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...