Bronze Age of Comic Books - The 1970s

The 1970s

In 1970, Marvel published the first comic book issue of pulp character Conan the Barbarian. Conan's success as a comic hero resulted in adaptations of other characters of Robert E. Howard: Kull, Red Sonja, Solomon Kane. DC Comics responded with Warlord, Beowulf, and Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. They also took over the licensing of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan from long-time publisher Gold Key, and began doing adaptations of other Burroughs characters such as John Carter, Warlord of Mars, the Pellucidar series and the Amtor series. Marvel also adapted to comic book form, with less success, Edwin Lester Arnold's Gullivar Jones of Mars and later Lin Carter's Thongor of Lemuria.

The murder of Spider-Man's longtime girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, at the hands of the Green Goblin in 1973's Amazing Spider-Man #121-122 is considered by comics scholar Arnold T. Blumberg to be the definitive Bronze Age event, as it exemplifies the period's trend towards darker territory and willingness to subvert conventions such as the assumed survival of long-established, "untouchable" characters. However, there had been a gradual darkening of the tone of superhero comics for several years prior to "The Night Gwen Stacy Died", including the death of her father in 1970's Amazing Spider-Man #90, the murder of Aquaman's infant son at the hands of Black Manta in Adventure Comics #452, and the beginning of the Dennis O'Neil/Neal Adams tenure on Batman.

In 1971, Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Stan Lee was approached by the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to do a comic book story about drug abuse. Lee agreed and wrote a three-part Spider-Man story, "Green Goblin Reborn!", which portrayed drug use as dangerous and unglamorous. At that time, any portrayal of drug use in comic books was banned outright by the Comics Code Authority, regardless of the context. The CCA refused to approve the story, but Lee published it regardless.

The positive reception that the story received led to the CCA revising the Comics Code later that year to allow the portrayal of drug addiction as long as it was depicted in a negative light. Soon after, DC Comics had their own drug abuse storyline in Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85-86. The storyline, entitled "Snowbirds Don't Fly", revealed that the Green Arrow's sidekick Speedy had become addicted to heroin.

The 1971 revision to the Comics Code also relaxed the rules on the use of vampires, ghouls and werewolves in comic books, allowing the growth of a number of supernatural and horror-oriented titles, such as Swamp Thing, Ghost Rider and The Tomb of Dracula, among numerous others. At the beginning of the 1970s, publishers moved away from the super-hero stories that enjoyed mass-market popularity in the mid-1960s; DC cancelled most of its super-hero titles other than those starring Superman and Batman, while Marvel cancelled weaker-selling titles such as Dr. Strange, Sub-Mariner and the X-Men. In their place they experimented with a wide variety of other genres, including the Westerns, horror and monster stories, and adaptations of pulp adventures mentioned above. These trends peaked in the early 1970s, and the medium reverted by the mid-1970s to selling predominantly super-hero titles.