Periodising 'The Marvel Age' Using The Production Of Culture Approach

For over fifty years historians, fans and academics have sought to periodise comics, and specifically American superhero comics, into a system of 'ages'. This generally begins with Golden and Silver ages before devolving into a situation where there are almost as many classifications as there are historians, fans and academics describing them.

This paper seeks to sidestep this confusion by using the term 'The Marvel Age' instead, a phrase which first appeared on the front cover of Journey Into Mystery #94 in 1963 (predating the 'ages' discussion by almost three years). By using a comics-specific reading of Richard Peterson's Five Constraints On The Production Of Culture and particularly the methods described in Casey Brienza's Cultures Of Comics Work, it will show how 'The Marvel Age' can be empirically defined as covering American superhero comics with cover dates between November 1961 and October 1987. It will also propose three distinct sub-periods of 'Creation', 'Chaos' and 'Consolidation', and give brief examples of ways in which these definitions can be used as part of a data-driven corpus analysis within the field of comics studies.