There’s no question a lot of the Bronze Age was solid gold. Steve Englehart’s Avengers. Tomb of Dracula. Starlin’s Warlock and Captain Marvel. Plus less spectacular but solidly entertaining books such as Cary Bates and Irv Novick’s run on Flash.
Nevertheless, a lot of the Bronze Age, as I said a couple of months ago, was processed cheese, a pale shadow of the best Silver Age stuff. I wonder if part of that was the lack of consistency in creative teams.
Consistency is obviously a huge benefit if you’re telling stories that stretch beyond a single issue. At Marvel in 1965, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were interweaving plots and subplots in Thor and Fantastic Four that kept everything racing along, issue after issue. Lee and Steve Ditko had another long-running plot in Strange Tales as Dormammu and Baron Mordo join forces, forcing Dr. Strange to flee for his life.
DC wasn’t doing anything that ambitious but I think their books still benefited from consistency behind the scenes. Jim Shooter on the Legion of Super-Heroes. John Broome and Carmine Infantino on Flash. Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky on Justice League of America. Bob Haney and Peter Cardy on Aquaman. The look of the characters, the style of the stories, the protagonists’ personalities, all stayed consistent issue after issue (with occasional startling exceptions). When I picked up a JLA story or a Hawkman issue (or for that matter, an Avengers), I knew what I was getting for my 12 cents.
The 1970s books had a lot more upheaval. For every long-running team, like Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan on Tomb of 
Dracula or Bates/Novick on Flash, there were books that suffered from a rotating cast of writers and artists. New books like Freedom Fighters or Skull the Slayer never got a chance to develop their identity as the creators didn’t stick around to give them one. On the latter book, for instance, Marv Wolfman set up the premise. Then Steve Englehart took over from Marv Wolfman, killed off the cast and sent the book in a new direction. Then Bill Mantlo sent it back to Wolfman’s original concept.
It hurt long-running books too. After Len Wein’s 15-issue JLA run ended with #114, the writing duties constantly shifted. We had Denny O’Neil, Cary Bates, Elliot S. Maggin, Martin Pasko, Gerry Conway and E. Nelson Bridwell before Steve Englehart took over with #139. That’s an impressive roster in terms of talent. Nevertheless none of them seemed able to get a grip on the book; Conway did much better when he came on board for a run that outlasted Fox.
That doesn’t mean consistency guarantees quality, of course. The last three years or so of Conway’s JLA ran out of steam even before he saddled us with the Detroit League. A number of those processed-cheese comics I’m complaining about include consistent creative teams; Len Wein’s run on Thor ran for around 30 issues, though with different artists. It was fun to read at the time yet I’ve no urge to read it again,
Still, I do think there’s a lot to be said for having a steady hand on the tiller.
Covers by Jack Kirby (t) and Gil Kane (b)
