Golden age?

Why is it when comic books first originate they start in the golden age, then degenerate to the silver age and after that the bronze age? This seems to be contradictory to how things should actually progress. When the industry first started it seems as if both the art and the stories are more crude then many of their more contemporary counterparts would be. Why is it when comics first start and they are just republished strips from the Sunday funnies called the golden age, later in the golden age comic books become original funnies and finally stories new stories which have mystery, suspense, and superheroes. Is this called the golden age just out of nostalgia for the industries origin? This seems to be a plausible explanation to me. What may also be the case for the names of the different ages of comic books is the the names are not reliant to the quality of the content in the books, but just arbitrary names given to different ages to periods in the comic book industry. The names could just signify that the trends in what the qualities of the comics were at the time. Maybe the golden age was called golden because the content in those books was the most clean and proper, but the silver and then bronze age progressively got into darker and more gritty topics of the time.

The chapter from Arie Kaplan's From Krakow to Krypton that we read for this week is about the origin of the comic books and what Jewish folk had to do with this. I found this article a very interesting and it was something that I did not want to put down once I started reading. The reading was very interesting to me because, even though I am not a avid comic book fan, most of the people mentioned in this book were familiar names to me, and it was a very interesting to read about how the comic books industry came to be. One thing that I found particularly interesting was that the industry was started by Jewish people and they were the majority of the people working in the industry through out the golden age. I was entirely unaware of this, but that seems understandable given how many of the big players during the origin and golden age of comics had changed their name's to sound less Jewish. One thing that strikes me as odd about them changing their names, is that many of them went under a few different aliases to makes their publishing companies seem bigger, so why they want to change their actual names when they could just use aliases that were not Jewish names.

Well since the hours left to finish this blog post are starting to come to an end I guess it is about time to make my second blog post of the week and this day for that matter.

This time I would like to write about the title story of A Contract With God. What I found most interesting about this story was how when Hersh's "contract with god" was violated, that was what made him assimilate with American culture and lose some of his Jewish identity. Before his contract was violated he had been living in America for a very long time already, but he still pretty much held on to all the tradition from his old country and his religion. When his contract is violated by god he totally changes his appearance from the tradition Jewish garb and hair, to what a more traditional American would be wearing at the time. With this comes a whole new set a values, mainly money, but there was also room for a new woman in his life as well. I also found it interesting when Hersh was wanting to renew his contract with god, the values of  three Jewish rabbis wasn't any different then Hersh's really, all they really cared about was the money. They did hesitate because they were doing a blasphemy, but Hersh justified his actions in the same way, he said that he would buy back the bonds he used for collateral and everything would be fine.

Well that is about all I have to say for now, looking foreword to class next week.

The wedding singer

Hello everybody, I am posting for the first time today, Saturday, the day both posts are due, and I hope not to make a habit of doing this, but I had a long night last night in which I was out in LaCrosse at 3am waiting for my battery to be jumped but enough about that.

I would like to write about the street singer story from A Contract with God, as this was the story that I found most interesting in our reading. Something I found interesting about this story and its inclusion in this book is it does not seem to have anything that makes it explicitly about Judaism.I can understand that it shares some themes with other stories in the book, but it still seems quite different from the rest of the stories.
The story starts out as what seems to be an average day for Eddie the street singer, which seems to be: waking up, going out singing, drinking, and then beating his wife. This day Eddie meets an ex opera singer name Diva Marta Maria, who wants to make Eddie or she like to call him Ronald Barry a star. Shortly after they meet Diva talks about how here career went down, mainly her husband, and I love the Irony with her description of her dead husband is basically the exact person Eddie turns out to be. With the money Diva gives Eddie to clean himself up he goes and buys alcohol, then he goes home gets drunk and beats his wife, which seems like it is probably a normal thing in their relationship. The next day Eddie goes out for a drink before he is going to see Diva, but then he realizes he never got her address and will not find her again.

I though this story was very interesting because the only thing it really has in common with the other stories is basically people screwing each other over. I also though it was interesting how in this story Eddie new really was trying to make it big or anything he was just trying to get by and not have to work a 9 to 5, which I find quite appealing, but he ends up out of luck when he realizes he doesn't know where Diva lives. What I found bothersome about this is in the last story two people go out specifically to bag themselves a rich spouse and they do. The street singer gets screwed over, but I don't see the street singer as any worse then the Bennie from the fourth story, but he could possibly be worse then Goldie but that seems debatable.

Well that is all for now and I will be back with my second post for the week in a few hours, hope this doesn't happen too many more times during the semester.