Considering how forcefully comics have driven the pop
culture of the twenty-first century, it is kind of amazing to review the state
of the industry at the very end of the twentieth. Comics companies were stuck
in a rut, catering to collectors rather than readers with cheesy “limited
edition” stunts or pandering to audience’s basest instincts with brutal vigilante
violence and bra-bursting sexism. Cinematic adaptations of The Phantom, Judge Dredd,
Barb Wire, The Shadow, and Steel
were sucking wind at the box office while The
Flash could barely complete a single season on TV. Marvel, the company that
practically holds a monopoly over the Hollywood of today, filed chapter 11.
Comics sales as a whole slumped.
However, the nineties was also the decade when comics buying
went totally mainstream as the tale of Superman’s (extremely temporary) demise flew
off shelves and his romance with Lois Lane (by way of Teri Htacher) lit up
small screens. It was when Batman did more than very well in theaters and shook
up the state of TV cartoons with his Animated
Series. It was the decade that saw the debuts of such innovations as The Maxx, The Tick, Hellboy, the
artist-owned Image Comics, and the racially diverse Milestone Comics.
In the latest installment of TwoMorrows Publishing’s comics
history overviews, Jason Sacks and Keith Dallas survey that topsy-turvy
landscape of the nineties. While too many comics storyline summaries trip up
the narrative, the fascinatingly troubled tale of the comics industry in the
nineties still manages to come together in American
Comic Book Chronicles: The 1990s. Sacks and Dallas not only cover the major
companies and upstarts but also get deep enough into underground titles to
forge a pretty complete portrait of a complex decade. And if you find yourself
zoning out while reading those plot summaries that never seem to stick to the
consciousness, you can just shift your eyes over an inch or two, because there
is always some fabulous piece of full-color art to re-focus on.
