I’m gonna play this one a little different and put some words about my man Guy Gardner in your way before we get to the mustache action as a delightful parting gift. Sure, you can just scroll to the bottom but I will know you did it and I will never forgive you. Ever.
Let’s do this thing.
There’s a lot that you can say about Marvel Comics in the 90′s that I’m not going to bother saying right now. What I do want to talk about is a tiny, tiny piece of the not-so-great line known as Marvel 2099. Quite simply, the first three issues of Ghost Rider made my damn head explode when I was 14 years old and it still holds up for me more than 15 years later.
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.
