24 Pages

What Happened? I started this project in late 2020 at the height of COVID. My very ambitious goal was to write and publish one essay per week for 60 or so weeks. As school started up again (remote though it was) I soon found that pace untenable. I also found that the project was turning out to be much more personal than I'd originally envisioned. So I reduced the number of essays I planned to write to about 40. And then, after completing essay #25, I got pulled into other projects and put the whole thing on pause.  My writing schedule finally freed up late last year, and though I initially didn't have a lot of desire to finish these final ten essays, the feeling was overcome by my hatred for leaving things unfinished. In the end, I had a lot of fun with the last batch of essays.  Now, here are some parting thoughts to close out the overarching story of "Heroes for the '90s!". Superheroes Still Weren't Cool in the Late 1990s In the introduction  I wrote about h...

The End of the Affair X-Men: The Hidden Years #1 (December 1999) Writer: John Byrne Penciller: John Byrne Inker: Tom Palmer Colorist: Gregory Wright * Nearly four years ago I promised there would be a part two to essay #4, " My First Comic Book Love ." At last, here it is. * If there was one constant through my entire first decade of comics fandom, it was complete adoration for the work of John Byrne.  From Avengers Westcoast to Namor the Sub-Mariner to Sensational She-Hulk to Next Men  to Danger Unlimited to Babe to  Wonder Woman to New Gods  I followed him everywhere. It didn't matter what it was, if it had John Byrne's name on it, it was an automatic buy. But if I was being honest with myself, my ardor for his work was diminishing with each successive project in the mid-to-late 1990s. The first thing I noticed was his writing becoming more formulaic, but I still enjoyed his artwork. With 1998's  Spider-Man: Chapter One , an ill-concieved attempt to reima...

A Kryptonian Raised by Humans Superman for All Seasons  Book One - Spring (July 1998) Writer: Jeph Loeb Artist: Tim Sale Colorist: Bjarne Hansen * Where we last left Superman he had died and returned to life . This had the effect of reminding most of the world how much they cared about the archetypical superhero, with a resulting jump in sales of his four monthly books. Five years later, the Superman books still had largely the same creative teams and were in a bit of a wilderness. The infamous Superman Red and Superman Blue storyline came along again as a periodic reminder to fans not to take Superman for granted. As I wrote last time, this is a ongoing problem creators have with Clark Kent's alter ego. His pure goodness is his defining characteristic and also what makes him difficult to tell interesting stories about. In the early 1990s this problem was compounded by the rise of the grim anti-hero. In the late 1990s there was a larger appetite for traditionalism, but the problem ...

Who is Spider-Girl? What If...  #105 Writer: Tom DeFalco Penciller: Ron Frenz Inker: Bill Sienkiewicz  Colorist: Matt Webb * With the Spider-Verse all the rage these days, there's one very important Spider character still waiting for her moment in the cinematic sun: May "Mayday" Parker, daughter of Peter and Mary Jane Parker. Spider-Girl's story is a fascinating one, both on and off the page. She debuted in early 1998 in the pages of What If... , a book that had seen much better days, and in fact was less than a year away from cancellation. She would go on to headline a small imprint of titles set in the same universe, a title that would last in various incarnations for 12 years and nearly 150 issues. Spider-Girl was the brainchild of former Marvel editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco. DeFalco had been dismissed from his position - which he'd held since 1987 - in 1994 under somewhat cloudy circumstances. Whatever happened exactly, he remained friendly with the powers-that-...

 A Nearly Perfect First Issue Thunderbolts #1 (April 1997) Writer: Kurt Busiek Penciller: Mark Bagley Inker: Vince Russell Colorist: Joe Rosas * Superhero comic books promise "an ending that will shock you!" all the time, but rarely do they deliver. Just over a quarter of a century ago, Thunderbolts #1 presented readers with a twist that still stands as one of the most genuinely surprising final pages in all of comic book history. It was a surprise that  wasn't just a clever bit of plotting, it was a bait-and-switch of the entire concept of the book. The Thunderbolts were presented in pre-release hype as a team of brand-new heroes who would be stepping in to fill the void filled by the apparent deaths of the Avengers and Fantastic Four at the hands of a villain called Onslaught. (At the risk of curtailing my momentum, I'll pause her to share that Onslaught was the in-story explanation for the awful one-year "reboot" of the Avengers, Captain America, Fantasti...

On Earth as It Is in Heaven Kingdom Come #1 (May 1996) Writer: Mark Waid Artist: Alex Ross * As I write these essays I keep having to remind myself that in the 1990s I was very very concerned with legitimacy. In those days when Kevin Smith was the only famous comic book fan, when comic book movies were largely terrible, and when many of the comics themselves were embarassing, things were pretty difficult for those of us trying to make an argument that comics should be considered art. So Alex Ross was a godsend.  Ross was born in Portland, Oregon but raised in Lubbock, Texas. His father was a minister and his mother was a commercial artist who proved to be his first artistic influence. Born in 1970, Ross developed a love of superheroes thanks the Super Friends Saturday morning cartoon and Spider-Man's appearances on Electric Company, and began trying to draw them. When he got into comic books, he gravitated toward the work of John Romita, Neal Adams, and George Perez.  He deci...