page_title: Silver Age of Comic Books
section_title: DC Comics
hierarchical_section_title: Silver Age of Comic Books / History / DC Comics
caption_attribution_description: English: Julius Schwartz at Comic-Con International in 2002. Français&#160;: Julius Schwartz au Comic-Con International, en 2002.
context_page_description: The Silver Age of Comic Books was a period of artistic advancement and widespread commercial success in mainstream American comic books, predominantly those featuring the superhero archetype. Following the Golden Age of Comic Books and an interregnum in the early to mid-1950s, the Silver Age is considered to cover the period from 1956 to circa 1970, and was succeeded by the Bronze and Modern Ages.
  The popularity and circulation of comic books about superheroes had declined following World War II, and comic books about horror, crime and romance took larger shares of the market. However, controversy arose over alleged links between comic books and juvenile delinquency, focusing in particular on crime, horror, and superheroes turning them into glorified firefighters. In 1954, publishers implemented the Comics Code Authority to regulate comic content.
  In the wake of these changes, publishers began introducing superhero stories again, a change that began with the introduction of a new version of DC Comics' The Flash in Showcase #4.
context_section_description: The Silver Age began with the publication of DC Comics' Showcase #4 (October 1956), which introduced the modern version of the Flash. At the time, only three superheroes—Superman (and his younger incarnation as Superboy), Batman (with his sidekick Robin), and Wonder Woman—were still published under their own titles. According to DC comics writer Will Jacobs, Superman was available in "great quantity, but little quality". Batman and Robin were doing better, but Batman's comics were "lackluster" in comparison to his earlier "atmospheric adventures" of the 1940s, and Wonder Woman, having lost her original writer and artist, was no longer "idiosyncratic" or "interesting". (Aquaman and Green Arrow (with his sidekick, Speedy) were also still appearing as back-up features in Adventure Comics, the only other two superheroes known to have remained continuously in print from the Golden Age as the Silver Age began, largely due to of their creator's ongoing affection for them.) Jacobs describes the arrival of Showcase #4 on the newsstands as "begging to be bought", the cover featured an undulating film strip depicting the Flash running so fast that he had escaped from the frame. Editor Julius Schwartz, writer Gardner Fox, and artist Carmine Infantino were some of the people behind the Flash's revitalization. Robert Kanigher wrote the first stories of the revived Flash, and John Broome was the writer of many of the earliest stories.
  With the success of Showcase #4, several other 1940s superheroes were reworked during Schwartz' tenure, including Green Lantern, Aquaman, the Atom, and Hawkman, and the Justice Society of America was reimagined as the Justice League of America. The DC artists responsible included Murphy Anderson, Gil Kane, Ramona Fradon, Mike Sekowsky, and Joe Kubert. Only the characters' names remained the same; their costumes, locales, and identities were altered, and imaginative scientific explanations for their superpowers generally took the place of magic as a modus operandi in their stories. Schwartz, a lifelong science-fiction fan, was the inspiration for the re-imagined Green Lantern—the Golden Age character, railroad engineer Alan Scott, possessed a ring powered by a magical lantern, but his Silver Age replacement, test pilot Hal Jordan, had a ring powered by an alien battery and created by an intergalactic police force.
  In the mid-1960s, DC established that characters appearing in comics published prior to the Silver Age lived on a parallel Earth the company dubbed Earth-Two. Characters introduced in the Silver Age and onward lived on Earth-One. The two realities were separated by a vibrational field that could be crossed, should a storyline involve superheroes from different worlds teaming up.
  Although the Flash is generally regarded as the first superhero of the Silver Age, the introduction of the Martian Manhunter in Detective Comics #225 predates Showcase #4 by almost a year, and at least one historian considers this character the first Silver Age superhero. However, comics historian Craig Shutt, author of the Comics Buyer's Guide column "Ask Mister Silver Age", disagrees, noting that the Martian Manhunter debuted as a detective who used his alien abilities to solve crimes, in the "quirky detective" vein of contemporaneous DC characters who were "TV detectives, Indian detectives, supernatural detectives, [and] animal detectives". Schutt feels the Martian Manhunter only became a superhero in Detective Comics #273 (November 1959) when he received a secret identity and other superhero accoutrements, saying, "Had Flash not come along, I doubt that the Martian Manhunter would've led the charge from his backup position in Detective to a new super-hero age." Unsuccessful attempts to revive the superhero archetype's popularity include Captain Comet, who debuted in Strange Adventures #9 (June 1951); St. John Publishing Company's 1953 revival of Rocket Man under the title Zip-Jet; Fighting American, created in 1954 by the Captain America team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby; Sterling Comics' Captain Flash and its backup f
caption: Julius Schwartz, an instrumental figure at DC during the Silver Age.
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