As you might have gathered, I didn’t allocate a large portion of my comics budget to DC in the ‘90s. I didn’t have an aversion to DC, I liked their main characters just fine and was more than willing to at least sample most of the Batman and Superman events, but there are only so many comics you can expect any fan to buy, let alone an adolescent one on a limited budget. As the ‘90s wore on, I did notice that DC was attracting a lot of attention from the fan press. Not just for the latest crossover event, or stunt relating to crippling a major character or changing his hairstyle, but attention for the actual content of the books. Wizard, which built most of its fanbase on incessantly hyping Marvel, Image, and whichever indie publisher had the most audacious T&A comic that month, even ran in article in 1996 praising DC as the "new house of ideas." Soon, it seemed as if any literate fan of mainstream comics couldn’t stop talking about Aztek, Major Bummer, Xero, Chase, or Chronos.
And yet, all of the praise in the world couldn’t save most of these books from dying after a handful of issues. As a fan looking in on the outside, it seemed as if DC cancelled a lot of books in the ‘90s. Every issue of Wizard would dedicate numerous pages to promoting all of DC’s promising new ideas, while the back-of-the-book solicitations informed us of the final issues of last year’s hot launches. I suppose I shoulder some of the blame. After all, I never bought these books. I bought dozens of X-Factor issues I hated and knew were garbage, but I didn’t give the critical darlings the time of day. So, now, I will dedicate a few weeks of my review schedule to DC’s low-selling yet highly-praised ‘90s output. It’s a meager penance.
(And, if someone out there were to take up my challenge and do index-style reviews of the ‘90s Superman and Batman franchises, I could guarantee you at least one follower...)
8 comments:
Young Heroes in Love is another Wizard-praised title that died a quick death. I was a total DC zombie back then and even I skipped that book.
Sounds Great! I'm really looking forward to this.
Sounds interesting. I liked Major Bummer because it was so tonally different than most books, and like Erik, I'm curious if you'll cover Young Heroes in Love.
I'm most looking forward to seeing your coverage of Aztek. I followed that book at the time and really enjoyed it. It was written by Grant Morrison. It's one of the books that DC has gone back to and is now available in a TPB.
It always seemed to me like the Superman books required an X-Men level investment to read. They all crossed over into each other every week like X-Men and Uncanny did in the late 90s except there were 4 or 5 books. It always seemed sort of overwhelming to me. I have heard good things about them though. It would be interesting to read a recap.
And DC probably published more Batman than Superman titles in the '90s, didn't they? (Although I don't recall the Bat-books having an equivalent of the Triangle numbering of the Superman titles).
Funny that Young Heroes in Love came to mind so quickly...
Yeah the amount of Batman books was insane and that's just counting the books Batman starred in and not ones like Robin. I remember wondering why books like Shadow of the Bat and Legends of the Dark Knight existed (which I later found out contained some good stories). Still, having to read all of the Superman titles to figure out what was going on was the most intimidating. It seemed to work though, for a little while.
LOTDK and Shadow were the only Batman titles I read in the 1990s, because they did have a reason for their existence and they also avoided the majority of the cross-overs.
LOTDK was an anthology title which featured non-continuity tales.
Shadow of the Bat was Alan Grant's own little title. While it wasn't as good as Grant's work on Detective Comics in the 1980s, there were still some good stories.
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