The Ninteties Sucked

I had intended to write at The Grind and then found myself sucked into the basement at the Darktower Comic Book Store in Lincoln Square, 4612 N Lincoln Ave. They have a great sale going on until the end of the month. Pretty much everything is half off including brand new trade-paperbacks, and their basement formerly filled with dollar comics is now filled with fifty cent comics, giving me the opportunity to fill the holes in my Crystar, Starriors, Sectaurs and M.A.S.K. collections



Ah, 80's toy tie-in comics.

While I was down in the basement for five hours something dawned on me. THE NINETIES SUCKED.

For the uninitiated the history of comics in the nineties was written by some real dopes. There were these five artists at Marvel that caused huge spikes in sales, they demanded some extra money for, you know, making Marvel money and were told to go fuck. So they all left at the same time, telling Marvel to go fuck, and formed Image comics. Which would bring Marvel bankruptcy and mankind Martin Sheen's performance in Spawn.

There way only one teensy problem, beyond drawing they were limited creatively







bordering on sucking. At Marvel the heavy lifting had been done for them, giving them little characters like Wolverine and Spider-Man to draw. They...hadn't thought of that. So they proceeded to create hundreds of the most boring characters



few of them discernable from one another besides weapon choice.



Just big huge things with no personality or backstory, just...names.



They all had different names, and big tits and they all fought, and jumped around a lot, and screamed showing all their teeth.



Spina-Bifida POWER!

And they sold like motherfuckers, it was a huge confidence game that lasted for a couple years as the comics were bought up by overexcited teens who loved big tits and guns in their oooooh spooky dark-themed comics and were too dumb to realize that these comics absolutely BLEW!. They were all five pages of people jumping then a preview of some new guy with a TOTALLY NEW NAME available next month.

And the worst part is, Marvel tried to emulate their model, making some of the least memorable Marvel comics in history, with Image emulating shitty character like Rage



(ooooh) and Darkhawk



and Fuckface and Rapist.



All of them available for fifty cents in the basement of the Dark Tower. Just the worst. I was completely out of comics but got a job at this comic book store in Oxford, which I juggled with my video store job because I was the next Kevin Smith. So I have this weird affinity for this shit era. I buy them for fifty cents and just laugh. As a lifelong fan of shitty movies and shitty comics, I must say, for fifty cents Image made the BEST shitty comics