10 Reasons Why Comics Sucked During The '90s

This is the decade that almost killed the medium. Find out why.

Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

During the '80s, no medium was more innovative and daring than comic books. Shedding the notion that they were exclusively for children, writers like Neil Gaimain, Frank Miller, and Alan Moore revolutionized the industry with titles such as Batman: Year One, The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and Sandman. These books transcended the superhero genre and wound up appealing to fans with more sophisticated tastes.

That decade of revolution simply couldn’t bleed over into the '90s, however. Even though Miller, Moore, and Gaimain were still churning out great work during the '90s, new trends started to overtake the industry. The superlative storytelling of the '80s were replaced by flashy art and greedy publishers' get-rich-quick schemes. Thus began the era of tasteless, hyper-sexualized drawings and classic superheroes thrown haphazardly into mindless stories created purely for shock value.

This week marks the 15th anniversary of one of the worst comic book events of all time, Marvel Comics' Heroes Reborn, a 1996-1997 crossover story arc that needlessly "killed off" the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and Dr. Doom and reinvented them in a pocket universe. To celebrate the anniversary, and hopefully ensure that we learn from our mistakes, we give you 10 Reasons Why Comics Sucked During The '90s.

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Symbiote Overload

SYMBIOTE OVERLOAD (1993-1995)

During the '90s, no Marvel character was hotter than Venom. Spider-Man's hulking, slobbering villain provided fans with the ultra-violent stories that the Web-Slinger just couldn’t duplicate. Marvel could smell this cash cow coming a mile away and started to green light as many miniseries and spinoff books about the character as possible.

Venom: Lethal Protector, Maximum Carnage, and Separation Anxiety all crash landed into comic stores in the mid '90s and, at first, fans were in heaven. At any given point, Venom could be featured in as many as 10 books a month; Marvel even created a bunch of Venom’s relatives (see: Scream, Phage, and Carnage) in order to leech off of his popularity.

Eventually fans began to grow tired of Venom and his brethren popping up in every book and, after a while, the character's comics started to simply collect dust at comic stores. Marvel had overexposed the character to an extent that the industry had ever seen before, and even to this day fans are wary whenever Venom rears his ugly head in a new Spider-Man comic.

Image Comics

9. THE IMAGE COMICS INFLUENCE (1992)

Image Comics is currently known for some of the best books in the industry, including The Walking Dead, Chew, and Who is Jake Ellis?, but during the dark decade the company was responsible for some of the most shallow and ugly stories in all of comics. After creators such as Erik Larsen and Todd McFarlane left Marvel in the '90s, they started Image as a haven for renegade artists to practice their craft on their own original characters. Here’s the thing: None of these people could write, and most of their art wasn’t even worthy of being hung on our refrigerator.

The Image art featured women with breasts the size of basketballs and men with muscles so big that Schwarzenegger looked like Stephen Hawking in comparison. There was no subtlety or storytelling behind the art and titles like Witchblade, Spawn, and Youngblood were prime examples of the Image philosophy of flash over substance. Gone was the atmospheric art of the '80s and in its place were over-the-top visuals that looked like they was drawn by an art school dropout on a sugar rush.

At first this artistic movement was seen as unique and daring, but people soon realized that there was no value behind Image’s hideous style and the company was forced to rethink its strategy. Unfortunately the damage had already been done because it seemed like every artist in the business was copying this style in hopes of striking it big.

Zero Hour

8. DC: ZERO HOUR (1994)

To truly understand the complicated nature of comics, you only need to know this one fact: DC Comics has had a reboot of their entire line of comics on at least four different occasions since 1985. These reboots are a necessary evil because, every five years or so, DC grows too complicated for even the writers to truly keep up with the universe.

In 1994, the company put out Zero Hour, a soft reboot of the DC world that saw Hal Jordan, a.k.a. the Green Lantern, go completely batty after his home city was destroyed. Grief-stricken, Jordan attempted to reshape reality in his own vision and resurrect his home; however, this process included murdering all of the other Green Lanterns and destroying time as we know it.

Although the end result was to make DC seem less confusing, it just frustrated fans more than ever. This is the point when people needed to start lugging around an encyclopedia of the DC Universe just to understand what a simple comic was about from week to week. In DC’s desperate attempt for new readers, Zero Hour completely alienated anyone who wasn’t an expert on the company’s history and characters.

History seems to be repeating itself as DC is planning yet another company wide reboot this September. Let’s hope they learned a few things since the '90s.

Punisher

7. THE PUNISHER REVAMP (1998)

The Punisher is one of the deepest and most accessible characters in the Marvel Universe, but not even he was safe from the company’s creative drought during the '90s. Whether they had him teaming up with Archie or being temporarily transformed into a black dude, the Punisher was having a pretty rough decade. But none of those missteps could come close to one of the worst decisions in Marvel Comics history: transforming the Punisher into the angel of death.

Coming back from the dead with a fancy new logo and glowing eyes, this new version of the Punisher tried to piggyback off of Vertigo titles such as Sandman and Hellblazer, but instead it ranks right up there with NFL Superpro as one of the worst titles the company ever put out. The title stripped the flesh-and-blood concept from the character and replaced it with some laughable supernatural mumbo jumbo that would've been ridiculed in the fan-fiction section of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer message board.

Thankfully the change lasted less than six months and the character was given yet another makeover when Garth Ennis came on to write the highly successful miniseries Welcome Back, Frank in 2000. It’s amazing that right when the calendar turned to 2000 everything seemed to get back on track.

Superman

6. THE ELECTRIC SUPERMAN (1998)

We love DC Comics, but sometimes they cause us to curse the kindergarten teachers who taught us how to read. After Superman came back from the dead in 1993, and finally married Lois Lane in 1996, the character seemed to lose considerable steam, so DC decided Superman needed a bit of a reboot in order to regain some of the swag he lost from the first half of the decade. Instead of finding a tasteful and creative way to propel Supes back into the spotlight, DC simply slapped an ugly new costume on him and changed his powers.

This new version of the Man of Steel was initially greeted with much fanfare, mostly due to curiosity. People bought the debut issue by the thousands and it seemed like things were going to work out, until fans actually opened up the issue and were exposed to the dreck inside. DC changed Superman from Earth’s savior into a human night light, and the quality of stories reflected this ludicrous concept.

There are certain things you just don’t do in the comic world, and one of them is change the basic concept of Superman. For better or worse, he’s DC’s constant. People need him to be consistent for the nostalgia he brings them, and for the fact that eventually fans want to introduce their own children to the classic Superman. DC learned this the hard way after fans universally rejected this new Man of Steel and simply stopped picking up the books.

Oh, and as for DC actually learning their lesson, well, let’s just say, a brand new younger and heavily armored version of Superman is debuting this August.

Az-Bats

5. JEAN-PAUL VALLEY AS BATMAN (1993-1994)

Batman was another helpless victim of DC’s wholesale overhaul during the '90s, once editors and corporate suits began to fear that the Caped Crusader wasn’t in touch with the average reader any more. They felt fans wanted intense gore and sex in their comics, like what Image was putting out, and Batman’s non-lethal philosophy just wasn’t getting that done. Enter: Jean-Paul Valley.

Valley claimed the mantle of Batman after Bruce Wayne had his back broken by Bane. Sporting a cybernetic costume that was lined with a bevy of lethal armaments, Valley was actually supposed to permanently replace Wayne as the Batman for a new generation. Things soon soured after writers depicted Valley as a stereotypical angry vigilante with a taste for blood as opposed to the well-rounded, and universally beloved, Bruce Wayne.

Readers had no reason to empathize with the murderous Valley, and it also didn’t help that he just came across like a cheap Punisher knock off. Jean-Paul Valley was just another example of the comic industry trying to impose change on a character that was flawless to begin with. Soon enough the original Batman was back, and now Valley only appears in horrible post-'90s flashbacks for certain hardcore fans.

But again, there is a new armored Batman with a snazzy light-up suit debuting in August, so it remains to be seen whether or not we’re on the cusp of a '90s retread.

Clone Saga

4. SPIDER-MAN: THE CLONE SAGA (1994-1996)

There isn’t much positive to be said about the Clone Saga storyline that was featured in every Spider-Man title during the mid '90s. It was overlong, ugly, and filled with clashing editorial directions. The premise of the story revolved around Peter Parker finding out that he was actually a clone of the original Spider-Man, so that meant that everything he believed about his life was a lie. This also meant that every single issue of Amazing Spider-Man since the '70s was effectively thrown out the window. People don’t take too kindly to their favorite comics being rendered moot by a cheap publicity stunt, so there was plenty of pandemonium amongst comic fans.

Despite the uproar, people were still initially attracted to the “Earth shattering events” that followed Peter Parker around. Unfortunately, Marvel decided to drag the story out even further to take advantage of the initial sales. This is where the whole storyline unraveled.

What followed was a confusing odyssey that featured Peter Parker giving up being Spider-Man and Ben Reilly, the supposed original Web Slinger, becoming his permanent replacement. After a while, fans began to tire of the constant over-plotting of the story and longed for Peter Parker to reclaim his title. But due to some editorial strife, the story went on forever and often felt like a rudderless ship. Towards the end, Spider-Man titles were being bought by a small fraction of the audience that they started off with.

The Clone Saga mercifully ended in 1996 and Spider-Man’s status quo was soon returned to normal. Peter Parker was once again Spider-Man, Ben Reilly was killed much to the delight of fans everywhere, and all seemed right in the world again; however, due to the poor decisions during the story, and a bunch of pissed off fans, it took until 2001 for the Spider-Man books to get back on the right track.

Heroes Reborn

3. HEROES REBORN (1996-1997)

Hot (or cold?) off the heels of a few years of sagging sales and waning interest, Marvel decided to inject some life into its line of books by relaunching its classic characters for a new generation. In order to achieve this, Marvel began by having the Avengers and the Fantastic Four die while battling the reality warping villain Onslaught in an embarrassingly moronic storyline. Of course, the heroes weren’t really dead but instead were transported to an alternate dimension created by Franklin Richards, the young son of Mister Fantastic.

In this dimension, the heroes’ back stories and origins were revised for modern times and they had no memory of their previous existence. Still following us? Good, because it gets a whole lot worse. Marvel then outsourced the art and writing duties to, you guessed it, the creators of Image Comics that you saw earlier on the list.

This hodgepodge of chicken scratch artwork and As The World Turns-quality writing led to some of the worst Marvel comics of all time. Characters were transformed into senseless shells of their former selves and the stories constantly revolved around alternate dimensions, time travel, and any other convoluted plot device you could think of. The whole failed experiment coincided with Marvel itself going bankrupt, leading most people to point to short-sighted stories, such as Heroes Reborn, as one of the reasons for their financial downfall.

Variant Covers

2. VARIANT COVERS (1990-1997)

While cosmos-sized train wrecks such as The Clone Saga and Heroes Reborn helped push Marvel towards bankruptcy, no initiative did as much damage as the variant cover trend that nearly ruined the industry as a whole. In the '90s, there was a massive influx of news stories that chronicled fans getting rich by selling their old comic book collections from the '40s, '50s, and '60s. This instantly led to a Spandex-clad gold rush that saw parents buying up as many comics as possible with dreams of posh yachts and fully-paid college tuitions running through their heads.

To take advantage of this trend, both Marvel and DC decided to put out "limited edition" versions of their comics every month, complete with "rare" covers, such as the gold and platinum versions of Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1. The hope was that fans would buy at least three or four different versions of the same book, propelling an issue that would normally sell 250,000 copies into the one million-plus stratosphere.

The problem was that these covers weren’t nearly rare enough to accumulate any value, so when people tried to sell them it turned out that they only got an extra couple of dollars, if that. Soon those collectors were gone and so were their wallets. That was a big problem because these companies printed a huge amount of comics every year in anticipation of these collectors, but when they stopped buying the books both Marvel and DC were left with millions of unsold copies and not enough money to cover the high distribution costs.

DC survived the hit because of the financial security of its parent company, Warner Bros.; however, Marvel wasn’t so lucky and the company spiraled downward, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 1996.

Rob Liefeld

1. ROB LIEFELD (1991-1997)

How could one man single-handedly be the worst thing to happen to comics during the '90s? Take this into consideration: He was one of the founders of Image Comics; he was one of the architects behind Heroes Reborn; and he was on the forefront of the variant cover movement. It can be argued that the artistic philosophy that Rob Liefeld brought to the comics industry nearly bankrupted the entire medium.

Rob Liefeld isn’t just the worst comic artist ever; he’s simply the worst artist ever. Any latchkey kid with a mild case of ADD and enough mental dexterity to clutch a crayon could draw circles around Liefeld; the man couldn’t even draw feet. We would rather have our eye sockets romanced by Diana Ross’ hair straightener than to have to gaze upon Liefeld’s "art" ever again, but despite his lack of talent, Liefeld is a crafty salesman. He turned his menial talent into an empire.

Liefeld’s use of overly exaggerated muscles and hilariously large weapons was a novelty in the comic world and for a while his books sold big time. Marvel saw this and anointed him the savior of the comic book industry and paid him a ton of money. Soon enough, though, his work started to deteriorate to near comical levels and fans started to turn against his books in droves.

His legacy is unfortunate too because comics had come so far in terms of respectability in the '80s, but in the '90s Liefeld, and people like him, ruined it all with a few strokes of their talentless hands. Thankfully, since the collapse of the comics industry in the '90s, Liefeld has been almost absent from comics save for a few covers and short-term work every now and again.

But, in what seems to be a trend on this list, DC just hired Liefeld to do the artwork for the new Hawk and Dove series for this September’s company-wide relaunch. We're bracing for the worst.