The Iron Age of Comics

It’s another big everything-changes-forever epic as Mark Waid hits “Terminal Velocity.” The discovery of the Speed Force as the source of superspeed in the DC Universe is transforming Wally West emotionally and physically, and his future with Linda Park is at stake. True love conquers all (sorry for the spoiler), but they won’t necessarily live happily ever as they have to pick up the pieces after...

It’s the part of the run you’ve been waiting for: Buddy Baker can see you! And Grant Morrison can talk to you, too. We’ve seen Animal Man establish his superhero cred, straighten out his origin, and become an animal-rights activist. Now, in issues #18-26 closing out Morrison’s run, the very nature of his fictional reality is at stake as our hero also deals with the ultimate personal tragedy. In th...

Professor Zoom has been defeated, Wally West has regained his top speed and put aside his insecurities about living up to Barry Allen’s legacy, and Mark Waid’s Flash is now a comic book to watch as 1993 turns into 1994. As rookie penciler Mike Wieringo comes aboard as new regular artist, Waid teams Wally up with Nightwing and Starfire (and his ex-girlfriend), puts the Flash on trial, and hints at...

A small preview of our discussion of Darwyn Cooke's DC: The New Frontier and how you can get the rest by supporting us at patreon.com/ironageofcomics.

Barry Windsor-Smith finally reveals the secret origin of Wolverine! Well…kind of. The biweekly anthology comic Marvel Comics Presents got a shot in the arm when it ran the serialized saga of Weapon X from issues #72-84 in 1991, and although the story has an amusing origin story of its own, it's fairly light on actual details about Logan’s past. Instead, BWS wrote, drew, and colored an intensely vo...

Our look at Mark Waid’s legendary run on The Flash continues! After taking on his first major assignment as a writer, retelling Wally West’s origin, and paring down the supporting cast to help focus on Wally’s journey to maturity, Waid goes for broke with an epic, life-changing event storyline that today we know as “The Return of Barry Allen.” If Wally’s beloved mentor is back from the dead, where...

In its original format as a 1988 six-issue prestige/bookshelf format limited series, Bob Harras and Paul Neary’s Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D. was a blockbuster, drawing readers in with lavish production values and a story that promised to upend everything you knew about the Marvel Universe’s premier espionage organization. It was collected in one of the earliest trade paperbacks in the developing bo...

Want to help us get our hands on the comics we read and talk about on the show? You can now support this podcast at patreon.com/ironageofcomics!

Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts, find us on social media where the handle is @ironageofcomics, and support the show at patreon.com/ironageofcomics!

Like Chris Claremont on X-Men or Frank Miller on Daredevil, Mark Waid’s work on The Flash was so additive and transformative that later creators can’t help but draw from it. Writing or co-writing the book from 1992 to 2000 (minus a one-year hiatus), Waid did around a hundred issues, including annuals and other tie-ins…and we’re going to read every single one! Our eight-part look at Waid’s run begi...

An extra week between episodes takes us off the beaten path of our regular coverage and into a hidden dinosaur kingdom inside the hollow Earth, where Walt Simonson and Lee Weeks pit pulp hero Tarzan against the Predators of film fame in a four-issue Dark Horse Comics limited series from 1996. Along the way, we'll pontificate about the finer points of Edgar Rice Burroughs' often problematic pop cul...

Fans love to argue about Batman, so why can so many of us agree that Batman: The Animated Series is one of the best interpretations of the character and his world in any medium? We don’t think it’s just the nostalgia talking! We’ll look at a selection of episodes from the first part of the series to illustrate how Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, and the production team inclusively cherry-picked the best of...

Milestone Media’s Icon has a pretty punchy elevator pitch: “What if Superman was a Black Republican?” But with stories by Dwayne McDuffie and pencils by M.D. “Doc” Bright (both now sadly no longer with us), this book goes to some interesting and unexpected places. For one thing, this Supermanalogue has a sidekick: a teenage girl named Rocket who is arguably the real protagonist of the book and who...

Neil Gaiman’s complete reinvention of DC’s trademark on The Sandman is inarguably one of the most influential comics of the Iron Age…so why haven’t we talked about it much yet? And why are we starting with the storyline that’s popularly considered “Volume 2” of the series? We’re focusing on the collection that introduced The Sandman to the bookshelf market (which originally included the landmark “...

We return to our coverage of DC’s 1989 Animal Man series—Grant Morrison’s first ongoing for the U.S. comics market—with a look at issues #10 through #17 (commonly collected in trade as “Origin of the Species”). Now that we’ve met Buddy Baker and seen him join the Justice League, we’ll follow his investigation into the mysteries of his secret origin (which, as it turns out, no longer fits into post...

While many early offerings from Image Comics were deliberately designed to appeal to their popular artists’ existing fanbases, Erik Larsen took a different approach, reviving a character he created at his kitchen table while making homemade comics with his friends as a child. And 32 years later, Larsen still stands apart from his compatriots as the only Image founder still regularly writing and dr...

Superstar penciler Jim Lee adopted less revolutionary rhetoric than some of his fellow Image founders after leaving Marvel Comics, but he became one of the most successful of the group, growing his WildStorm Productions imprint into a publishing empire. WildC.A.T.s , Lee’s first Image offering from 1992, takes his and co-creator Brandon Choi’s love of spy fiction and channels it into something tha...

When Daniel Clowes was writing and drawing vignettes about two cynical teenage girls in his groundbreaking comic anthology Eightball , he wasn’t sure Ghost World would add up to anything in the end, but its balance of bitter ennui and painful self-reflection connected with readers and led to a standalone graphic novel and a 2001 film adaptation. Kicking off our conversation with a discussion of th...

With one foot in the world of DuckTales and another in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Jeff Smith’s Bone is so confident and assured from its very first issue that it seems to have arrived fully formed, but it was actually the result of years of refinement. Syndicates balked at Smith’s creative vision for a four-panel comic strip version of Bone , but their loss was comic books’ gain, as the series...

Anything goes on a fifth Wednesday, so in this episode, Justin and Jim look back at a blast from their pasts — Kevin Smith's comics-reference-heavy 1995 movie Mallrats — but arrive at somewhat different assessments about how it plays today. Along the way, they discuss what it meant to name-drop Wolverine in a Hollywood motion picture back in the '90s, the comics-style shared universe Smith...

BWA-HA-HA! Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatties may not have originally set out to turn DC’s signature superteam into a workplace sitcom, but with artist Kevin Maguire they produced a screwball series still treasured by fans. With a roster assembled largely out of desperation and a constantly shifting status quo, Justice League International reinterpreted how the superhero would be perceived in a post-...

The story of a faux Justice League who seize control of the United States with the best of intentions only to be undone by the resulting ethical nightmares, Squadron Supreme is sometimes called “Marvel’s Watchmen ”: a 12-issue series examining the impact of superheroes on society and deconstructing the genre. But Mark Gruenwald’s magnum opus is a very different work in terms of tone and execution,...

Our continued deep dive into the comic book that defined the Iron Age begins with a lengthy appreciation of Dave Gibbons’ art and storytelling, then gets into the weeds talking about the novel’s themes, worldbuilding, and its legacy of superhero deconstructionism. We’ll also discuss the ownership dispute over the rights to Watchmen , and the various adaptations, sequels, and prequels that exist to...

What’s left to say about Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ novel Watchmen? Plenty, as it turns out! In our first of two episodes on the subject, we talk about the changes in the larger comics industry that needed to be in place for Watchmen to exist, consider the degree to which the series relies (or doesn’t) on the Charlton Action Heroes for inspiration, and finally do a deep dive on the major charact...

This fifth Wednesday, the Iron Age boys throw a bit of a curveball by taking a look at an obscure fantasy series from the early 1980s! Designed to serve what was perceived as an untapped audience for Marvel and entice toy manufacturers to create a line of licensed tie-in action figures, The Saga of Crystar, Crystal Warrior throws a few curveballs of its own with a somewhat conceptually abstract ce...