The Dark Age of Comics and Dick Giordano

Last week, Dick Giordano passed away at the age of seventy-seven. He was a former artist and executive for DC Comics, and I wanted to briefly spotlight the role he played in shaping the comics we have today.


More after the jump!







As the Vice President and Executive Editor at DC Comics from 1983 to 1993, Giordano oversaw the defining projects of the comics medium's 'dark renaissance.' This transition was the coming-of-age for the entire industry. Giordano was in charge when comic books traded their innocence and predictability for darker, more psychologically complex storytelling. 

Creators started becoming industry celebrities as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons gave us Watchmen, the ultimate critique of the superhero concept. It was an unsettling story reflecting the contemporary anxieties of the real world; from this point forward, it became commonplace for characters to be superheroes without necessarily being good people.

Concurrently, Frank Miller was advancing this idea with the ultimate anti-hero story in comic books: The Dark Knight Returns. DKR was representative of the entire comics medium. As comic books were becoming a wholly counter-culture experience with an aging readership, Frank Miller conceived an aging Batman forced to become the ultimate social outcast in a world that lost its superheroes. The once-irreproachable Superman was the shocking villain of the story, and the antagonism between these two icons is still a popular idea today.

Dick Giordano was at the helm when DC published these stories. He oversaw the projects that pushed America's mythology into relevant modernity: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, the Justice League, and the Teen Titans were all relaunched under his watch. He and Karen Berger mandated a new series of projects that ultimately became the alternative Vertigo imprint, a branch of DC Comics responsible for the influx of British writing talent such as Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.


Even for those of you have heard of these stories and their writers, I'm betting most of you didn't know the name Dick Giordano. Go pick up a comic book and enjoy the medium he helped shape.


-Aaron-