It goes without saying that comics, like everything else in the word, have changed quite a bit since the '60s. Art style, storytelling technique, even the identities of the characters themselves are drastically different today than they were at the height of the Silver Age.

Stretching from the '50s to the '70s, the Silver Age was considered by a lot of people to be marked by the endless status-quo-preserving silliness of Red Kryptonite, imaginary stories and a surplus of talking gorillas. There were rigid rules as to just what characters could and couldn't do ("Everyone knows Superman can never lie..."), and entire stories built around explaining why they were breaking them ("...so why is he telling Lois Lane that he has no super-powers?!").

In a lot of ways, comics have moved away from this sort of storytelling, instead preferring to deal with more humanized heroes, but in the world of super-heroes, things can often be strangely cyclical. The creators of today are influenced by the stories they read growing up, and that often results in stories that are eerily reminiscent of what has gone before. That's why today, I've taken some time to imagine what the DC comics of today might look like if they came out 40 years ago!



And if we expand things a little to cover independent comics...