminds the reader that the entire sorry state of the world is the direct result of the misinterpretation and oversimplification of "evil," something that Golden Age comic books, with their notoriously black-and-white worldview, are known for.
One of the most notable things about Project Superpowers is its use of characters that have lapsed into public domain. Instead of just making up a host of new "Golden Age" heroes with which to tell his story, Alex Ross went the extra mile for authenticity and assembled a cast of dozens of genuine Golden Agers, culled from the character libraries of several different tertiary comics publishers of the 1930s-40s, including Standard/Nedor (the Fighting Yank; the Black Terror; Pyroman), Fox Features Syndicate (Samson; the Flame), Dell (the Owl), and Lev Gleason (the Golden Age Daredevil, renamed "The Death-Defying 'Devil" in Project Superpowers for obvious trademark reasons). Some of these characters were last seen in the Tom Strong spin-off miniseries Terra Obscura from DC/WildStorm, while others have appeared in the Femforce line of titles and in various Golden Age reprint series from AC Comics, an important keeper of the Golden Age flame during the lean years of the 1980s and 1990s. One thing all of these characters have in common is that they went unpublished for enough years following their Golden Age heyday for their respective copyrights to expire, making them fair game for any and all publishers to use, and even for more than one publisher to use simultaneously (see the "Public Domain" sidebar for more details). Golden Age purists take note: Ross has streamlined and updated the costumes and powers of most of the characters appearing in Project Superpowers, some more drastically than others.
Public domain copyright law has been a great benefit to the Golden Age revival trend, in that it makes Golden Age characters legally accessible to a wider range of comics publishers, large and small, who might wish to launch revivals of their own. Characters in the public domain can function as a kind of freelance "heritage-for-hire," available pro-bono to any up-and-coming new superhero universe, such as Ross and Krueger's, in need of a ready-made Golden Age history on which to build. Also, public domain allows for multiple interpretations of certain Golden Age characters to exist concurrently at different publishers. For instance, in April 2008, the Green Lama was able to appear in Project Superpowers, in the first issue of his own original AC Comics limited series, and in a hardcover archive from Dark Horse Comics reprinting his earliest comics appearances, all in a single month!
Marvel Comics fans reading this article may be wondering why so little has been said so far about Golden Age revivals from their favorite publisher, which had a decent market presence in the 1930s-40s as Timely Comics. This is because Marvel simply has never done quite as much to develop and use its Golden Age resources as, say, DC Comics has done with the Justice Society. For instance, Marvel's entire Golden Age-inspired output during the 1980s and 1990s, not counting reprints (of which Marvel has published many, including several hardcover "Marvel Masterworks" volumes of Golden Age stories), consisted of a single Invaders miniseries in 1993. In 2000, a team of Golden Age-related characters known as the V-Battalion appeared in the Thunderbolts title, and they were eventually spun off into two miniseries in 2001 and 2002, respectively. A New Invaders ongoing series was attempted in 2004, featuring a squad of Golden Age heroes attempting international paramilitary missions in the present day, but it lasted a mere ten issues.
The concept of legacy, which has been so successful for DC, has never really caught on at Marvel either. With the exception of Captain America, whose mantle has been taken up by several different characters over the years (most recently by Bucky, the Golden Age sidekick of the original Cap, after the latter's death); the British hero Union Jack; and a few members of the V-Battalion, Golden Age superhero identities have not usually been portrayed as intergenerational legacies in the Marvel Universe. Instead, those Golden Age characters who mattered to fans simply survived into the present without aging, no successors needed, while the rest faded away.
Marvel's seeming lack of interest in its own early history could be attributed to a desire to focus on its present and future instead. Marvel has always had a reputation for being more forward-thinking and progressive than DC, even if that reputation has not always been wholly deserved. Nevertheless, the ugly truth is that Marvel simply does not have as much viable Golden Age material to work with. Compared to the Golden Age oeuvre of DC Comics (or National Periodical Publications, as it was then known), which was solid enough to evolve into its own "universe," the fondly-remembered Earth-2, alongside the mainstream DC Universe during the Silver Age, Timely/Marvel in the Golden Age was shallow and inchoate, a shadow of its future self.
Look up your favorite comics (Superman, Black Cat) or topic (Artist Interviews, Reviews)