How old should a comic be before it can be called a "classic"?

[hondobrode]

2 years is way too soon IMO. I'm comfortable with the 10 year gap as many have mentioned here.

[adam_warlock_2099]

Of course confusing matters now is the proliferation of the term vintage. I have seen a few shops around here refer to their back issue section as having vintage comics. Classic has connotations about quality, vintage speaks only to age.


-M (feelling particularly vintage myself this afternoon)

I've always thought of classic as a term of quality over age, and vintage to be a more accurate term as well. However I didn't coin the terms use as popular. I would consider something as new as Annihilation or Conquest classic because Abnett and Lanning wrote a great space opera like Starlin's Warlock or Dreadstar. While Kirby's Challengers of the Unknown isn't a classic in my terms but is defiantly vintage.

Or everything published before I was born in 1977 is classic since it's old and I'm not. Ha!

[icctrombone]

I consider "classic" to be the stories that were foundations to what we read now. So, mostly golden age, silver age and some bronze. Everything we read is built on those eras.

[shaxper]

Wouldn't it be logical to define "classic" for the purposes of this forum as being anything that's too old to be of much concern to the other forums on CBR?

Ergo most comics from 2 years ago would be eligible, but probably not anything Grant Morrison or Scott Snyder wrote.

[DebkoX]

It just isn't about age to be honest, i got mighty thor #345 and I consider it a classic for many reasons, like the style of the cover, the creative team (Walter Simonson) and other factors like speech ect.

[hondobrode]

I consider "classic" to be the stories that were foundations to what we read now. So, mostly golden age, silver age and some bronze. Everything we read is built on those eras.

To expand on that, if it somehow builds on but shifts the core slightly to make it similar but different, and that's the next level of the character for years to come or bravely goes where no one else has or to that degree, i.e. Miller's Dark Knight or Daredevil, Watchmen, Claremont's X-Men, etc.

[Reptisaurus!]

Wouldn't it be logical to define "classic" for the purposes of this forum as being anything that's too old to be of much concern to the other forums on CBR?

Ergo most comics from 2 years ago would be eligible, but probably not anything Grant Morrison or Scott Snyder wrote.

Grant Morrison started writing for Marvel UK in 1985, and ARKHAM ASYLUM was 1989.

But I'm not sure you're wrong, either. This probably isn't gonna be the board where substansive discussions of the post-Alan Moore British Invasion writers end up.

[Tristan_MC]

This is interesting. I never really gave much thought to the difference between classic and vintage. I always thought classic was something timeless whether it is a past story or present. Vintage does seem to imply age.

[Polar Bear]

To expand on that, if it somehow builds on but shifts the core slightly to make it similar but different, and that's the next level of the character for years to come or bravely goes where no one else has or to that degree, i.e. Miller's Dark Knight or Daredevil, Watchmen, Claremont's X-Men, etc.

They have this kind of question with literary canon, too.