My friends, my dear friends. Mr. Colt Hoskins is a good man and makes awesome things like The Immortal Iron Fist with a beautiful growth of facial hair on his upper lip. Check it out:
And in case you’re wondering, he can channel his chi through the mustache.
…Ladies?
Many people aren’t willing to admit it, but we all have that Frosted Mini Wheat aspect to our identities, the yin and the yang, Jekyll and Hyde and so forth. I’m actually pretty in touch with this part of myself. I have a sort of David vs. Wolkin thing going on. I think of my David side as the thoughtful, intelligent, critical thinker, and Wolkin? Well, he’s the guy who thinks Steven Seagal is really awesome, without a hint of irony.
The only thing they agree on is Keith David, which is the only thing that everyone agrees on.
Now that you have the context, it is with great excitement that I present to you a new feature entitled “Wolkin/CounterWolkin,” in which David and Wolkin will engage in dialogue with one another about the latest comics!!!
Here was my thought process when I discovered that Thunderbolt Ross was the Red Hulk:
Do you want to know the answer to number four? Tell me you want to know. Say it. SAY IT.
…ok, that’s acceptable. Calm down. Here it is!
This delightful image was illustrated by one William “Colt” Hoskins, and I am delighted to announce that he will be dining on Chicken, Waffles and Comics at least once a week or so as a residential superhero mustache artist!!! Here are some more numbered details, because I like lists:
I love you. Yes, you. I can’t speak for Colt.
Okay, yeah. They kinda were. I totally accept that. You had the speculation thing, the boom and the bust, the chromium cover whizbang nonsense. I can’t deny any of that.
But it’s also when I really fell in love with comics, like so many of us. I recognize that my young self lacked the critical capacity to distinguish good comics from bad comics at the time. I was so excited about everything that the quality of a comic often had no bearing on my reading experience.
Also, I like shiny things. I fell for every single one of those covers. You can judge me. I don’t care. I know that you do things when nobody’s looking and you are very, very ashamed of them. I’m just guilty of liking comics with HOLOGRAMS on the cover when I was a CHILD.
So comics are pretty great today and they’re getting better, and everybody talks about how much the 90′s sucked for comics. I understand that they certainly weren’t a good time for comics, but without that downward dip, the industry probably wouldn’t have challenged itself to become what it is today (I am probably wrong about this, and I have no evidence to back it up, but I said it anyways and it’s not really the point of what I’m getting at here).
What I’m trying to say here is that it’s time to stop crapping on my childhood.
That’s why I’m going to dedicate some time to reminding myself of some of the gems of this era, at least in terms of my experience as a reader. We all know that Morrison and Porter’s JLA run was awesome. Preacher was great, of course. But what about the first three issues of Ghost Rider 2099? Have you read those? It’s non-stop cyberpunk hoverbike hacker revenge fantasy and it’s fantastic.
This isn’t about nostalgia for me, for the most part. It’s about reexamining comics that I read during an era that folks claim was detrimental to the medium and discovering the stuff that holds up for me. And it’s not always about checking out an entire work; I can promise you that I’ll go on about Guy Gardner: Warrior at some point and that was far from a perfect comic, but there are elements of it that would still be considered creative by today’s standards.
Anyways, let’s get to the show.
You could argue that The Death of Superman was one of those events that typified the early 90′s, sending a million non-fans running to the stores to get a “very special” issue of a comic that went way up in price and then went way back down. Did it draw in a lot of committed new readers? Who the hell knows. I read all of it years after the fact and I didn’t mind it.
What really grabbed me, though, was everything that followed, and I’ll tell you why. Not for all of the story itself, per se, but because of where it led us. It gave us three enduring characters in Superboy, Steel and Cyborg Superman (I know the Cyborg was introduced earlier, but there’s no arguing that this is where he came to real prominence). And the climax of this story is still one of the more gut-wrenching superhero stories I’ve read, the Destruction of Coast City.
I’ve always thought about how much of the DC Universe is driven by this event. Hal Jordan is driven insane, turns into Parallax, destroys the Green Lantern Corps, attempts to start the universe over again in Zero Hour, destroys the old JSA, David then Jack Knight becomes Starman, and so on.
This was a crime that was simply massive in scale and it’s impact was felt deeply throughout the DCU. Other writers have destroyed entire cities, even countries, but it’s never had the same kind of impact…this is a weird thing to write about. I’m comparing the emotional effect of fictional destructions of cities and countries. I feel weird.
Never mind.
I decided to start with this event mostly because of the image that I’m about to paste below. I could keep going on about the story, but then I could say that the 90′s can be redeemed with brilliant two-page spreads like this one, from Superman #80, by Dan Jurgens and Brett Breeding:
You ever pick up one of those coffee table books with photographs of atomic explosions? The idea of “beautiful destruction” and such? I can’t look at those books without becoming completely terrified, but there’s no denying the power of those images.
This spread is like that, and it’s some Neo-Tokyo level explosion stuff right here. One of the most traumatic events in the DCU and Jurgens/Breeding nailed it. It’s not real, it never happened, it’s not going to happen, but it still scares me like that coffee table book. That’s how good this is. Interspersed with the panels of the Eradicator’s last resistance against the Cyborg Superman and Jurgens’s painfully detailed description, this whole thing hits home with me. The destruction of Coast City remains in the popular imagination of the DC reader because Dan Jurgens put it there.
Seventeen years later and I’m still thinking about it.
And it felt like everything came out on time.
