Although the era had its share of comic book and superhero successes, the 1990s are generally seen by fans now to be a dark time for the medium. It didn't seem that way at the time, of course; we were still riding on the coattails of the success of Tim Burton's 1989 ultra-smash Batman, and comic books were experiencing an intense sales spike thanks to what is now called a speculation market. There was, in the comics world, a wave of new titles, and a new industry contender called Image Comics was making headlines with its artist-owned characters. Events like the Death of Superman were featured on the news.
These '90s spikes, however, petered out rather aggressively, and fans of the medium saw things to criticize fairly early on. The newly introduced characters weren't necessarily good ones (insert your least favorite Image Comics character here), and the films and TV shows that were based on them were rarely noteworthy; audiences may have responded to the well-received but short-lived The Flash (1990), but this was also a decade when Steel, Spawn, Batman & Robin, Judge Dredd, Albert Pyun's Captain America, and the ill-recalled Generation X TV pilot were creeping around in the background, stinking up the back alleys of comic books' not-yet-salvaged reputation.
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These '90s spikes, however, petered out rather aggressively, and fans of the medium saw things to criticize fairly early on. The newly introduced characters weren't necessarily good ones (insert your least favorite Image Comics character here), and the films and TV shows that were based on them were rarely noteworthy; audiences may have responded to the well-received but short-lived The Flash (1990), but this was also a decade when Steel, Spawn, Batman & Robin, Judge Dredd, Albert Pyun's Captain America, and the ill-recalled Generation X TV pilot were creeping around in the background, stinking up the back alleys of comic books' not-yet-salvaged reputation.
Continue reading…
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