Heroes for the '90s!: A Conclusion

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 how very uncool superheroes (besides Batman) were in the early 1990s. Things got marginally better with the debut of X-Men: The Animated Series on Fox, but superhero comics were still very much out of the mainstream and their fans still very much on the outside of pop culture looking in.

In May 1999 I graduated college. I lived with my mom and stepdad for three and a half months before packing up and moving to Minneapolis. I only brought a couple of the twentysomething boxes that held my comics collection, as that was all I could reasonably store in a one-bedroom apartment. The rest stayed behind in parents' basement. Though my obsession with comics had downshifted into a mild interest, I fully intended to keep collecting. I sought a comic shop close to my place and landed at Dreamhaven on Lake Street in Uptown. 

The store had a mix of old and new sci-fi books, comics, and graphic novels. It was reportedly a favorite of Neil Gaimen's when he was in town, though I never saw him. One of the first comics I bought there was X-Men: The Hidden Years #1. However, that comic wasn't the final nail in my hobby.

I continued visiting the store - whose staff I always found to be just shy of hostile - for about four months until I realized a couple of things. The other was that my entry-level salary at a non-profit organization didn't provide enough to support a weekly comics habit.

And very soon I was on to other interests – buying CDs and records at Cheapo, going to concerts, making new friends, attending grad school to get my teaching license, finding my way into adulthood. Strange as it sounds to me now, I felt like growing up meant leaving comics behind.  

Superheroes Started to Become Cool in the Early 2000s

I had that mindset thrillingly challenged as comics fans began to emerge in the mainstream. Michael Chabon’s 2001 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was a love letter to comic books wrapped up in a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Johnathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003) not only took its name from Superman’s private getaway, but found its main characters bonding over comic book collecting. In Seth Cohen, The O.C. (2003) gave us an idealized comic book geek.

All of these were harbingers of a geek culture revolution. For me, they were also the start of an itch to go back to collecting comics.

On a trip back to our alma mater for Homecoming my friend Richard and I spent a night at the home of former professor and the newspaper advisor, Michael Nolan. We discussed Chabon’s book, and I was surprised to learn Nolan was also a lapsed comic book fan. He revealed to me that he still bought the occasional Spider-Man comic at the Walgreens just up the street, “Just to see what’s going on.” 

It wasn’t long after that I found myself doing the same thing. And each visit I made back to Illinois one of my great pleasures was spending a couple of hours digging through the my boxes of comics, triggering old memories and inevitably finding a stack to bring back with me to Minnesota.

In Late 2004 I started semi-regularly popping into Comic College on Hennepin Ave, picking up a few books here and there. DC: The New Frontier, Identity Crisis (that was a mistake), and Uncanny X-Men / X-Men. Often I’d head over to Uptown and Booksmart, where a modest comics section held a few boxes full of recent issues, and I began to fill in some of the runs I’d abandoned in late 1999, namely Fantastic Four, Flash, and JSA.

Much as it had in 1989, things started to snowball. By the spring of 2007 I was back into comics fully, making the weekly trip to Uncle Sven's in Saint Paul. I was also in love with the woman who I'd marry. This time my interest in comics didn’t accompany depression, but contentment. 

I also had started working at a middle school, and made an attempt to right the wrongs of my own adolescence by starting a comic book club. I had one regular member, a young man named Jonathon, whose ardor for comics outpaced even mine when I was his age.

The following year I got married, and Wendy and I bought a house shortly after. My mom and stepdad were happy to be able to deliver the whole of my comic book collection back into my care. It was a necessary and utilitarian thing to happen, my property returning to my hands. But it was also symbolic. I had fully reclaimed something that was a hugely significant part of my life and my identity.

Back to Front

I started this whole project with a question: What do you think of when you hear the words “Superhero comics in the 1990s”?

My hope is that the 34 essays in this collection have painted a more complete picture of the 1990s, one that goes beyond the reductionist view of the decade as nothing but the adventures of poorly-drawn, underwritten, overly muscled anti-heroes with comically large guns, all sold with multiple shiny covers and trading cards in polybags.

I submit to you instead that the 1990s was a time of great experimentation and creativity, especially in the creation of superhero universes - Impact, Milestone, MC2 - that served as an alternate to mainstream Marvel and DC.  It was a time of titles like Batman Adventures reminding fans what really mattered in superhero comics. It was a time of world-building multi-year sagas like Flash, Starman, and Legionnaires. And it was a time that the mainstream comics world made small but significant strides toward the worlds on the page looking more like the real world in terms of gender, sexual orientation, and race.

Now a good 20 years into my second phase of comic book reading, I can say without a doubt that superhero comics are my favorite. While I appreciate and read other genres, it’s superheroes that have my heart. Once in awhile when a superhero writer writes a true crime or vampire noir book, I check it out, and invariably I find I’d prefer to just stick with their Marvel or DC work (Brian K. Vaughan is the Bizarro version of this; his superhero work leaves me cold, while I love everything else he does). A significant part of this is an affection for and history with the characters, but mostly it’s an appreciation for the mythic rhythm of the form itself, and what it brings out in the writers and artists I admire.

As such, I don’t foresee another time when I won’t be a Marvel and DC reader. In a life where there are very few sure things, it’s nice to have at least one.