It's 4:30 a.m. and I can't sleep so
Can we have a 90's comics thread?
The good, the bad, the ugly?
(but hopefully mostly the good because we've all seen people shit on 90's comics plenty, haven't we?)
I've been on a real nostalgia kick for the comics I grew up with, and I'm even trying to make a comic in the style of all that x-treme goodness, too
Anyways, are there any 90's comics /co/ would recommend?
Character designs they ironically or unironically like?
Good story arcs?
etc.
btw, has anyone seen The Image Revolution documentary?
or all the Stan Lee Comics Greats on youtube with Liefeld, Lee, and McFarlane?
>Anyways, are there any 90's comics /co/ would recommend?
Maus, Sandman, The Invisibles, Zott.
>>77411494
>btw, has anyone seen The Image Revolution documentary?
It's pretty good. They don't shy away from how much they messed things up with their inexperience...but they don't get too far into it.
Hitman is still god-tier.
>are there any 90's comics /co/ would recommend?
Starman, Madman, Jonah Hex
Groo the Wanderer is still GOAT
>>77411480
>Zealot
Fine taste, OP. WildC.A.T.S is one of the precious few early Image comics that doesn't suck. Sure the art is bad, but there's a coherent plot and the characters actually feel like they have some semblance of personality.
>>77411798
how about spawn?
I grew up with a random stack of comics my parents bought me, so I only have a few out of order issues of spawn and they seem pretty interesting
is it worth going out and buying a trade paperback?
>>77412574
Spawn had a great start. It promised a limited but epic story, had a cool supporting cast, some nice meta-touches (the "TV-Commentary" ever few issues), had some cool/crazy guest writers and then, as it became an a solid hit, the story basically halted, so the comic could be milked forever and ever.
My tip would be something like, read 1-30, 50, 100 and 200 (the ugly looking Batman/Spawn-Oneshot was quite OK as well, the better looking was crap). Everything in between might be nice to look at, but it's a waste of time.
>>77411480
I like Savage Dragon. Sure it isn't shakespear and the Artwork might be meh, but I love the worldbuilding and the non apologizing "inertia" of the stories. You're in for like ten issues and you feel like the world is as fleshed out as Marvel or DC. Sure you've just seen a small portion of it, but the world seems big and alive allready.
>>77411480
>Character designs they ironically or unironically like?
Fuji from the original Stormwatch
>>77413681
I remember him! I remember thinking how the fuck does he walk?
>>77411781
Is that an alien behind Hex?
>>77413681
Fucker certainly looks like a mountain.
I've always had a soft spot for Gen13.
>>77413681
Ah the days when EVERY team needed an obligatory "big guy" along with along with the edgy loner "Wolverine" rip off!
>>77414472
No Wolverine ripoff came close to Shadowhawk.
Look at him, it's just Wolverine wearing metal armor with some batman thrown in
>>77414545
Pretty sure he intentionally paralyzed some random thug in the first issue. Fantastically edgy.
Someday I want to read the Extreme Universe
Youngblood
Bloodstrike
Brigade
Prophet
Something about Liefeld actually fascinates me , not just in a " oh this is so bad I need to read it to mock it" way. I think it's knowing that if I was reading comics at the time I would be totally into all this stuff
>>77414459
Sarah was always my favorite.
>>77413681
That pic is hilarious.
>>77414545
Nah, Deadlock of Bloodstrike, was the most blatant of Wolverine rip offs. Basically Logan but undead.
>>77414582
Not just the first issue, braking backs was pretty much his calling card.
>>77414590
Man i loved Liefeld back in the day, these days i look at it and can't help but laugh but 12 year old me dug this shit hard!
>>77414645
Shit why not just kill them.
>>77414592
>>77411480
There are two '90s, the Edgy Extreme era and the Neoclassical Nostalgia era.
By 1997 or so everybody was on the Neoclassical Nostalgia bandwagon and even the X-Men art style had changed to be more like Manga than Jim Lee.
Grant Morrison, who helped create the neoclassical boom with JLA, later dismissed a lot of these as "dad comics," but the neoclassical period brought a lot of good stuff:
- Marvels
- Kingdom Come
- Starman and Robinson/Goyer/Johns' Golden Age revival
- Some of Marvel's late '90s relaunches like Avengers
- Thunderbolts (which has a premise that sounds Edgy Extreme but was actually a merry neoclassical romp)
- Waid's Flash
- Untold Tales of Spider-Man
- Some of the Loeb & Sale stuff
etc.
As for the Edgy Extreme era there are good things in there. It's not like X-Men is unreadable, you can see why it was one of the most popular comics ever (more popular than any comic has been since, certainly). Jim Lee's art really was exciting and Liefeld... okay, Liefeld is ugly as shit, but he was still more interesting than most of the art on New Mutants in the few years before he joined.
Yes, there was a bubble, but comics in the early '90s really were more popular than they are now, and in some ways they were more surprising because you never knew exactly what crazy shit to expect.
Frankly i would take the early 90's EXTREME!!! over this new boring ass Tacticool bullshit. It was silly but kinda fun, the costumes look dumb as hell and in some cases so over the top that it was at the very least memorable.
How memorable is some asshat in a fucking regular biker jacket and leather pants with a cape? Or a fucking T shirt, and jogging pants with sneakers.
>>77411682
Maus isn't 90s though and Zot only barely is.
>>77414656
Heroes don't kill
No really, it's been a while since I read it but I'm pretty sure that was his reason.
>>77411798
WildCATs is okay but personally I can take it or leave it until Moore's run. I thought Stormwatch was more consistently good except it got really really shitty right before Ellis took over, I can't remember who was the writer for that run though.
>>77413681
I've always unironically loved the jacket over costume look.
>>77415842
Kesel's Superboy is another early example of the neoclassical style.
(Kesel, Busiek, Waid, Morrison, Tom Peyer, Todd DeZago are some of the neoclassicists of the era. Loeb and Fabian Nicieza had a foot in both the Edgy Extreme and Neoclassical camps.)
>tfw you've searched for 4 years through 4 different states to find all the floppies for this series to no avail
>>77416376
One thing I like about both Starman and Hitman is that they're a more mainstream version of the Vertigo style. Hitman is Garth Ennis doing his thing within the limitations of the DC universe and the issue where he meets Superman is justifiably famous.
And Starman was Robinson's attempt to do what Morrison was originally hoping to do with Doom Patrol, which was to do a comic that was halfway between mainstream capes and the more personal Vertigo style.
Don't forget Batman Adventures, which was usually better than the main Batman title even when they couldn't get Dini or Timm to work on it (and when they did, we got Mad Love and the Christmas Special).
One of the most underrated minis from the 90's
>>77411480
I loved Age of Apocalypse. It was fresh (my first "big summer crossovers" ), ambitious and epic.
Best of it all, you'd only need the start issue of the crossover, and while all of them mattered a little in the end, you'd only need to read one of the paralell series, before the final issue (Quite the opposite of today where the tie-ins are usually of little to no consequence in the bigh picture, that is, if they tie in at all),
Oh and then 10 years latter or so, they crapped all over it, by ressurecting that world and undoing pretty much everything that was cool about it.
>>77414545
Didn't he die of AIDS or something?
>>77414590
Well, there's fantastic runs of Supreme, Glory and Prophet, none by Liefeld though.
>>77415518
Kingdom Come is most definitely a "dad comic", it's the comic book equivalent of an old man yelling at a cloud.
>>77415518
There's also the huge resurgence of more professional indie stuff, like the rise of Image, and Dark Horse utterly winning with their IPs. Star Wars, Conan, Robocop, etc, as well as original stuff like Hellboy, Madman, Concrete, Big Guy and Rusty, so on.
>>77414590
The Extreme Universe is nonsense but a ton of fun to read especially if you like that style of comic. I think in a podcast or something I heard, Brandon Graham summarized the Extreme U as Team A attacks Team B's base, and then Team B gets revenge by attacking Team A's base. Repeat. It's pretty accurate.
>>77414459
Gen 13 was unapoleptic sexy and fun. It's a shame we don't have such a comic anymore.
>>77418185
Aspen still does comics like that, not sure if there are any others though.
>>77418225
Well, the previous Lady Death run was equally unapologetic and had a decently epic storyline.
>>77418225
>>77418246
What I've seen of it was kinda sexy, but somehow it was not fun. Didn't work for me I guess.
>>77418045
Yeah and then he got resurrected in the 00's.
>>77418945
>dies of AIDS
>is resurrected
Man, that would cause such a shitstorm these days. Or maybe not, no one cares about Shadowhawk.
>>77414459
Yeah, I can't say I'd recommend it to anyone (and if I did I'd tell them to skip Lobdell) but it's a fun book.
I really started collecting comics in the mid 90s, so i have some of the record breaker after record breaker stuff that Todd, Rob, Jim, etc did for Marvel. The only thing i should have but don't is Todd's Spider-Man #1. Then almost all those Image #1s with the longest runs being WildC.A.T.s, Spawn, and Savage Dragon. Got the 2 cowboys i split a room with for senior trip hooked on MTV's Maxx cartoon. "Is he crazy or is this really happening?""Some of both." Hardly anyone i knew had the internet back then, so Wizard was the news source of choice. LOL at Wizard #10 and why they can never show that cover again. I lived an hour drive from the nearest comic store but one day the news stand at the local drug store (10 minutes) just BLEW UP. Not just Marvel and DC, but Image, Valliant, Ultraverse. https://youtu.be/LJhoa2SVGNA
>>77415799
Funny, I loathed reading the entirety of Stormwatch until Ellis as soulless rote comics, but Wildcats was always reasonably charming.
>>77414592
Roxy was objectively best girl tho.
I read the original Malibu Prime series some years ago and I actually really liked it.
It had some flaws in execution and most definately lacked subtlety most of the time, but I think I aprpeciated it more for what it was trying to be than for what it was.
The thing I liked was that our hero actually went through a Coming of Age arc that made perfect sense. He starts out idealistic, but overzealous and naive, and just ends up making things worse by throwing his considerable weight around.
Enough people get on his case, his home life starts falling apart, and he goes into his rebellious edgelord phase that lasts a good ling while, but he still manages to be an effective anti-hero.
Then finally he gets his head out of his ass and man's the fuck up and becomes, in his own words, "The hero he always should have been." He cleans up his act, starts making amends for his past blunders and ends up becoming a pillar of the Ultra community.
Character growth and maturation. It's a wonderful thing.
>>77419722
Realistically she is. Cute, short, half Asian master race and low self esteem to boot.
But the ambitious part of me will always lust after the tall, brainy, muscular, redhead.
>>77414378
Some kind of ancient Stygian horror type deal.
>>77415799
I think Ron Marz wrote for Stormwatch at some point? I can't remember for sure. James Robinson wrote for Wildcats before Moore, I think.
>>77422809
Yeah but you know what they say about Robinson' bibliography: If it's not Starman you've gone too far, man.
>>77418246
Lady Death has almost always delivered better storylines than it's given credit for, in my opinion. It got shaky towards the end of the Chaos! years and for a while the Avatar stuff may not have been the greatest, but the classic Lady Death era is great.
I actually quite like the Medieval Lady Death stuff too. Kind of sad it's no longer continued.
