What weren’t ’90s comics?
Transcript
Thanks to Batman v Superman and the animated version of The Killing Joke we’ve revived a really annoying meme just when it was finally wearing off. That of the 90s comics.
90s comics as a wasteland of pouches, huge guns, grimdark heroes, innocence lost, incoherent stories and poorly drawn feet. All of these happening because the industry learned the wrong lessons from Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. The first problem with this concept is in the name itself. 90s comics does not mean all comics done in the 90s.
They don’t refer to the black and white independent adventure comics
nor to those from the blossoming alternative scene, to the Vertigo horror and dark fantasy comics. Nor to the genre comics from smaller publishers.
To the comic strips of the era, nor to the early webcomics.
Plus, don’t forget all the porn comics! So many porn comics.
And for the sake of brevity I’ll take it as a given that by comics we’re referring just to north-american comics.
What’s absurd is that not even a good portion of superhero comics from the 90s aren’t considered 90s comics. No, 90s comics just signifies the kind of comic books that intersected the most with the speculator market, which is a primary reason for their shared aesthetic.
Speculator market
The story’s much more complicated but I hope this simplified version will help me make my point. From about 1989 until 1997 Marvel Comics realised that they could make the customers -notice that I say customers, not readers- buy more issues of a comic by insisting that it’s special in some way, worth collecting. Usually using a variant cover or by pretending that the first appearance of a third stringer X-Men character is just as important as that of Superman, riding a wave widely publicized comic book auctions. I don’t think many people actually believed that those comics among mountains of their copies all preserved pristinely in mylar, are as valuable as an Action Comics #1 that survived intact since 1938, but they did believe others would think so for just long enough that they would buy an overpriced copy.
Marvel wasn’t quite alone in this. Valiant comics especially is of note.
Started by former Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter, with help from venture capital through Triumph Capital, it used many of those tactics to quickly turn a fledgeling company into a competitor to the big two. More than that, it refined them and even brought a couple innovations of its own.
It brought reflexive variant covers. It turned crossover events into sales boosting precise marketing moves. It made use of special number 0 issues.
At about the same time DC Comics entered more confidently in the speculating game by engineering status-quo changing events and selling comics in opaque sealed bags which would lose their value as collectibles when opened.
All of these meant that more and more the value of a mainstream superhero comic, to a certain audience, turned from how good it actually was to the speculative value it could be sold for at a further date. It’s telling that pop culture magazines, such as Wizard, had columns dedicated to ranking valuable issues or to highlighting potentially undervalued ones.
This wasn’t a phenomena isolated to the comic book industry, by any means. Something similar happened with baseball trading cards, for example. And it was just a reflection of the overall atmosphere in a postindustrial, extremely financialized economy. In this economy, an asset isn’t a means of production. It’s something to be bought low, inflated, then sold high. Its value is virtual, almost independent on its productive capacity. When Ronald Perelman bought Marvel comics in 1989, that was pretty much what he was going to do with the company, making himself rich in a cycle of buying bonds from the company, selling them and then having Marvel repurchase them. The attitude trickled down to retailers and got exploited by distributors.
Robust, slow, but steady practices for growth were replaced by price gouging, flooding the market with product and a reliance on marketing. It’s not like he was going to keep the company for ever. This made itself seen in the aforementioned gimmicks and in a reliance on branding. For a short period of time, even the editorial structure of the publisher was realigned in order to be better controlled by marketing and the corporate higher ups.
That it all lasted as much as it did can be attributed to the fact that the main client of the comics companies weren’t the readers themselves, but actually the comics shops, with distribution acting as a further obfuscating layer. It all created this impression of continual growth, even if boxes and boxes of non-returnable issues were accumulating each month in poorly ran comics shops set-up by people who thought they could rig the collecting game.
Extreeeeme!
Marvel always had a house-style. In the early sixties Jack Kirby set the stage with blocky figures, a focus on action and energetic sequences laid on a regular three tiered pages. By the 70s this gave way to Neal Adams and Gil Kane’s study of fully rendered bodies, drawn in motion and even allowing for grace, with pages designed to display the figures and play with time.
Usually one knew how a Marvel comic looked.
Ironically, In the 80s, under the somewhat tyrannical editorship of Jim Shooter there were some pockets of auteurism. But by the end of the decade a handful of enthusiastic young artists were arriving at a new house style, bringing fresh energies to old characters and even creating their own. People like Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane were developing over common influences in new, exciting ways and attaining success in the market.
This new house style wasn’t just a distinct way of rendering the human form or a manner of storytelling. It also came with a specific sensibility regarding design and posture and a disregard for clarity and convention. It had an attitude. Which hypercharged the idea of the style as a brand.
Not only a Marvel comic was supposed to look a certain way, but it was supposed to feel a certain way. More aggressive, more modern, more intricate. Designs were militarized. Everything was cyber-this, techno-that, bio-something and it looked the part.
This was happening right at the time when Marvel got acquired by Ronald Perelman and when that inflation of perceived value was about to begin.
In 1988 Marvel was publishing about 50 titles with a certain variety in the art and stories. By 1993 that number grew to around 140 and naturally their quality started to fluctuate more strongly downward. Marketing was gaining more control over the editors and the workforce was very solicited.
To compound the issue the guys who brought and developed the main style went off, some of them creating Image comics and giving the people what they wanted, by providing an even more exaggerated version of what was a already pretty extreme approach. Which meant that the industry had to hire many new people. For example it brought in a lot of Brazilian and Spanish artists who, I guess, kinda thought that this is how the Americans liked their comics. In these conditions, something like The Clone Saga was bound to happen. Even DC gave their earnest replies to Image’s Youngblood or Marvel’s X-Force with stuff like Extreme Justice.
But usually they prefered to have their cake and eat it too, by having the traditional heroes teach a lesson or two about the value of the old ways to different cyberpunk anti-heroes who thought following the law was for losers and villains should be killed right away.
Probably the highest point of this aesthetic was in 1996, when Marvel outsourced the production of four core titles to Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld’s respective studios in a line of comics dubbed Heroes Reborn. More often than not, when you see an example of how awful comics were in the 90s, it’s something from here. This lasted only a year, was composed of a handful of titles and it’s presumed awfulness was it’s point in a way. I mean, they wouldn’t hire Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld to make something that didn’t look like it was made by Lee or Liefeld. They were doing their thing and their thing sold.
All of this came to a stop in 1997 when the market crashed, Marvel declared bankruptcy and law was restored to the land.
What about Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns?
Um, not much, really. I’ll admit that Frank Miller influenced in part some of the people who created that extreme 90s style, but with his work on Daredevil and Ronin, rather than on The Dark Knight. He liked ninja and samurai movies, some of those guys liked ninjas and samurais. He had an interest in dystopian, dirty sci-fi, some of them liked the cyberpunk aesthetic. Later Lee and Tim Sale played in Deathblow with the hypermasculine noir tropes and chiaroscuro style from Sin City. So there’s indeed an acknowledgement of influence or at the very least awareness.
But there were many, many other artists and authors in their DNA. And they were influenced by a lot of types of entertainment outside of comics. If seeing Cable on the cover of New Mutants #87, with his shiny eye, and robot half and pointing his big gun you’re thinking of Alan Moore, not The Terminator, then you’ve been reading Moore all wrong. In fact, the stories they told wouldn’t be out place in the kind of Terminator straight-to-VHS clones popular in the 80s and 90s with a certain segment of people. Their style was that spasm of the old dying and the new not being able to be born. This rapturous tension excited people.
In terms of marketing and publishing there’s nothing further apart from Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns than that pocket of superhero comics from the 90s. The first two are self-contained limited series, where the authors had enough creative control, the others are never ending series constantly crossing over into each other, with authors treated as fungible resources leading to often abandoned plot-points and inconsistencies. The first were superhero comics clearly swinging into the authorial direction, the others at their most corporate.
There are a few comics linking the two approaches, but the link is too weak to sustain the idea that Moore and Miller gave the industry enough rope to hang itself as it’s commonly said. Especially not with Watchmen and The Dark Knight. Because there were comics inspired and influenced by those. Both artistically and editorially. And they were indeed darker and more violent, but the violence was looked at critically. They got what Watchmen was doing. As there were enough precedents for the “90s” books both in terms of style and publishing where visual bombast and quick cash grabs took precedence over subtlety and storytelling.
I guess it’s easier to consider comics, art in general, as isolated from the economy, from fads, from financial bubbles. This is entertainment. This is art. High finance doesn’t have anything to do with it, right?
At the same time it’s easier to pass the blame for a disruptive event on other stuff that stood out, rather than to recognise that Youngblood and WildC.A.T.S. are the inevitable evolutions of The New Teen Titans and The Uncanny X-Men, especially considering the larger culture of the time.
This would mean criticizing the systemic factors that gave rise to those comics. Which are the economy and fads and financial bubbles.
And not to deny some of the quality work that’s been done in this space or the pride these authors took in what they’ve created. It’s not their fault that financiers saw an opportunity in their industry, took control and implemented destructive measures in order to quickly raise money. But that’s what made them like they were, for good and bad. The apotheosis of comics as product. As artificial, filler, product. It’s not Alan Moore or Frank Miller who’s at fault. It’s not Rob Liefeld. It’s the 90s.
