Comic Book Talk
I agree with most of these. I got sucked into the variant cover craze with foil and holograms
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The 90s often gets a bad rap for comic books, even though there were some classic comic books launched during that time period. Marvel got a refresh the company desperately needed, while DC learned to adapt to a world that asked for darker heroes without actually making most of their heroes any darker.
But the reputation the 1990s have for comic books is still somewhat warranted. There are elements from that era of comics that made things worse as a whole, like the comic book collapse thanks to the speculator boom. Fortunately, many of those tropes are gone, and hopefully stand no chance of making any kind of return to modern comic books.
Every Important Comic Had A Gimmick Cover
Publishers in the 90s did everything to generate interest in comics... besides making people actually want to read the comics. That's not to say the books were bad, just that the marketing didn't focus on how good the stories were. Instead, everything was a
#1 or a Collector's Item.
Many of those comics had kind of fancy cover gimmick, so people knew just how "important" a comic was without even opening it up. These days there's a ton of variant covers, so this didn't entirely go away, but getting rid of those ugly Chromium covers was for the best. Especially considering marketing like this was a large part of how the industry collapsed.
90s Characters Were Obsessed With Guns And Knives
Throughout much of comic book history, guns were rarely seen as something that made anything better. But with The Punisher's increasing popularity and a growing gun culture in America, suddenly the comics had to deal with a ton of characters built around weapons.
Gone were the creative weapons and devices characters used in place of guns. As things like the Comics Code Authority eased up, the combat creativity in comics felt like it vanished in favor of weapons people could easily find in real life............
The 90s Had Edgy Names That Sound Ridiculous Now
Superman and Batman aren't the most original names for characters, but they still sound iconic compared to the many character's names from the 90s. Everything had some variation of "gun," "blade," "war," "blood," or some other violent verb or noun. The vast amount of characters using this trope made the whole concept feel repetitive and unoriginal.
The initial idea was to convey how tough these characters were, which made sense at the time. Thirty years later, it's hard not to think of these characters as generic, with little helping them stand out from one another. As plain as the name "Iron Man" is,
Tony Stark isn't a copy of anyone else, he's the one people copy.............
Everyone Wore Armor Instead Of Their Normal Costumes
In the same vein as everyone thinking guns were the best weapons, in the 90s everyone needed to wear armor. Batman's replacement Jean Paul Valley decided the Batman suit wasn't good enough for him and replaced it with a menacing suit of armor. Several other characters followed suit and suddenly found their way into wearing armor even when they didn't need it.
The worst of these had to be
Catwoman, who wore a special suit of armor for two issues to help her deal with a technologically advanced enemy who hated her. Even though it was short-lived, the armor took away from what made Catwoman unique just to fill a popular request from the era..............
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