Chromium age

The Chromium Age of American Comic Books was the period in comics beginning in the mid 1980s and lasting through the late 1990s. The hallmark of this era was the vast over printing of comics many of which had special variant covers. These variant covers typically had chromium, holofolio, holographic stickers, and other special printing materials.^[1][2]

Some of the most well known storylines from this era are "The Death of Superman", "Fatal Attractions", "Phalanx Covenant", and "Age of Apocalypse".

History

From roughly 1985 through 1993, comic book speculation reached its highest peaks. This boom period began with the publication of titles such as Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and "summer crossover epics" Crisis on Infinite Earths and Secret Wars. After Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns made their mark, mainstream attention returned to the comic book industry in 1989 with the success of the Batman movie and again in 1993 with "The Death of Superman" storyline.

Once aware of this niche market, the mainstream press focused on its potential for making money. Features appeared in newspapers, magazines and television shows detailing how rare, high-demand comics such as Action Comics #1 and The Incredible Hulk #181 (the first appearances of Superman and Wolverine, respectively) had sold for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

During this time, comic book publishers began to pander specifically to the collectors' market. Techniques used included variant covers, polybags, and gimmick covers. When a comic was polybagged, the collector had to choose between either reading the comic book or keeping it in pristine condition for potential financial gain, or doing both by buying two copies. Gimmicks included glow-in-the-dark, hologram-enhanced, or foil-embossed covers. Gimmicks were almost entirely cosmetic in nature, and almost never extended to improved content of the comics. However, many speculators would buy multiple copies of these issues, anticipating that demand would allow them to sell them for a substantial profit at some nebulous point in the future.

This period also saw a corresponding expansion in price guide publications, most notably Wizard, which helped fuel the speculator boom with monthly columns such as the "Wizard Top 10" (highlighting the "hottest" back-issues of the month), "Market Watch" (which not only reported back-issue market trends, but also predicted future price trends), and "Comic Watch" (highlighting key "undervalued" back-issues).

Ironically, the speculators who made a profit or at least broke even on their comic book "investments" did so only by selling to other speculators. In truth, very few of the comics produced in the early 90's have retained their value in the current market; with hundreds of thousands (or, in several prominent cases, over ten million) copies produced of certain issues, the value of these comics has all but disappeared. "Hot" comics such as X-Men #1 and Youngblood #1 can today be found selling for under a dollar apiece.

Veteran comic book fans pointed out an important fact about the high value of classic comic books that was largely overlooked by the speculators: original comic books of the Golden Age of Comic Books were genuinely rare. Most of the original comic books had not survived to the present era, having been thrown out in the trash or discarded as worthless children's waste (just as baseball cards typically were at that time) by parents. Stories of uncaring parents throwing out their kids' comic book collections are well known to the Baby Boom generation or recycled along with other periodicals in the paper drives of World War II. As a result, a comic book of interest to fans or collectors from the 1940s through the 1960s, such as an original issue of Superman, Captain America, Challengers of the Unknown, or The Vault of Horror, was often extremely difficult to find and thus highly prized by collectors, in a manner similar to coin collectors seeking copies of the 1955 doubled-die cent. In many ways, with an enormous supply of high-grade copies, the "hot" comics of the speculator boom were the complete opposite.

The end of the Chromium Age is circa 1996. Two events that mark the end of the Chromium age are Marvel's bankruptcy and the publishing of the storyline Kingdom Come.^[3][4][5]

References

1. ^ http://www.chs.org/comics/comics101.htm
2. ^ http://theherohouse.net/7.html
3. ^ http://theherohouse.net/7.html
4. ^ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3670253/Superheroes-are-older-than-we-think.html
5. ^ http://www.sequentialtart.com/article.php?id=814