A common stereotype of superhero fans is that they love the comics they read as children. Apparently, superhero comics were so much better during the Golden/Silver/Bronze/Iron/Tin Age. But rosy nostalgia is difficult if you grew up reading superhero comics in the 1990’s. With a tiny number of exceptions, those comics were terrible. That’s not meant as a defense of the current crop of superhero comics, which are generally unreadable. But the comics I read as a kid weren’t much better. In fact, many of the problems in the 2012 superhero market – amateurish art, continuity porn, title crossovers designed to push you into buying a dozen extra comics – were firmly in place by the mid-90’s. And yet I was buying this crap.
I’ve mentioned before that I was an X-Men fan. And out of all superhero fandom, X-Men fans were the biggest suckers. Marvel editors figured out that we cared so much about our spandex soap opera that we’d be willing to buy not just one, or even four, but upwards of six or more titles each month. In any given month, I was buying X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, X-Force, X-Factor, Excalibur, Cable, X-Man, Wolverine, and probably around 2-3 mini-series. I was even willing to shop outside the X-Men ghetto if a crossover required it. Crossover with Ghost Rider? Sure, I’ll buy that. Avengers? Not a fan, but I would get it. I was even willing to buy Fantastic Four if necessary (and if you want to experience superhero comics at their nadir, read some FF in the 90’s).
So I was part of the target audience for the “Onslaught Saga,” the big crossover of 1996. For those of you who had social lives that year, Onslaught was a psychic energy being inadvertently created by Prof. Xavier after he psychically lobotomized his arch-enemy, Magneto. They had some weird mind-meld, and their bastard offspring was out to conquer the world, enslave humanity, etc., etc.
Onslaught was not much of a character, being one-dimensional and completely devoid of personality. But he wasn’t even much of a plot device, because the Onslaught Saga barely had anything resembling a plot. Instead, it meandered from one irrelevant beat to another before finally lurching to a “climax.” More accurately, Onslaught should be described as a corporate re-tooling device: most of the Marvel titles that weren’t part of the X-Men line were selling so badly that Marvel decided to reboot most of the characters and hand creative control over to the big names of the decade, like Rob Liefeld.
Eat gooch and die, Japo-Nazi!
Onslaught existed for only one purpose: to “kill” all the heroes (excepting the X-Men) so they could be reborn in another universe. In other words, the point of the Onslaught Saga was not to tell a story but to restart a few brands. I had purchased plenty of bad crossovers before the Onslaught Saga, and I had seen plenty of transparent attempts to reboot an unpopular superhero. But the Onslaught Saga actually offended me in a way that’s hard to describe. Maybe it’s because the X-Men franchise was hi-jacked to reboot another group of heroes, characters that I had never cared about and would never care about. Or maybe I was offended by the blatantly transparent “corporateness” of it all.
Technically, this roundtable is supposed to be about the worst comic I ever read, not the worst crossover. It’s hard to pick a single “worst” comic in the Onslaught storyline, because all of them were rubbish. But if I had to pick, I’d go with Uncanny X-Men #336. It isn’t the worst on most “technical” levels. Scott Lobdell’s script is about as passable as one could be for a comic of this nature. And Joe Madureira’s art doesn’t make me want to poke out my eyes most of the time, though there are plenty of shitty panels.
I’m not even sure where to begin: the lazy use of coloring instead of drawing a background, the balloon boobs, or the fact that her hands are turning into rocks.
But what makes this the “worst” comic was that this particular issue was the moment when I stopped caring about the X-Men. I know this because it’s the last issue of Uncanny X-Men in my collection (I read the Grant Morrison comics years later, but I downloaded those). It’s hard to look back and remember what was passing through my mind, but at some point I decided that I was getting nothing out of this hobby: no laughs, no excitement, not even the fannish pleasure of seeing certain couples hook up. I just wasn’t interested. When I quit X-Men, I actually stopped reading all comics for the most part, and it wasn’t until several years later that a college friend introduced me to comics for older readers.
My decision to quit X-Men comics was at least partially dictated by other developments in my life. Around the same time I gave up comics I also got my first car and I was starting to notice girls. I was spending more time with my circle of friends and less time reading the funny books. And none of my friends were into comics, so there was no one to reinforce my bad habit. And back then the Internet was only partially developed – and dial-up connections SUCKED – so there were few opportunities to participate in comic blogs or web forums. So, despite being an X-Men fan for years, it proved surprisingly easy to quit.
In a way, I supposed I should be grateful to the writers of the Onslaught Saga. Had they actually put together a halfway decent story, I might of continued reading superhero comics indefinitely. And instead of blogging about the worst comic I ever read, I’d be writing a panegyric for Geoff Johns.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.
Oh God, the nineties superhero books blew week-old donkey cadavers for sure.
1990s Mainstream Editor Strawman: “Nice portfolio, kid, but if you can’t ape McFarlane, Keith and Larsen all in one panel, there’s no work for you here. How are your gold-foiling skills?”
Gold-foiling is so 1992. The new cool is holographic trading cards.
Oh man, I was really into the X-Men at this time, and I devoured Onslaught. I remember being kind of disappointed by the finale, but I was too dumb to realize it was all just a corporate reshuffling of characters and plots. Wow, that really was some awful stuff.
Amusingly, the practice of using a big crossover to shove pieces into place for company-wide initiatives is still in practice today, with the most recent example being Flashpoint (Geoff Johns again!), which was used to arbitrarily reboot the DC universe. I’ve long since stopped caring about that nonsense, but that one seemed especially bizarre, almost designed to alienate whatever hardcore fans they had left, in hopes of drawing in a new audience, but not actually doing anything new or interesting enough to deserve attention from anybody outside of their regular audience. God, superhero comics suck.
My waterloo with this stuff was DC’s Millenium crossover. I think I actually tried to get all the crossovers…. Holy god was that a piece of shit.
Hey, I liked Millenium! But mostly because I was rooting for the villains– No man escapes the Manhunters! Too cool for school!
Matt, being bilked into buying Onslaught… It makes sense why you hate superhero comics so much now. There’s your secret origin.
The fact that I got into them during the late 90s/early 2000s probably explains why I still like them. However, anybody starting right now will probably come to hate them. DC is cultivating a new bunch of Matt Bradys with the New 52.
Noah, could Millenium be the first crossover that could have the common defense of “It’s crap but some of the tie-ins are good!” applied to it? The Suicide Squad issue was good at least.
I never read any DC books in the 90s except for the big events that suckered everyone in, like Death of Superman and Knightfall.
I learned about Millenium off the Internet and it did indeed look dreadful. Though in comparison to some of the crossover that came later…
Hey Matthew, when did you reach your “moment of clarity?” Maybe we should set up a support group for recovering superhero addicts.
Well, another thing about Millenium I liked was the Joe Staton artwork. A last bastion of cartooniness in the clenched-jawed wasteland of ‘rivet artists’.
I didn’t have a moment of clarity. I was really into Spider-Man and X-Men (not that I bought every title or even every issue of my favorite titles) up until around summer 1992. That summer I took a 6-week road-trip from New Jersey to Seattle (2 weeks each way) with my grandparents and stopped at every comic store along the way. I had a $120 budget and I spent probably half of it on comics and half on nature field guides. Bought tons of titles I’d never heard of before. By the end of that trip I was into Spawn (looking back on it not the best thing I read that summer by a long shot) and no longer cared about Marvel or DC. I continued to collect Spawn (and the Max) for about 15-20 issues but after less than 2 years realized they were just piling up and not being read. Then a while later I got into manga, and after that some older friends of mine lent me some of the stuff I’d missed in the 80s – Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Ed the Happy Clown.
I don’t know if I ever had a Road to Damascus moment with superhero comics; I read them throughout my teenage years, mostly following X-Men and Spider-Man (the Clone Saga would be my breaking point there; I enjoyed it at the beginning, but it went on for so long that I mostly quit reading Spidey by the time it was over). I remember reading X-Men up through a story called The Twelve, which was supposed to be a big culmination of some long-running prophecy or something, but it was very unsatisfying, and I didn’t read much after that. Really, I mostly just drifted away from comics when I went to college, although I still read some here and there. But when I came back a few years later, I had lost interest in the big events, or keeping track of the ongoing story of the various characters, and mostly just followed creators that I liked. That’s pretty much what I do now, but even the people I like don’t really do any superhero comics that interest me, so I almost completely ignore the genre. That’s certainly a boring description of reading habits, but I suppose it fits the subject matter.
I’ve never read The Twelve, but I’ve heard from a number of comics fans that it was the nadir of 90’s X-Men.
I think drifting away is probably the more common reason that people give up comics (which could be applied to any hobby, really).
Hey ave. My brother gave up DC/Marvel to read only WildCATS for awhile. Then he gave up comics altogether soon thereafter. Those were some shitty comics, even by 90’s standards.
Heh. The thread is turning into a support group. “Hi, I’m Noah, and I used to read superhero comics…”
I thank the gods that my own waterloo came shortly before the 90s qua 90s began — when Chris Claremont was unceremoniously booted off X-Men. Unfortunately, part of the reason I wasn’t into the whole 90s Image and Image-style thing is that my tastes in art were very conservative — my Platonic ideal of how comics should look was John Buscema being inked by Tom Palmer.
There’s an interesting post to be written on how superhero comics incorporate extra-diegetic phenomena into their diegesis, especially to motivate reboots and retcons. It’s a technique I associate most with DC — Crisis on Infinite Earths being the ne plus ultra, although it goes back at least to “Flash of Two Worlds” — but it seems from this post like Marvel has done it too.
Amen to all the points in the article. So I guess teenage me wasn’t the only one who thought ’90s comics sucked. Oh, the bitter anti-nostalgia. Does anyone remember “Atlantis Attacks”? That was my first recollection of when superhero comics started to develop a big chink in the armor. My memory of getting through those is somewhere along the lines of having to get through math homework.
Wow this brings me back. I actually cashed out right before Onslaught… I grew up reading my older brother’s comic collection and then in middle school started with contemporary stuff (This would’ve been early 90’s). I stopped reading them precisely because all the alternate dimensions, realities and time traveling made the books unreadably complicated, incoherent and dense. Really, the ultimate problem was that it made the comics boring. I gave up around the time Bishop showed up and revealed that in the future Gambit was going to betray the X-Men and didn’t start reading comics again until after college when I read Palestine and Watchmen in the same month right as we were leading up to the Iraq war.
“Unfortunately, part of the reason I wasn’t into the whole 90s Image and Image-style thing is that my tastes in art were very conservative — my Platonic ideal of how comics should look was John Buscema being inked by Tom Palmer.” – Jones
I was never really a fan of the Image comics’ artwork. To the extent that I noticed style back then I was more of a fan of Sal Buscema’s Spectacular Spider-Man than McFarlane’s Spider-Man. I think it was the sex, violence and slightly exotic cosmology of the Image stuff that won me over. (Or the Image stuff that I latched onto anyway – I didn’t really follow any of their straight superhero titles). I only started caring about style a couple years later when I discovered Katsuhiro Otomo; I went to superhero comics for the _content_ . :(
“I went to superhero comics for the _content_ . :(”
Me too.
But the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem….
Jones – I’m fairly certain Tim O’Neil has written the post you’re talking about. Can’t find it on his blog, unfortunately.
isaac – the sad thing is I still have a little pang of nostalgia when I see Bishop. I started reading X-Men around the time he showed up.
I’ve also never experienced that euphoric moment that I just wasn’t into superhero comics anymore, it was much more gradual. One year I started saving up for a trip to Japan, so that meant cutting my comic reading down quite a bit, and had to choose which comics where on my cutting block; Yotsuba&! or X-Force? Scalped or Robin? I dropped the Marvel and DC books on the assumption that I could pick them back up at any time, and catch up with the collections. That never happened. One or two months after I stopped reading Marvel and DC comics, I stopped thinking “Dang, I’m missing the latest issue.” Another month or two of keeping up with all of the news on CBR and Newsarama, I started scoffing at the interviews and press releases; “Really? They’re doing THAT?” I realized that I never really cared about the characters; I’d just blaze through the 20 pages of comics, get to the end, see the cliff-hanger and think, “what happens next?” It was my compulsive need to see what happens next that kept me coming back, hoping to see the end of the story of these characters whose stories are NEVER GOING TO END. And while the Marvel and DC comics get put into a longbox and never to be looked at again, I’m picking up Akira or Hellboy off the shelf again for the 5th or 6th time. Part of me misses joining in the hype for the characters and events, but I remember, if I want to join in, I’d have to read them. Then I decide to read the new Jodorowsky comic that Humanoids released.