It’s often the case that if you hear or read something enough times, it becomes easier to regurgitate the same “fact” yourself, even if it’s not as clear-cut as it seems. We’re all guilty of it. If you’ve spent any time in the trenches of this little collectible hobby of ours built around toys and comics, you’ve no doubt been inundated with that concrete fact that the ’90s sucked. No other decade suffers as much as that period of time from 1990-1999. The boogiemen that haunt that decade make themselves immediately clear. Just hearing the term “the ’90s” probably means you conjured up some of those demons yourself. Foil covers. Pouches. Bomber jackets on superheroes. Psychotic amounts of crosshatching. Liefeld. Even more pouches!
It’s easy — and lazy — to hear the term “the ’90s” and immediately write off the entire decade as one big pouch-fueled foil-covered suckfest. But if you step back outside of your own preconceived notions, you start to see that this much-maligned decade is much more than a handful of easy buzzwords.
The ’90s eased into the world gently. Marvel was riding high on the “Acts of Vengeance” crossover that had infiltrated the vast majority of titles. DC maintained a strong stable of post-Crisis titles that had all built solid audiences. A deluge of overseas talent like Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman were behind making Vertigo a stunning success, with titles like Doom Patrol and Sandman in the midst of legendary and reputation-making runs. In both companies, we were seeing a bold shift in how all of these iconic characters were viewed.
Within a year, Marvel had already debuted titles like Ghost Rider, which revamped and updated the titular character for a new audience and brought back characters like Deathlok, Luke Cage and the Guardians of the Galaxy. Damage Control, Sleepwalker, Darkhawk, Slapstick and other brand new characters debuted to varying levels of success. And the Infinity Gauntlet would make it’s first appearance in this time, a creation whose aftereffects are still being felt today.
DC was continuing to take chances with titles like Green Lantern: Mosaic and Shade: the Changing Man. Vertigo’s effect could be felt in the proper DC universe, with several titles taking on a darker tone. We’re just now starting to feel the edges of that “grim and gritty” time in comics. But nothing about any of this falls under the auspices of the crappy ’90s we hear about.
At this point in time, everything was pretty standard. We’re seeing the rise of the artist with people like Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld, but there was nothing truly horrible happening. If anything, it was an exciting time of experimentation and “see if it sticks” imagination, with new characters, new ideas and fresh takes on old themes becoming commonplace.
But, unfortunately, things did shift a bit.
In 1992 the formation of Image Comics drastically changed the landscape. It caused such a massive ripple that it was inevitable that the “Image effect” could be seen everywhere. By 1994 the Image style of storytelling and art spread across the Big Two. This time period can be looked at as when the decade gained a reputation. Things got dark and crosshatchy, and then they got even darker. Aquaman lost a hand. Iron Man went nuts and was replaced with his teenage self. Superman died. Batman was broken. I think the Wasp was an actual wasp. The Invisible Woman started wearing a horrible outfit.
It got pretty grim in those two years.
Two years, though. Out of a decade, those two years. And as Spider-Man went through a Clone Saga and Onslaught reared his head, as Superman eventually returned to life, as all the experiments both good and bad came to a head, we reached a creative nadir with the “Heroes Reborn,” a horrible horrible time when the heroes of the Marvel Universe were attacked by crosshatching and bad plotting while living in a small blue ball.
But even in this time, underneath the darkness, great things were happening. James Robinson was writing a career defining run on Starman. Mark Waid was redefining Wally West. Legacies became even more important as Green Lantern and Green Arrow would be replaced with younger versions, and a new Robin made his mark on the name. Lobo became a cult favorite, Garth Ennis began his fantastic Preacher series, John Ostrander’s work on Spectre was consistently great, and so much more even in this dark time happened if you do the research.
When we finally made it through the other side of that, and what did we find on that other side?
Marvel had washed their hands of “Heroes Reborn.” The heroes returned. Busiek on Avengers and Iron Man. James Robinson on Captain America. We got brand new titles for Heroes for Hire, Deadpool and a little title that took everyone by surprise called Thunderbolts.
And over at DC?
JLA.
With preliminary work done by Mark Waid, Grant Morrison would once again bring the essential DC heroes together — some the original, some the legacy — and provide a blueprint for team books done right in the tail end of this supposedly crappy decade. Returning Plastic Man to prominence, making the electric Superman cool, and injecting a new level of entertaining cool into the concept of the Justice League after the degradation of the brand during the dark years, Morrison’s JLA was the comic that DC needed. This paved the way for the rest of the ’90s at DC, which would see a resurgence of interest in nearly everything. For a while there, it was good.
It’s easy to just vomit out the same tired “’the ’90s sucked” line over and over. But when you look at the decade as a whole and really take in all the invention and creativity and honest attempts at trying new things — even if the success rate could be spotty — it’s pretty easy to see how unfairly it has been judged in the passage of time. Maybe two years in that span of time could be looked upon as living up to the reputation, but as a whole? If you look past the pouches and crosshatches and Liefeld, you can see a time of bold experimentation and transition that brought a lot of exciting things to the world of comics, the same as the ’60, ’70s, ’80s and beyond have as well.