TS: 1990s superhero comics vs. 2000s superhero comics

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Youngblood_01_cover.jpg http://crushingkrisis.com/assets/Avg3-0503.jpg

nobody is going to vote for the 2000s.

*raises hand* much prefer 2000s fustercluckery over the 90s variants, the artwork alone was better, let alone the writing

2000s by a mile.

1990s Marvels/DCs were bad enough to drive me away from comics for 10 years.

90s was when I gave up on superhero comics altogether, 2000s were when Grant Morrison kinda dragged me back - so uh 2000s

I have 8 longboxes of 90s shite still. Titles like Nomad, FFS.

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btw guys if anyone has a complete run of Ghost Rider 2099 I will buy it

I have the first coupla issues, I think. I'll have to check next week when I'm visiting my parents house

on a related note:

Join Kingfish in this survey of his terrible 90s comics!

I missed the 90s, so I only know it through rumor and the back issue bins. I've read quite a bit of Batman from the 90s and a few other things here and there, but I haven't read enough to be able to put a 'best of' list.

I've read enough from 2000-present to be able to give an on answer to a question of what super hero comics I thought was really good.

Grant Morrison- XMen, Batman, Final Crisis, 7 Soldiers, JLA, All Star Superman, 52
Bendis/Maleev- Daredevil
The Secret Six
The Authority- Ellis/Millar
The Punisher- Garth Ennis
Thunderbolts/Dark Avengers - Ellis & Bendis w/Deodato and others
Cable & Deadpool
Planet Hulk
Joe Casey- Godland, Codeflesh & Nixon's Pals
Matt Wagner- Batman and the Mad Monk & Batman and the Monster Men
Paul Pope- Batman Year 100
Mark Millar- The Ultimates, Wolverine: Enemy of the State

Warren Ellis and Paul Dini both did some really cool one shot issues at some point, they are both pretty good at the single issue comic book.

If we say the 80s ended with Death of Superman, then definitely the 2000s were better. But there's lots of stuff from 89-92 that will stick with me forever.

Is no one else going to stick up for the 90s (except James Franco)?. I thought the average age of people who post here might favour the nineties due to nostalgia value. I really don't like the house style of 2000s Marvel and DC comics, even when I can see it's objectively well put together there's just something incredibly depressing about it for me, like they're going out of their way to avoid doing the things superhero comics are good at (there are exceptions of course). I definitely prefer most 90s comics art over the photorealism type stuff that lots of marvel books adopted in the 21stC

i am curious about what you're saying about avoiding what superhero comics are good at - but not quite sure. like maybe in terms of having great single piece, non-continuity stories that anyone can pick up and read; good children's stories as well seem rarer. Like, the kind of stories that would go into "The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told" don't seem to be commissioned much these days

but then i think about the work Bendis did on say, the lead up to Secret Invasion over five years and dozens of issues over twenty different books and I don't think other mediums can really do this kind of thing, even TV. the 2000s are generally a massive improvement over the 90s equivalent

maybe not a fair comparison, but say even a pretty decent event like Batman: No Man's Land vs. the insanity of Batman R.I.P./Final Crisis/Return of Bruce Wayne

I guess was thinking in terms of stuff like concision and short hand when I said what superhero comics are good at, but obv everyone has their own idea of 'what superhero comics are good at', I don't want to come across like I'm insisting my taste is the one way superhero comics should be.
I stopped reading new comics regularly around 2000 and read some Bendis Avengers stuff about 2006 or something and the shift in tone felt like a big shock, particularly the 'naturalistic' dialogue and this general feeling of enforced seriousness.
No Man's Land was one of the last things I read before cutting back around 2000, I guess I associate it more with the 90s than the 2000s. Most of the people who were working on the bat books at that point were still people who'd been there for most of the last decade like Doug Moench and Alan Grant, right? I associate it more with the 90s era.

Oh wait sorry No Man's Land was 99, you were using that as an example of 90s comics compared to Batman R.I.P./Final Crisis/Return of Bruce Wayne, sorry.

I read some of the Spider-man clone saga stuff recently for the first time since I was about 13 or something, and I really love the melodramatic tone of the whole thing, I feel if they did something like that now it would be more tasteful but also more boring. But nostalgia may be playing a part here.

I gave up on mainstream comics about a year into the Image revolution and returned circa 2006. I see the 90s as the reason I stopped reading cape stories and the 00s as the reason I returned. If Annihilation wasn't the first thing I got into when returning I'd probably think less of the oughts than I do. That was Bronze Era storytelling excellence.

Not a fan of the Bendis Avengers much at all. But I liked his Daredevil.

I think that older style super hero comic is out there, but it often gets off when they try and mix in the modern gore and over serious story lines. Even doing that older style comic with gore is pretty popular as Robert Kirkman and Geoff Johns have kind of rode it to the bank (even if they are hit and miss as writers).

Cable and Deadpool was a pretty classic Marvel comic with humor and all sorts of thrill power type action. Kurt Busiek, Dwayne McDuffy, Mark Waid, Christopher Priest and other vet writers do some of those type comics. It's the same with the bronze writers in that some of their stuff is pretty good and some of it not as good.

Some of these guys best stuff kind of splits across the 90s-00s like Astro City or say Priest's Black Panther are also pretty good reads.

astro city was awesome but definitely an outlier with respect to 90s comics

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by "merit badges", is he referring to POGs?

Is no one else going to stick up for the 90s (except James Franco)?. I thought the average age of people who post here might favour the nineties due to nostalgia value.

I think the nineties were when a lot of us got into comics and then subsequently got out. I was drawn in by the X-Men cartoon, got into some '92, '93 era stuff, and clung to a couple of contemporary titles while digging into the 80s back issues which I liked a loooooot better. At some point I looked around and everything had gotten pretty stupid. I still rep for some of the big, stupid 90s things, especially early in the decade (Return of Superman is awesome comics fun, "slammin" indeed) but if you want well-executed, coherently-plotted SUPERHERO EPICS and AMAZING PLOT TWISTS and OHHHHHHHH SNAP THAT GUY IS *BACK* moments, the 2000s were almost systematically calculated to deliver.

Also the art (at least on the first- and second-string books) was by and large wayyyyyy better, a few hacks like Greg Land aside. The worst comics from either decade are probably equally bad, but picking a random book off the rack in this era was way more likely to give you something at least readable than in the mid-90s.

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My superhero comics experience is informed by Marvel of the 70s/80s. Dipped out completely until the mid-2000s. When I tried to play catch-up, I found I liked the 90s stuff the least. People kept recommending me Age of Apocalypse. Couldn't deal with that at all. What is an awesome Marvel arc from the 90s for people who hate Age of Apocalypse?

"What is an awesome Marvel arc from the 90s for people who hate Age of Apocalypse?"

Busiek & Perez's Avengers is pretty much classic Marvel comics. So is Starlin's first couple of 90s Thanos stories leading up to Infinity Gauntlet. Of course that is guys that were making good comics in the 70s and 80s too. Haven't read them all yet, but what I have is pretty good.

These are some that I have read that are supposed to be pretty good that I haven't read.

Busiek/Mark Bagley on Thunderbolts
Mark Waid/Andy Kubert on Captain America & Kazar
John Ostrander on Heroes for Hire
John Byrne on Namor
DeFalco/Frenz on Thor

I would recommend Peter David and Larry Stroman's run on X-Factor v highly if you haven't read it.

Also Ann Nocenti's Venom: The Madness and Nightmare mini-series, though I don't know how easy it is to find those at the moment.

I liked the first year or two of Lobdell & Bachalo's Generation X but I was an X-fan and I'm not sure how well it holds up now. Probably the least terrible X-thing from that period. At least the art's better. But I include in that its portion of the Age of Apocalypse, the refreshingly bleak and grotesque "Generation Next."

It was one of the least horrible Lobdell things. I know DJP liked some aspects of the Lobdell/Bachalo X-Men years but I find them pretty cringeworthy.

I always see a lot of people on the web who say they gave up superhero comics in the 90s and were drawn back in the 2000s, but sales of these things things have been on a pretty unchanging downward slope since the mid 90s, right? Is the number of people who came back to comics, and would post about it on the internet, just dwarfed by the number of casual news-stand readers they lost?

Or is it that the people who came back were only a minority of those who left in the 90s, and the people who didn't come back aren't discussing comics on the internet so I don't hear from them?

A mix of both. The boom and bust in the 90s took out speculators and any remaining newsstands/casuals. The more the direct market became the only market the creepier comics became to those outside looking in. Wizard has a lot to answer for.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

In hindsight, it's just weird they ever got as popular as they were, so far from their earlier heydays and with growing pocket-money competition from things like video games. I wonder if it was a demographic bubble of some kind, or a double-bubble that lent itself to a decently large Generation X readership (that consumed X-Men and Teen Titans and DKR and so on in the 80s) handing off the hobby to a much bigger readership of their kid siblings born in the late 70s and early 80s. But that might just be me-centric analysis.

I think the comic reading audience is way older now than when I was into the hobby back in the 80s. I think people 'get into' comics more in high school or college now than really picking up the habit when they were 10 or 12 or younger.

The second thing about comics that is harder to gauge is really the monthly sales what the total audience is these days? I think it harder to gauge on some titles popularity as people get into reading series more often as back issue in trade paperbacks or online.

http://gabebridwell.com/index.php/2011/09/07/robert-kirkman-and-the-walking-dead-sales/

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

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Also, Walking Dead trades sell insane numbers in bookstores, moreso than any Marvel/DC trades. At least, according to the local comic shop owner.