I’m going to have to read Darwyn Cooke’s The New Frontier again, because I don’t remember it being as tight a read as The Golden Age turned out to be. I’m shaky about Robinson, I tried reading his Vigilante series last year and the terrible dialogue and narration stopped me before the first issue was done, but The Golden Age doesn’t suffer. The dialogue works (though some of the first issue’s narration, before Robinson switches to a variety of first person narrators, is iffy).
The Golden Age is an incredibly affecting piece of work--managing to marry HUAC with a superhero comic book, with great reveals and battles, but a lot of human moments. Most of it, actually, is human moments. The series was four issues, so for the first three parts, I kept wondering how Robinson could possibly close it all off, but he manages to do it and do it well. It’s an incredibly satisfying conclusion, with Robinson laying the elements throughout the series.
Robinson, I imagine, keeps Golden Age as historically accurate as it needs to be (there’s so little reference, he could have done it with an encyclopedia), but the meat of the story is the characters. It’s characters first and the approach fills in any possible pitfalls--even the story’s spectacular conclusion goes down without any trouble. I read somewhere online that Golden Age is a Watchmen approach to DC’s Golden Age heroes and I suppose some of that prescription is true, but where Alan Moore had to create the entire context of Watchmen, Golden Age readers are expected to fill in some of it themselves. I’m not a DC Golden Age scholar (I’m barely familiar with it, mostly from a few things I read in the 1980s), nothing had me wondering in Golden Age. Robinson committed the most beautiful move I’ve seen in quite a while--he had one character tell another character about something that happened to him. No flashback, just lots of words. Absolutely beautiful.