Hello again, and welcome to another installment of “Looking Back at Comics”! This week, we’re going to take a look at the 1990s. Everyone who was around during the 90s now looks back at the era through a lens of somewhat sheepish embarrassment; although it was easy to get caught up in the hype and excitement of an era that was all about flash and excess. Even the covers of the 90s were big and flashy: Comic books back then artificially raised their value through so-called “variant covers” that the company hyped as being worth more than the regular ones. Fortunately, modern comics have completely ditched the variant cover craze and…um…well, except…I mean, those are legitimately rarer! And they aren’t shiny!
But it wasn’t just the covers that made the 90s so ludicrous. Those fancy variant covers frequently adorned comics that had over-hyped “shock” storylines. Who can forget the so-called “Death of Superman”, a story that actually got play in regular newspapers because foolish reporters actually believed that the character was going to permanently die! Of course, less than two years later, Superman was back, but fans at the time treated the mock “death” as real and vehemently debated the merits of replacing him with a grim and gritty cyborg version of the character. Thankfully, we’d never see a grim and gritty cyborg character replacing an iconic American…um…let’s move on. Let’s just move on.
To the villains! Yes! That’s certainly an era where the 90s got downright silly! They loved nothing more than to make good guys go bad and villains reform, simply for the shock value of seeing them change sides! You’d get absurdities like Iron Man turning against the Avengers and Venom becoming a good guy…crap. The point is, we’ve learned from the 90s. Definitely.
Because we wouldn’t have such an excess of grim, dark, anti-heroes. Back in the 90s, it was almost de rigeur to have “grim and gritty” heroes show up like Darkhawk, Night Thrasher, and Lobo. Back then, they even had a “Dark Speedball” character! Of course, at least they were self-aware enough to make it a joke, instead of actually trying to sell the character as an actual deep and meaningful character moment. I mean, come the fuck on! “Penance”? Who were they thinking this would appeal to? Speedball fans who said to themselves, “Hey, I love Speedball, but he’s not enough of an emo prick!” Or perhaps comics fans who said, “I dunno, I really like emo pricks, but none of them have the name recognition that would make me take a chance on them!” …sorry, breaking character there. The point is, Dark Avengers, Dark Wolverine, Dark X-Men, and Dark Reign are entirely different from Force Works and X-Force. And X-Force is entirely different from X-Force, too. Just like Fantastic Force is different from Fantastic Force. Because it’s not the 90s anymore.
What changed to break comics out of the 90s mindset? The arrival of Joe Quesada, that’s what! Quesada put an end to the numberless spin-off titles that were diluting the brand identity of Marvel’s classic titles (like X-Factor, X-Force, et cetera) and ended the practice of frequent, pointless crossovers that was eroding reader loyalty. Without that, it’s doubtful that Marvel would have survived to hit the motherlode of movie adaptations that have become the company’s financial lifeline. Yes, Joe Quesada’s innovations ushered in an era of true greatness at Marvel.
I wonder if he remembers what they were…
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Snark aside, the quality of the comics that Marvel has been putting out this decade has, in my opinion, really been higher. DC, on the other hand, not so much (aside from a few high profile projects, it’s actually gone downhill).
While I mostly agree, I just want to point out that Lobo wasn’t, originally, a “Grim n’ Gritty” anti-hero. He was suposed to be a parody of “Grim n’ Gritty” anti-heroes. Somewhere along the way, peolple started taking him at face value.
Ah, but now we have fewer pouches!
Both companies seem to be doing some great work with some of their C-listers, but having trouble with getting people to really like their mainstream output. I could read Blue Beetle or Birds or Prey or X-Factor or Incredible Hercules until the pages fall apart, but I’ve not heard a single person recommend a Justice League comic in many years.
Carlos, see also: Deadpool.
“Thankfully, we’d never see a grim and gritty cyborg character replacing an iconic American…um…let’s move on. Let’s just move on.”
Is this supposed to be a slam on Brubaker? Give me a break.
This kind of thing was stupid then and it’s stupid now, but the difference is that back in the 90s there were virtually NO other options. There was Vertigo and a few trailing remnants of the 80s indie boom. Everything else was Image-style schlock.
Yeah, Brubaker’s Captain America has been pretty darn good, I think. But I do think that a shaky economy is not the time to revisit the 90s.
Can you show us on the doll exactly where the crossover event plotline touched you?
Bitch bitch bitch, moan moan moan “wah, comics aren’t the same as when I was a kid”.
Same old Same old John. I’m surprised you didn’t throw in your usual bitch about the Max line.
PMMDJ: Deadpool wasn’t a parody of anything. Liefeld isn’t clever enough for that.
He was just a STUPID character, that Fabian Nicieza and Joe Kelly managed to redeem somewhat and build a fanbase for.
@Burrowowl: oh my god! I remember!
You know, if you really don’t like comics, you can just NOT read them. Or even just avoid the ones that are badly written – I’ll take my AWESOME Fraggle Rock comics over any number of stupid “mainstream” books any day.
And seriously, comparing Cyborg Superman to Bucky Cap? FAIL.
Just joining the Bru Bandwagon here. The argument he makes here is significantly weakened JUST by including that example as a comparison, what with the example actually being a good concept that worked. Oops.
He was suposed to be a parody of “Grim n’ Gritty” anti-heroes.
I thought Lobo was satire and Rorschach was the parody of that kind of character?
Deadpool I think was like Bloodwulf; a liefeldian satire of a parody that ended up being done straight because liefeld’s mind consists entirely of a negative amount of knowledge about the human body and a pouch fetish he acquired while whacking off to skippy the bush kangaroo reruns.
On the plus side, if Leifeld had been born a decade later furry porn would be even more nonsensical that it already is.
Can we come up with some kind of terminological distinction that separates “90s comics” from the 1990s of Sandman, Starman, Astro City, Transmetropolitan, and Planetary? Because on the one hand I know what you mean, but then again, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac? 1990s. Mark Waid’s runs on Flash and Captain America? 1990s. The Busiek/Perez Avengers? 1990s. Moore’s Supreme? 1990s.
I am insanely tempted to just divide the decade into pre-and-post-1994, when the collector market collapsed. A lot of the bad Image knockoffs went under in the ensuing maelstrom, and most of the good work I listed above appears afterward. On the other hand, does that feel too simplistic to anyone else?
On one level I agree with John that we’re mostly getting a more subdued 90s style of comics, but I think superhero comics will always have some level of excess, both in production and story-telling.
And a lot of these comparisons are seriously lacking context, but that’s been partially covered by others.
Jokes apart, the 90 was not such horrid period for comic books, no more than any other periods. Is not that 70ies or 80ies didn’t have their good fare of crazy and embrassing issues(like the flamboyant ridiculous original costume of power man)
Actually, Dave, it’s really more “bitch bitch bitch moan moan moan comics are exactly the same as when I was a kid, only back then I had too little taste to know how much they sucked.” 🙂
As for Brubaker’s Cap…get back to me in ten years. “Onslaught” had plenty of defenders at the time, too. Everything looks better while it’s happening.
Okay, hold the goddamn phone.
First off, I’m really sick of the pointless Quesada bashing from people who should know better. He’s not innocent, but he’s greenlighted a lot of really solid ideas and he’s gotten a lot of good creators putting out solid work under the Marvel banner. I was there in the ’90s, and even the books I don’t like from modern Marvel are leaps and bounds ahead of Howard Mackie’s Spider-Man or Lobdell on X-Men. Quesada’s made some deeply weird decisions and OMD and M-Day are going to follow him to his grave, but he’s been a good EIC overall.
Finally, did you seriously just compare Brubaker’s Captain America to Onslaught? That’s not even an apples and oranges comparison. That’s apples and brain tumors.
Can we come up with some kind of terminological distinction that separates “90s comics” from the 1990s of Sandman, Starman, Astro City, Transmetropolitan, and Planetary? Because on the one hand I know what you mean, but then again, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac? 1990s. Mark Waid’s runs on Flash and Captain America? 1990s. The Busiek/Perez Avengers? 1990s. Moore’s Supreme? 1990s.
I’d gladly not, because all of that was exactly as 90s as everything else mentioned here, and as the post says the 90s excesses that people snicker about aren’t much different from the excesses of the 00s/10s, maybe swapping some of the more awful art for the modern-day tendency to throw in a rape every couple of dozen issues.
Thomas Wilde: Yes, Quesada did a fantastic job getting Marvel out of bankruptcy, but he’s been in the chair of ten years and its about time that someone else got the opertunity to make their mark before OMD becomes the norm rather then the standard.
“Finally, did you seriously just compare Brubaker’s Captain America to Onslaught? That’s not even an apples and oranges comparison. That’s apples and brain tumors.”
He said to give it time. Captain America Reborn is the weakest Cap story Brubaker has written and as far as I’m concerned to do that story and then keep Bucky in the Captain America uniform speaks to me of favoritism and a step in the wrong direction, Secret Avengers or no. Time is the only true test you can give anything. I liked Onslaught at the time too, still think its a boss look, but I can understand were that story went wrong.
If you want a better Cyborg Superman comparison, then lets look at Cyborg Thor (Ragnarok).
I agree with all the things you said, Thomas. I was totally serious in the column when I said that Quesada did a lot of shit right when he came in. He really did cancel all the crappy spin-off books that were just there to cash in on the fans who felt pressured into buying everything related to the core title they really liked (he canned X-Men: The Hidden Years, Mutant X, Bishop, Gambit, and probably some others I’m forgetting.) He really did end the practice of yearly crossovers that was making it unattractive for top-flight creators to go to Marvel. He lured guys like Morrison, Ennis, Stracynski, and Brubaker away from DC and put them on major titles.
But as the old saying goes, “What have you done for me lately?” The lure of quick cash from pointless spin-off titles and crossovers has proven irresistible, and many of the things he vocally and specifically derided when he took the job, he’s doing now. (Remember how he once wouldn’t let Morrison resurrect Colossus because “dead means dead”?) Calling him on that isn’t “pointless Quesada-bashing”, it’s legitimate criticism.
Given the comparison between thor and superman in previous posts, the cyborg superman remark makes a lot more sense as a reference to ragnorok – or indeed to the entire sentry debacle.
And while I doubt that was the original intent, the fact that we can pull two different ways in which a cyborg superman remark can be made to apply to recent shenanigans at marvel is worrisome.
but he’s greenlighted a lot of really solid ideas
It’s not entirely clear those ideas wouldn’t have been greenlighted by someone else – while OMD and Civil War… not so much.
It does seem to me– and I’m basing this only on the Marvel stuff that I read– that the overall quality is a little better now than it was during the worst of the ’90s, and the art is a lot better. But the giant crossovers of recent years have done more damage than the crossovers of the ’90s, most of which were restricted to just a ‘family’ of titles. The Clone Saga only messed up Spider-Man, for example, whereas Civil War messed up everything.
But from what little I’ve heard about this ‘Heroic Age’ thingie, we might be entering the new 1998-style period, when everything got better for a while.
The Sentry’s a cyborg?
You know, why are we mentioning the new Cyborg Thor?
Way I remember it, there already was a cyborg Thor.
Who, as a matter of strict fact, is BETTER than regular Thor.
(Probably because he’s also a Space Alien with a skeletal horseface.)
Ragnarok never REPLACED Thor, though. Because Thor got cancelled, and took years longer to come back than the rest of the Avengers. Which, coincidently, also happened in the 90s, when his book died going into Onslaught but wasn’t deemed worthy of getting the shitty Image reboot, and took until months after Heroes Return to actually start up again.
Damn, you broke my irony-meter!
The Sentry’s a cyborg?
You know you could probably get away with a one-shot special in which a black sentry, a young hip teenage sentry and a cyborg sentry show up and are immediately killed in various daft ways.
Of course if Nextwave was still going you could just have Boom-Boom, Photon and Machine Man mourn him by dressing up as him and retelling how he was so very important to them in a piss take of that bloody funeral (with machine man revealing he lost his virginity to Sentry) while going through a marvel version of the death of superman arc.
Who’s fault was Nextwave’s cancellation?
Now I actually enjoyed the Reign of the Supermen story. Even knowing perfectly well he was coming back, it was interesting to see Steel, Cyborg, Superboy and Eradicator playing off each other (and really, I think it was the latter who was the grim and gritty one). In contrast to, say, Azrael replacing Batman.
“– As for Brubaker’s Cap…get back to me in ten years. “Onslaught” had plenty of defenders at the time, too. Everything looks better while it’s happening. –”
Onslaught was good for the same reason that LOST was good. You had a lot of mystery, and imaginations went wild. Once you got the full reveal, you realized that the writer plotline wasn’t as cool as the one you had in your head. :-p
“– To the villains! Yes! That’s certainly an era where the 90s got downright silly! They loved nothing more than to make good guys go bad and villains reform, simply for the shock value of seeing them change sides! You’d get absurdities like Iron Man turning against the Avengers and Venom becoming a good guy…crap. The point is, we’ve learned from the 90s. Definitely. –”
I think Marvel went a little overboard with this idea, particularly in the Spider Man books. At one point, I believe there’s a scene where Peter Parker bemoans being out of work because all his old villains redeemed themselves.
But, particularly among Spider Man villains, some of these guys aren’t “bad people”, they’re just people in bad circumstances who make bad decisions. Dr Octopus is just a research scientist strapped for funding. Venom is a rival news photographer in the cut throat New York photojournalism market. Lizard was a Vietnam veteran who just wanted to be whole again. Norman Osborne was a jackass, but his son was a genuinely good guy whose loyalty was split between family and friends. Letting the writers play with the villains as more than just canned bad guys was – in my opinion – a good thing. Execution was spotty, but the idea was sound.
Likewise, Iron Man is a selfish and hedonistic prick. Should he be hiring villains off the street like illegal day laborers? Probably not. But there are plenty of Batman-in-the-future comics where Bruce Wayne just says “Fuck it, I am the law” and turns into a local tyrant. I’ve got no problem seeing Tony Stark break from the classic Lawful Good arctype and slip towards Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil. Again, execution isn’t always perfect – Civil War had it’s plot hickups – but it was a compelling idea and one that deserved a run.
Aside from the Brubaker bashing, I think it’s hilarious just how cyclical comics are. As much things appear to change, they pretty much stay the same.
On the bright side, we’ve had a new resurgance of B-level characters getting the upgrade. Nova, Booster Gold, etc. It’s like the old days of Animal Man and such.
Hey, y’know when would have been a good time to post this? Last year. When most of what you said actually applied to the current status quo.
And jokes about “Death of Captain America = Death of Superman” got about as played as Skrulls and Black Lanterns about fives seconds after Cap. #25 came out.
I look forward to seeing John around the internet in a decade or so. Even WITH Cap Reborn, I’ll be more than happy to be a total prick and bring up his Onslaught/Bru’s Cap comparison. Ridiculous. Good way to start discussion though, I’ll give the man that.
Later, the death of Captain America was more accurately compared with that of Batman.
Darkhawk wasn’t really grim and gritty. He was a 70s Marvel hero with a dumb 90s name.
I actually liked a lot of 90s stuff. Have the Superman books been as good in the past decade as they were during the Death and Reign storylines? Not really.
Yes, lots of terrible comics came out in the 90s, but lots of comics came out, period. There was some good stuff in there, currently overlooked because of the backlash stigma of that decade.
I thought that this was a funny post. I can’t believe how many of the responders are taking it seriously and getting offended by it.
John Seavey, spot on. I’d been thinking along a related note, but not just about Marvel:(Spoilers for some of the series I discuss)
Here’s the thing, I like what I’ve read of Mark Waid’ Irredeemable and Incorruptable so far. I Liked the Astro City “Fallen Angel” arc which had both reformed supervillain(s) and a fallen super-hero. I thought that the initial premise of the Thunderbolts was cool, and I’ve liked James Robinson’s Starman and The Shade miniseries, all of which had redeemed villains and fallen heroes…
But I also remember thinking how godawful the fall of Hal Jordan was, how I never bought Deadpool as a hero (I had a friend who loved the Deadpool comic, and I could see the quality of some of the writing, but I always thought that Deadpool reforming made as much sense as the Joker reforming would have. I just couldn’t believe it.) Or Sabretooth, or the Juggernaut, or Venom. etc. etc. etc. (Although I liked the Marvel Sandman being a hero.)
So what am I trying to say? I dunno, I guess “switching sides” (which sounds like a sexual orientation euphemism, but I digress) ends being a hack job in some creators’ hands, and being meaningful in others. I remember certain creators and others complaining, “I can’t tell tell the heroes from the villains” during the 80’s and 90’s and thinking, “What are you idiots smoking? Can’t tell the difference? Have Spider-man and Superman started robbing banks and trying to take over the world? Even the Punisher blows away murderers and such instead of innocent citizens (barring the “Gassed Punisher shoots jaywalkers” story line.) Guy Gardner may be mean, but he’s taking on nastier foes and times than the Silver Age.” I liked a lot of what I read back then, even the Emerald Dawn miniseries with Hal as a drunk who cleaned up. Back then there were some cool experiments (such as Danny Fingeroth’s “Deadly Foes of Spider-Man” which put the focus on the villains points of view long before Thunderbolts or Astro city. Clunky at the time, but it was worth reading.)
If there is anything serious to come out of of pondering the nineties with its Image creators’ Liefield and McFarlane-style excesses, I guess it’s that we should be glad that along with those excesses we got the experiments of The Sandman, Bone, Astro City, Strangers in Paradise, From Hell, etc, and the general message that a writer could go Indy and tell the good story that they wanted rather than have an editor trash it.
Meanwhile at Marvel, I may never understand why Quesada deliberatley ended jms’ run on Spider-Man by committing the exact same mistake they were both brought in to fix: that no one cared about Spider-man after people tried to reset the clock by erasing his past. All the evidence showed that the fans absolutley hated that shit, and the massivley experienced, successful writer got overruled by the less proven editor. You see why I like writer driven projects more, such as your blog post?
The thing is, I don’t think there WAS a lot of good stuff in the era we’re talking about, the very late 80s and early 90s. The mid-to-late 90s, OK, yes. There were some fantastic comics produced during that period. But the early 90s? Like I say, it was pretty much Vertigo, Bone, and a handful of indie books. Actually, Bone was an indie book, so even that is kinda redundant. I guess you could make a case for some of Dark Horse’s spinoff books, but even that is a bit of a stretch.
The early 90s were loaded with systemic problems, particularly the emphasis on speculator-driven comics. That attitude made it actively pointless to produce good comics–everyone’s buying it for the cover anyway, right? Combine that with the rise of truly awful artists like Liefeld and the peak of juvenile shock value and contempt for the fun and whimsy of old comics, and you have not just a lot of lousy comics but a trend AWAY FROM GOOD COMICS.
I agree in some ways with Seavey that the Big Two are making the same old mistakes all over again, but the comics industry has diversified and put an emphasis back on what goes between the covers. You can’t seriously argue that things haven’t gotten better, quality-wise.
By the way, it’s kind of funny to me that when people talk about, say, movies, it’s always a conflict between those rhapsodizing about the golden age (whenever that might be) and condemning the modern era, and people saying “Come on, there was lots of crap back then too, we’ve just filtered it out.” Whereas with this discussion it seems to be the other way around–people talking about how much better comics are now, with the contrarians saying “But there was lots of good stuff back then too!”
“I don’t think there WAS a lot of good stuff in the era we’re talking about, the very late 80s and early 90s.”
Oh, but there was! Admittedly, I came up as a comics fan during this era, so I’m bound to have rosy views of it, sure. Okay, so the early Image stuff was awful, we all know that. But have you gone back and read some of the other stuff? That was one of the best periods for the Batman and Superman lines, giving us definitive runs by Grant and Breyfogle, Milligan and Aparo, Puckett and Parobeck, crazy John Byrne, and all the rest. JLI/A/E by Giffen, DeMatteis, and all their friends! Loebs and Waid on Flash! The lovely, underrated !mpact comics, the early strength of the 2099 line, and so many more.
Sure, there was a “more is more!” philosophy at the time, and the stuff that sold the most tended to be the worst. The X-Men books collapsed under the weight of their own continuity, Spidey fell into a pit it took him a while to climb out of… But, specifically, ’87 or ’88 to around ’92 was filled with excellent, solid comics storytelling, a kind we don’t see anymore in today’s event-driven industry. 1993 was the year things started to sour at the edges, and yeah, like I said, there were bad comics then. But hell, there’s bad comics in any given decade. The speculation bust is what’s tainted our memories, but the comics themselves, a lot of them were good stuff, and the bulk of my– I hate to use the word collection– stockpile of comics.
I love finding esoteric runs everyone’s forgotten. I’m the guy with a complete run of Sleepwalker, the guy that loved Thunderstrike, the guy who liked Ravage 2099! I know, I know. But that shit’s great when you give it half a chance, and better when you’re buying it out of quarter bins.
I guess I should mention that New Warriors was pretty good in the first half of the ’90s, since nobody else has brought it up.
And Spidey 2099 rocked. I’m not saying that comics back then were a vast wasteland, anymore than they are now. I’m just saying that it’s kind of odd that everyone looks back at the 90s and says, “Wow, what the hell were they smoking back then with the Clone Saga?” and then follows it up with “Wow, Wolverine has a teenage female clone. That’s so awesome!”
@Mary Warner:
You are now my most favorite MGK commentator. NW4L!
“Wow, Wolverine has a teenage female clone. That’s so awesome!”
Has anyone actually said this about X-23, like ever? I mean I do think it’s interesting you have a character like Wolverine who is trying to gain some degree of humanity but coming at it from the totally opposite direction (the programed weapon side rather than the animalistic one), but I don’t think I’ve ever found the character to be worth reading about (I’ve never bought her minis or read X-Force.)
Also I’m glad someone else remembers “Deadly Foes of Spider-Man.” That book was kind of a proto-Thunderbolts back in the day.
I like X-23 but it’s not as though the character is in any way inspired in it’s origins. Then again, I like Ben Reilly too.
Also, Warren Ellis is responsible for the cancelation of Nextwave. How bout them apples?
@Dan
“I’d gladly not, because all of that was exactly as 90s as everything else mentioned here, and as the post says the 90s excesses that people snicker about aren’t much different from the excesses of the 00s/10s, maybe swapping some of the more awful art for the modern-day tendency to throw in a rape every couple of dozen issues.”
A) Yes, it was all “as 90s” as in it was published then, but it wasn’t stereotypically 90s, which might have been his meaning.
B) Seriously, run on sentences are bad, mkay?
The major change between the X-TREEEM comics of the ’90s and the comics of today: Writers and editors went from trying way too hard to appeal to readers, to not trying at all. In the ’90s they were pulling out all sorts of gimmicks to lure in readers, from variant covers to “bold” new characters to collector’s editions. Nowadays, they only seem to like writing comics for their own entertainment, bringing back old characters they want to see, disposing of characters just because they don’t like them, and callously dismissing any and all criticism from readers as inconsequential. Today’s comics are essentially crappy fanfics you have to pay to read. As awful as Cloud Mows The Lawn was, at least the price was right.
I wonder if this conversation will happen in another twenty years?
Considering print publishers are playing the role of the band on the Titanic, I doubt it.
John Seavey, thanks for showing us once again that it’s not the concepts that matter, it’s the execution of said concepts.
Also: New Warriors was great for pretty much its entire run (with the exception of the Time&Time Again crossover ’round #50) – Evan Skolnick & Patrick Zircher’s run is probably the most underrated in all of comics. The Sandman was a cool reformed villain and Ben Reilly/the original Scarlet Spider needs to be brought back post-haste, hoodie and all. Make it happen, Marvel!
Ridiculous Brubaker/Cyborg Superman comparisons aside, I sort of agreed with this. And then I was reminded of all the awesome comics from the 90s that people mentioned in the comments section. But I still kind of saw what John was saying. Then I read Bill Reed’s thing above and remembered that there was still plenty of good going on even during the speculator boom. Grant and Breyfogle’s Batman is the tits, for instance. I think writing off an entire decade of comics because a few marquee titles like X-Men and Spider-Man sucked, and because of the junk Image was putting out, is really missing the point. Its not “90s style” comics that suck and are excessive. Its comics published as sales stunts that suck and are excessive.
Personally I got into comics through Image so people can hold my personal taste against me if they wish, but the 90s did hold a number of things that did benefit comics. More competitors stepping up for one – Image, Valiant, Dark Horse (X had some brilliant moments), Malibu. Some of their output was absolutely awful, but some of it wasn’t. Some of it changed the rules.
However, MGK’s point appears to be that the big comic companies are making the same kind of mistakes that they did before. My belief is that they are unable to stop doing it because they need that comic to come out next month and sell well, so whatever appears to be working in one title (e.g. the Death of Superman) is brought across to others (e.g. the End of Batman) and then repeated (e.g. the Time Travelling Adventures of Batman and Captain America, Esq.).
Stories need an end. Comic books can’t end, but instead wait for readers to outgrow them so they can deliver the same stories to a new audience. This hasn’t happened as much with comics over the last 20 – 30 years as the people who were reading them then are often still reading them now. So we end up the kind of schizophrenic state of comics as they are now – not for children because they are too dark and not for adults because they’ve seen it before and how dare the new writers ignore a storyline from 2001.
… I have no real point to conclude on. Just observations.