And Now For Marvel: Good Comics of the 90s Round III

(For those of you who haven't been keeping up with my recent on-line activity, this is the third in a series of posts looking back on the comics of the 1990's. Part One focused on the era's independent, alternative and self-published comics, while the second installment turned its eye on DC's 90's output. And now, at last, the time has come to look at Marvel Comics in the Clinton Decade)

The notion that the 90's was the "worst decade EVER" for comics is, sadly, pretty much true in Marvel's case. I really had to strain my brain to come up with the meager offerings listed here.  No other publisher, other than Image, of course, embraced the flashy, exaggerated, over-rendered "Image Style" that was inexplicably "hot" at the time as wholeheartedly as Marvel did.   Though it would be inaccurate to accuse Marvel of jumping on the Image bandwagon, as it is highly likely they would have trod that dark path had Image never existed, since they were headed that way anyways.  You must remember that the founders of Image all made their names and developed their trademark styles while toiling at Marvel, and probably would have stayed there if Marvel had been willing to pay them what they felt they were worth.  After all, despite all the high minded statements bandied about back around 1992, the so-called "Image Revolution" was not about artistic freedom or creator's rights, but about money.  Which is not to say that's a bad thing; comics is, after all, a business. But let's call a spade a spade, shall we?

Anyway, out of a decade of mostly dreck, I've come up with a pitifully short list of Marvel comics of the 90's actually worth reading.

Top 5 Super-Hero Movies or TV Shows NOT Based On Comics

As you can see in recent posts, I've gotten on a list-making kick, and my post comparing the 90s Electric Superman to Steven Spielberg's Freakazoid inspired the following round up of five of the best super-hero sagas of movies and television that are not adaptations of comics.  

For a moment, I considered putting Batman Beyond on this list, since Terry McGinniss is an original creation for TV, but, in the end, he's still calling himself Batman and Bruce Wayne is still hanging around. Heck, if I were gonna include Batman Beyond I might as well throw in the Lou Ferigno The Incredible Hulk series, since it shared little other than a title with the comics that were supposed to have inspired it.
Also, although I've heard good things about it, and enjoyed other films by Sam  Raimi, especially the first two Spider-Man films and the Evil Dead series, I've never actually seen Darkman, so that's why it didn't make the list.

Anyway, the list I finally settled on follows the jump.  Please feel free to share your thoughts on this list, as well as any additions or substitutions you might have made.

Freakazoid Supes

Going back one more time to that list of 10 Worst 90s Character Revamps that provided the spark for my recent focus on the comics of that decade, you'll notice that at No. 5 is Superman during the brief, but not brief enough, period when they completely changed his powers and costume.  I was reminded that I used to refer to this version of the character as the "Freakazoid Superman", after the Steven Spielberg produced Warner Brothers TV cartoon of a couple of years earlier.  These two images should illustrate why:

Hilarious as Electric Supes was,however, Freakazoid! was, of course, much funnier. Not to mention a better super-hero story, as well.

90's Comics Part II: DC

Here we go with the second installment of my look back at some of the highlights of the final decade of the twentieth century in the world of funny books. As I explained in my last post, the whole thing began when I e-mailed some friends of mine a link to a list of Worst 90's Character Revamps which featured such gems as Azbats, Electric Blue Superman, Zombie Punisher and Alien Shapeshifting Guy Gardner.  (Personally, I would have found a spot on the list for Heroes Reborn, especially Rob Liefeld's execrable Captain America relaunch.)  This led to responses labeling the 90s  "...the worst decade EVER..." for comics and "..sad."  As the guy who initiated this round of 90s bashing, I felt that it was thus my duty to point out that were actually some good comics published during that decade, and I compiled a list of over fifty titles.  In the first part of this post, I covered the independent, self-published and small press books of the era, and today I turn my attention to the "big two," DC and Marvel. 

Actually, since there are so many DC books I want to talk about, I'm going to concentrate on those today and come back later with a, sadly, much shorter post on Marvel in the 90's.

Not All Bad: A Defense of 90's Comics

It started when I stumbled upon this list of The 10 Worst 90s Comic Character Revamps on-line and shared it via e-mail with fellow members of the Sunday Comix group, eliciting the following response:
"There is no doubt the 90s were the worst decade for comics ever. Ever. Even worse than the 80s."
That was followed by:
"At least the 80s are funny. The 90s just seem sad."

At that point, having initiated this, I felt it therefore incumbent upon me to  rise to the defense of the comics of the Clinton decade.  Sure, it was the heyday of Liefeld and McFarlane and their various imitators, the era of multiple chromium/3-D/die-cut/holographic/lenticular/trading card cover gimmicks,  a time when a plethora of "new universes"--the Ultraverse, Comics Greatest World, the Kirbyverse, Impact, and many others--sprung up overnight and disappeared just as quickly, the time when it seemed like any new character created had, as if by some unwrittten law, to include the words "blood", "kill" or "death" or some combination of thereof in his name, and the era of the "speculation boom" that at first  caused sales to skyrocket then threatened to destroy the industry.
It was also, however, if you look very closely, an era that produced some pretty good comics, and I set out to make a list of the highlights of the decade that, with a little help from Sunday Comix member Jonathon Riddle, who compiled his own list that included a couple of things I'd overlooked or forgotten, eventually grew to over fifty items.
Some of the highlights of that list follow the jump....

Off-Target: "Human Target" Take 2

When I first saw The Human Target in the back of The Brave and the Bold #143 ("The Cat and the Canary Contract" by Len Wein and Dick Giordano), I thought the character was pretty cool and that the concept would make a great TV series. It seems that I'm not the only one struck by that thought, as last month a new Human Target series debuted on Fox.  This is the second attempt to bring Christopher Chance to the small screen.  The first version aired briefly on ABC back in 1992 and starred Rick Springfield. (Yep, the guy who sang "Jesse's Girl," which I still maintain is one of the worst songs ever, despite being perhaps the only hit song ever to include the word "moot". Odd casting, perhaps, but nowhere near as bad as the Hoff playing Nick Fury.) Human Target v2 stars Mark Valley in the title role backed up by Chi McBride and Jackie Earle Haley.  McBride and Haley are always good no matter what they're in, and the show is probably worth checking out at least once just for them.

Now, don't get me wrong, Human Target is actually a pretty good show. It's an exciting action/adventure series of the type that we don't really see that much of any more.  It kind of feels like a throwback to the PI shows of the 70s and 80s, such as The Rockford Files or Magnum, PI. What it isn't, however, is The Human Target.
The problem is not that the Human Target concept doesn't translate to TV, it's that the producers didn't even try. The basic idea of the character, as created by Len Wein and Dick Giordano and first appearing in Action Comics #419, is that if someone is trying to kill you, you hire Christopher Chance, a master of disguise who will in effect "become" you, disguising himself as you and taking your place until he catches the killer, or, as the cover of B&B #143 proclaims, "If you're marked for murder, he'll replace you on the bullseye". In the new version, however, Chance merely goes undercover as someone close to the intended victim; no longer a "human target," but simply a bodyguard, which makes the series a lot less interesting than it could and should have been.
Well, I guess I can always hope that this show tanks and someone tries again in another eighteen years.

Oh, How the Times Have Changed: Superman #326

I just finished re-reading Superman #326 in preparation for the writing of this post, but I really didn't have to.  I've read that story so many times over the past thirty-two years that I practically have it memorized.   Marty Pasko is one of my favorite writers of the Bronze Age, mainly because of his Superman stories, and #326 is one of the issues that won him that place in my heart.

The story is entitled "A Million Dollars A Minute," and deals with Superman being mind controlled by a mad scientist working for UBS, the chief rival of GBS, the TV network where Clark Kent anchored the Evening News at the time, into signing a contract in which he promises to reveal his secret identity to the world on UBS.  Now, the way Supes, big blue Boy Scout that he is, sees it, a contract is a contract, whether you were mind zapped by mad scientist or not, so the bulk of the story deals with Superman's efforts to not only foil the bad guys, but protect his secret identity as well while keeping his reputation for integrity intact.  It strikes me as somewhat ironic that while the Man of Steel goes to such great lengths to keep the public at large from learning his secret, that same issue features a sub-plot, setting up the following month's showdown with Kobra, in which the Deadliest Man Alive quite inadvertently discovers that secret when he traces an alien weapon stolen from him by SKULL agents to Clark Kents apartment, and finds, just hanging there alongside his legion of identical blue suits, a spare Superman uniform.

Anyway, the title of the story, "A Million Dollars A Minute," refers to the rate UBS charged advertisers for commercial time on the broadcast where Superman was to reveal his identity.  That "...unprecedented rate..." was, as the hypnotized Superman states on the splash page, "...the highest price ever..."

Seems kind of quaint, doesn't it?

It's probably obvious by now why I was thinking of and chose to write about this particular comic today, of all days.  After all, it is, as you may have heard, Super Bowl Sunday, and tomorrow morning, as is the case every year, there will most likely be more talk about the commercials that aired during the broadcast of the game than about the game itself, and while a million bucks might have been an unheard of sum for a minute of airtime back in 1978 when Superman #326 hit the newstands, tonight's advertisers will have shelled out two and half times that amount for a mere thirty seconds.