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Walt Simonson, who was a close contemporary of Johnny Storm and Peter Parker at the time, has said Stan and Jack and Steve never presented him with “teenagers” who were like himself or any of his friends.

Being 4 years younger, I took the Marvel teens at face value. Maybe that was what I would become in a few years? (It wasn’t.)

The Silver Age—not yet called that—was brand new. Over the next few years I was present for the introduction of Hawkman, the Atom, Green Lantern and the Justice League. All with no idea they were revivals of “Golden Age” characters. They were all brand new to me. (Some of them were brand new, in fact. The Metal Men, Metamorpho, the Sea Devils, Cave Carson.)

I will confess to decades of grumbling after the Golden and Silver age terms showed. Archeologists and historians used “Golden Age” to describe civilizations at their peak. They didn’t use “Silver Age”. That came from sports, where the best athletes got gold medal, while the second and third got silver and bronze. (Someone said second place is just first loser.)

I was not at all pleased to find myself entering what was starting to be called the “Bronze Age”. Seemed like a declaration of inferiority. Were we really not as good as the Thirties and Forties? (An argument could be made that we were not as good as the Sixties, especially at Marvel!)

As the audience has gotten older, cute has become less and less tolerable.