90s stuff that didn't suck?

[Ivan Brandon]

believe it or not, i missed the whole 90s... i quit comics and the first image comic i read when i got back was powers. but right now, my argentine friends have a lot of that work, and i'm looking at some of it out of curiosity, to see if any of it holds up in any way, conceptually, etc.... but most of all visually.

of what i've seen so far, charest's wildcats designs, when the book was relaunched with horrible horrible lobdell scripts, were really phenomenal by even modern standards... but i'm looking at like a handful of books here, you know? i missed years and years of work.

and i am glad to have missed a lot of it, and don't want to revisit horrible comics... but what was good, then? who was it that was actually trying to do anything new?
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[Ian Brill]

When I think of good '90s comics Astro City, Madman and Hellboy spring immediately to mind. The first few issues of Astro City really feel like Busiek was trying write Raymond Carver stories that just happened to have superheroes in them.

Ivan, do your friends have the Wildcats issues by Joe Casey and Sean Phillips? Those were okay.

Preacher took over from Sandman as the lead Vertigo title and still holds up. I know Transmetropolitan has its fans but I've never read an issue myself.

[Seth M Peck]

Some 90's stuff I liked:

Hellblazer
Preacher
Madman
Hellboy
Hard Boiled
The Invisibles
Doom Patrol
Alan Moore on Supreme and WildC.A.T.s
Millar and Hester on Swamp Thing

I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of stuff...
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[Drew Bell]

Thanks for this thread. I'm in the same boat. When high school came around, gas money overtook comics money, and the eight jillion new titles that came out then didn't help the situation.

[Jason Green]

[wayne.ree]

Todd Dezago, Mike Wieringo and Richard Case on Sensational Spider-Man. Probably the BEST Spider-Man comics of that decade, both visually and in terms of writing.

[marco]

the x-force books by jeph loeb and adam pollina
pollina's art is still pretty current and just got better each issue, especially when morales inked him.

[dwk]

[Seth M Peck]

I also liked "Cable" when Joe Casey and Ladronn were on it...
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[r_sail]

Yeah, mom jeans aside... Charest, man, fucking Charest. It's ridiculous.

What's really ridiculous is when he fell off and couldn't finish an issue, so they had fill in guys, and you know, nothing aginast those guys, but how do you follow Charest? Fuck... you don't. I don't envy those guys who had to. It's terrible to be reading (I say reading, but not really) these fantastic pages and then... BLAMO!!! CRAP.

His Wildcats/X-Men crossover issue is mind blowing... even today.

The bit of Metabarons he did? Going to destroy people when it comes out. Fuck.

90's though... man, I got nothing off the top of my head...

[Jason Green]

[Ivan Brandon]

[Jason Green]

[Abhay]

Perfect-- I just got two motions out the door, and I haven't slept all week so... this is perfect, thanks:

I really binged heavily on the worst superhero comics in the 90's. Oh man, I was such a superhero comic junkie. I guess I still am, but it was different or... man, I was just so invested. If Newsarama had been around, I'd have been one of those guys, shrieking that Fraction had insulted his 20-sided dice or whatever (jesus!). It was such a horrible time to be invested, though.

It was, like... you can say what you want about people's goals now, but people now? They have goals. Even the guys writing Iron Man comics now have a goal of making it like 24 or doing this or that. And you can argue if their goals are good. Back then-- it was -- you couldn't even argue that-- no one had any goals. No one had any ambition. It was all just such shit, such horrible shit.

I guess people thought comics were ending in a couple months; Marvel fired all these people, stores were closing, the T&A thing was even worse than it is now, nothing was reprinted, comics weren't in bookstores or in movies-- they were this relic of a bygone past, and... everything was fucking broken and wrong and it wasn't going to get fixed without something seriously out-of-left field happening. And it'd been AWESOME like-- 5 years earlier? 10 years earlier? It had been awesome in 85/86, and then 10 years later, everything was just fucking cratered. And it was, like... it felt like I'd missed it, you know?

I guess that's how I remember the 90's...

Anyways-- here's stuff I remembered liking--



We all know about this one, but yeah: this was such a big part of the 90's in comics for me, that I have to mention it. That issue in particular caved my fucking head in, man. That's the Morrison I miss when people jerk off to his Superman comics. The one who'd tell you what music he was listening to or what books he was reading or-- it presented this entire worldview.

Saving this book kinda-forced Morrison to write JLA. Which in turn was a heavy-duty part of the DNA of Ellis's Authority. Which-- after those two books, you had a new ballgame in mainstream comics. It's not one I'm super-psyched about-- I have, you know, I have my hoity-toity problems with it. But it's better than what was happening otherwise, so...



Back before everyone and their mother did zombie comics, the two things they did were "it's like the X-Files only..." and "the new Bone." That's what the 90's were like if you were dealing with uninspired indie-cartoonists. That and vampires, but shitty vampire comics are forever. Anyways: this was one of the "it's like the X-Files only..." comics, by Steve Grant and one of the Len's (there were two guys named Len with difficult last names in the 90's).

Except the art was John Paul Leon and Matt Hollingsworth fucking KILLING. KILLING BABIES. I'd loved some of John Paul Leon's Milestone stuff, but he really kicked into gear here. It's a fuck-off great looking comic, man. I think he did Earth X next which-- the fanboys just couldn't handle him-- they'd wanted Alex Ross and instead they'd gotten John Paul Leon and it was... you know: hilarity ensued.

It's weird how deep a scar the X-Files had in the 90's, where it was so everywhere if you were a comic fan-- everyone was trying to recreate that energy in their shitty books, and now? It's gone. Like that show never was on the air. I wonder if the movie'll change things, but I doubt it. Not unless Darin Morgan wrote the movie and no one told me, anyway.



This was one of the failed imprints, the Blanc Noir imprint the Gai-jin studios guys tried to start up at Dark Horse. I think this and Body Bags were the only books that came out of that imprint; this was Joe Phillips's the Heretic. I don't remember it all, just that it existed and I liked it. I was looking forward to all those books though-- this had a Brian Stelfreeze back-up, if I remember right...

I'd read any piece of shit superhero comic if it had even the slightest hint of ambition, you know? This had something interesting in the premise but I don't remember what. I was desperate, man. People were all ambitious with the genre, even in bad ways like New Statesman or Bratpack, and then *BAM*-- they weren't anymore, and it's like "let's break Batman's back and put out another X-Men spin-off with an all-white tin cover." I was a junkie who's supply had gone cold, you know...?



There were 5 million "universes" in the 90's, at least. Milestone got the raw end of the deal-- they were the ones who actually cared. Unfortunately, their characters were black. The end.

That's what happened-- everything real uppity "comics should be respectful of others" type comic fans say they want in their superhero comics, man-- that was Milestone. But the characters were minorities, so no one read the fucking things.

None of the characters popped but there was some solid things going on over there-- Denys Cowan's stuff or whatever. I was into Shadow Cabinet the most-- that was early John Paul Leon on an edgy superhero team out to save the world from itself. So: yeah, that played to where my head was at. I liked Blood Syndicate too-- that was the superhero street gang? Or it had a spinoff called Holocaust which was a supervillain book-- they've never really made the supervillain comic I've wanted to read-- they always turn the supervillain into a fucking anti-hero rather than just make a comic about what it's like to be a supervillain. Thanks, I've never seen a Sergio Leone movie, thanks a lot. But Holocaust came closer to that than most books...



It's sad to have to say this but: Before there was the Order, there was Chase. The superhero comic that really had it, you know, but no one bought anyways? That's what Chase was. JH Williams, you know? JH fucking Williams, and people didn't even notice it existed. And D. Curtis Johnson just fucking-- he did good work, you know? It was a fun book, man. No one cared. Superhero comic fans don't want new characters. Unless they were/are me. Boo-hoo.

Chase was, like, a female agent for a "metahuman" agency doing noir-y shit. It had a great premise, it had smart writing, it had this monster you hadn't heard of on the art, and it just sank without a fucking trace. People couldn't have avoided it more. You want to know what the 90's were fucking like, if you were a comic fan? THAT'S what they were like.

It's fucking horrible that hasn't changed.



The 80's had John Ostrander's Suicide Squad; the 90's had his Spectre-- it was the Vertigo comic that Vertigo didn't publish, basically. It wasn't GREAT, but it was a neat little superhero comic. Tom Mandrake's art just seemed so perfect for the character. I didn't read every issue, but I remember whenever I did read it, thinking "oh, hey, that's something there." Why wasn't it a Vertigo book? No one knew. Anyways: I liked Ostrander, I liked Mandrake, I thought it was a fun book.



Valiant under Jim Shooter was pretty horribly overrated, but it wasn't totally overrated. There were ideas there that you could see why they might work. And any company that you can credit with finding Dave Lapham-- you know, can't count that out.

That said, if they did one thing right, it was empowering Barry Windsor Smith for... that's my favorite Barry Windsor Smith era, his Valiant work. Most of all, Archer & Armstrong, his "fun" series. This is really the only thing that I remember deserving to survive the Valiant era. Then, Bob Layton and a bunch of shitheads took control and everything dive-bombed into the crapper within, you know, within minutes.



Most people know about James Robinson's Starman-- which was only really something for about the first 12 issues-- but there was also his earlier Ultraverse book called Firearm.

This was just a funky private eye comic, about a private eye in a superhero world who lives in San Diego. Harmless; cute; forgotten. James Robinson was so exciting for such a brief period of time, and then he put out a bunch of awful Starman comics that kind of stunk up the joint (I quit when he started doing "this villain I created is great because she killed a bunch of c-list heros no one cares about" stories), and then he ran for Hollywood and never looked back. His first WildCATS issue is great, too, if you can find that-- none of the WildCATs are in it. I liked it more than anything in the Alan Moore run, by a lot.



Marvel comics in the 1990's... they really were this force for evil and badness and wrongness and... They were literally blaming comic stores going out of business on black and white comics. It was-- it was just such a dysfunctional company... Almost every single last thing they did for those 10 years were wrong.

This was the only Marvel comic I can think of that went okay-- it had Alan Davis art. Which doesn't hurt. It was like a superheroic family or some nonsense-- it got canceled right away, of course. New characters. I didn't really follow the formative Ellis works at Marvel-- Doom 2099 or Druid or whatever, so for me, this was the 90's at Marvel... this and maybe a couple Roger Stern books...



Another one everyone knows, but man: high school, reading this-- getting my brains exploded. That's worth mentioning. Not my favorite Peter Milligan anymore, but still: this ain't a bad one.



There were "imprints" in the 90's, and the reason why was Legend-- Miller! Byrne! Mignola! Art Adams! Allred! Books never coming out! No more imprint!

Most people focus on Next Men as being the Lost Byrne Project-- he quit that at an ending point, and moved on to become... an angry crank on the Internet...? But this was, like, another one-- this was just a neat little superhero comic. People didn't buy it. Then he went crazy or whatever. then the end. I guess IDW's reprinting Next Men in phonebooks, but I don't know if or how it'll hold up. Danger Unlimited-- there's not enough to reprint so anyone cares. It's just one of those blips. There were a lot of blips-- Casual Heroes (the only book of the Motown line... Motown comics... oh, 90's...), Jay Stephens's superhero comic Atomic City something, etc. I'd get my hopes up then nada...



Yeah, this was a good one. After Valiant, there was Acclaim, and it had Birthquakes and-- it was a relaunching of the Valiant universe. People tried hard, but-- who wants that? It didn't work out. This was the gem of the line-- Christopher Priest wrote this really funny superhero buddy comic about race and friendship and dealing with the past. Mark Bright drew it.

The internet loved it. The end.



The only person I see still talking about this comic is B. Clay Moore. I don't know-- I think it's a good one. Paul Smith does maybe career-best art. James Robinson firing on all cylinders-- he tried to do a similar thing with Vigilante with Tony Salmons, which almost worked-- Salmons's work was beautiful of course, but it didn't quite gel. This though-- yeah, I'd rank this.



This was a superhero comic that just-- this one really hit the spot with me. Then it got cancelled. Then they brought it back, and it was still great. Then it got cancelled again. Then Ellis just made it dumber, they changed the name to the Authority, and people bought it and everyone won, until DC decided they hated the gays. The end.

It was never perfect-- like, there's a lot that never really worked out so great in that book-- I remember feeling like there were a bunch of plotlines that were never resolved at all. And the characters were mostly not good since he inherited this shitty Wildstorm cast. But of the Ellis superhero comics, this is the one I liked, I guess. I guess I liked it *because* it was more raw than the others, and it felt like-- the other books, he seems like he's thought it out more, while this one, it was a little more like following an evolution, watching a guy evolve on a book. He was the guy who'd been cancelled lots at that time since he'd done so much work during the chaos at Marvel, and ... everyone there got cancelled lots. So I don't know if that made for a different energy on this book but ... I remember this having had a different energy, I guess...



This was another imprint: Bravura. They did Chaykin's Power & Glory. They did Starlin's Breed. And they did Norm Breyfogle's Metaphysique (which I think you can download at Wowio). But this was the crown jewel. Kevin Maguire, as good as he's ever been.

I'm still shocked no one's thought to put this out as a trade. This was... this was the good one. Just-- Maguire doing exactly what you want him to do-- a fun, high-energy action-comedy with characters making funny faces and then hitting each other then saying something funny. Sal Cipriano's a fan, too, if I remember right...?

Then it never came out again, and Kevin Magurie is ... I don't know where he is. He was one of my favorite artists when I was, like, 15. He did a Cap project that I remember kind of screwed him up because he got over-invested in it and stopped putting out pages, and now... he works on books I don't read now, I guess...

and last one...



This is the best issue of the Mark Millar run of Swamp Thing. I remember thinking Mark Millar was going to be this big huge name in comics after I read that run. Then, unfortunately, he was.

He was trying to be someone he wasn't on Swamp Thing, though. Unfortunately, I like that guy more. I guess it breaks that way sometimes. You know, that's the creative journey he went on, so... His Swamp Thing had these single-issue gems in it though: him and Curt Swan did this comic about a deranged hippie finding right-wing politics and becoming a Republican stormtrooper that's hilarious, and that's the last Curt Swan comic before he passed away. Or-- the River Run arc was just all about the main character confronting the nature of fiction, or something, and...

And now he writes comics about farting or whatever, and is beloved. The end.
-abhay

[Abhay]

Oh, I forgot:



I was a huge Savage Dragon fan for that first 75-issue stretch previously mentioned, but there was also this Jason Pearson limited series that was fucking fun in there, too. Pearson. Big retarded action. Good, good times.



This was my favorite issue of Savage Dragon. #12? It has this bad guy called Openface, whose face opens up so he can bite the Dragon. Then Dragon bites his tongue off. It's wonderful. Savage Dragon used to grow moustaches and had a hooker girlfriend. It was a great book. It became a different thing after 75-- more all-ages, is my sense of it. And I had a hard time for the stretch it turned into a monster comic, so I lost track of it. But that first stretch was just-- here's Dragon with a moustache killing a villain and humping his girlfriend in the shower-- and that was, like, every single issue. But it was that channeled through Larsen who-- his aesthetic is essentially good-natured, so it was like... Dragon was very lovable while he was having sex with his hooker girlfriend. Or whatever her deal was. I forget. It was just a very happy-go-lucky but also very violent and dumb and clever, and just... it was funny. I just thought it was a really funny book.
-abhay