I feel personally hurt when I see this blanket phrase used & it gets used a lot on the the internet.
This happens mostly when someone happen to point out something (look at this costume design, see this cover, what is going on in this panel, etc.) from the 90’s comics. If the person pointing out this thing doesn’t say it, someone in the comments will most likely say that “this is why 90’s comics suck”. Oddly enough most if not all of these things pointed out are from the first half of the decade & not the later half. There are things to be hating on past ‘95 too! Heroes Reborn was around until ‘97!
Why do I get hurt over a comment like this? You are attacking a period of comics that I particularly like. This is the decade that I “came of age” & is also the one where I started to read comics (does this mean that I also suck?). I started to read comics in the thick of what some would call a “dark time” in comic if they wanted to get all dramatic about it. I started to read comics in summer 1991 & over the next few years: I saw Batman being broken & be replaced by the most 90’s of replacements. I saw Superman die. I saw the reign of his replacements. I saw Superman return from the dead & sport a mullet! I saw him become electric & blue! I saw the X-Men be overcome by Leifelding proportions! And Pouches: every X-Men had pouches sometime during the 90’s! I saw The Invisible Woman wear a glorified one piece swimsuit with various cutouts so she might as well have been a bikini as her approved uniform!
I was there!
Were there things that “sucked”? yeah. There will always be sucky things in comics. It’s part of it’s foundation. Right up there with belted undies & “science mishaps = super powers”.
Were there various problems with the comics of the time? Yes! But then present day comics have all sort of problems, too. Comics will always have problems no matter the time period they come out in. Some of the same problems are coming back into comics 20 years later.
Should people hold back on using the S word when discussing 90’s comics? Sure. It would be nice. I doubt it’ll happen. The Internet survives on a unhealthy diet of hate & one of the major parts of the comic book pyramid of discussion is “hating on 90’s comics”. It’s right up there with “unexplained hatred of Aquaman”, “Sexism in Comics” & “Deadpool is so awesome!”
I wish more people would give more thought to why something might suck & why it was allowed to exist (money? poor creative choice? unholy pacts with the devil? drug habits? misunderstanding popular trends?). We all know the jokes but can’t we come up with new ones that haven’t already been run into the ground?
