Marvel is returning to greatness... after 18 years

**stingray** · 02-12-2018, 07:50 AM

Originally Posted by Nick Miller

Marvel has had great comics every year. You just need to find what you like. It’s not that hard.

90s Xmen were FREKIN great. Up until Onslaught.

Again, one reader's opinion. I thought nineties X=Men were awful. The introduction of Cable and every other new character with shoulder pads and guns ruined the franchise for me. Not everyone likes the same thing, nor should they.

**KingsLeadHat** · 02-12-2018, 07:54 AM

Originally Posted by stingray

Again, one reader's opinion. I thought nineties X=Men were awful. The introduction of Cable and every other new character with shoulder pads and guns ruined the franchise for me. Not everyone likes the same thing, nor should they.

For me, all a X-Men fan REALLY needs to read in terms of essential material is Giant Sized X-Men #1 and Uncanny X-Men #94-200 by Claremont and crew. After Magneto goes good-guy, the series starts to falter.

I'd also add Claremont/Miller Wolverine and Claremont's New Mutants and Excalibur runs for good measure. Anything beyond that, if it's good, is icing on the cake.

**Nomads1** · 02-12-2018, 07:54 AM

Originally Posted by Daniel22

Same here, I see the late 90's and early 2000's WAY more on "worst era" lists than "great era" lists. I think it's cool that each era has its own fans for different reasons.

The 90's get a real bad rep for basically two bad things The extreme era, influenced by Image and its star power artists, which worked under the assumption that all comic fans wanted was to look at pretty (though, what one considers pretty is not the same as the other, and a lot of it is highly debatable) pictures, and writers were not as important as artists. And for gimmicks such as the cover bellow.

Basically, a lot of what was sold during the period was all flash and no substance. Still, it was the decade that gave us the New Warriors (the heroes of the 90's), Age of Apocalypse, Operation Galactic Storm (two of Marvel's best crossovers ever), Ostrander and Ferry's Heroes for Hire (probably my favorite run ever published by Marvel), Heroes Return (with it's titanic team-ups of talent and characters - Busiek, Perez and the Avengers, Jurgens, Romita Jr and Thor, Busiek, Chen and Iron Man, Lodbell, Davis, Claremont, Larroca and the FF) , and so many others homeruns (and that is just at Marvel. DC had a lot of good stuff also).
While at Nu Marvel, we had (have?) the trend that writers were all that mattered, independent of them knowing or not how to write for the medium, above even characters, comics history, continuity and consistency. So there's good and bad at everything. Personally, I think I enjoyed much more of what was published in the 90's than I did during the Quesada, Bendis and Co. rule.

Peace

**KingsLeadHat** · 02-12-2018, 07:58 AM

The problem with the 90's is that most of the biggest titles were in dire straits. I think the only major title that maintained good quality into the mid-90's was Peter David's Incredible Hulk and possibly Silver Surfer (though it was hit or miss after issue #75 or so). Even so, both of those titles were past their prime's at that point and peaked around 1991.

**CentralPower** · 02-12-2018, 09:00 AM

I still like Venom, but did think that Price as the host was interesting and a good move for the title. Price is still around, so hopefully they do more with that. I hope Venom Inc hasn't turned him into a straight bad guy though, the thing that made him interesting was that he was not a hero or a villain.

I doubt we are going to see Price again any time soon. (i would like to be wrong. But, we know how this sort of thing usually plays out. Price might end up getting aced in the next event, or just being forgotten.)

I would say that Price was a villain. But, he was a comprehensible villain. Price's pre-origin background is comprehensible. He was a guy who fell on hard times, and he wanted to get up and out. (Who doesn't understand that?) Price wanted money. He wanted security through obscurity. (Again, reasonable stuff to want.)

But, about 5 minutes after getting the suit, Price totally murdered a guy (who had the misfortune to be a witness). Price is a bad guy, and he should be.

So does this mean the return of the marvel swimsuit issue then?

Complete with nude Ghostrider?

A lot of people are happy Bendis is gone but he’s responsible for creating some of the only new characters to have gained a measure of popularity. Without him Marvel are lacking a recklessly creative writer and I don’t know who at Marvel is capable of filling his shoes. This probably doesn’t matter to some as they are happy reading about the same people over and over again.

Yeah, plenty of comics fans are backward looking. And, yup, that is a problem. (But, it is a problem with the fans, not the comics.)

If you like Bendis, you can follow him to DC. (I have certainly followed writers to different companies.) But, Marvel has a deep enough talent pool that they can handle the loss of Bendis.

Marvel has had great comics every year. You just need to find what you like. It’s not that hard.

True enough. But, in the 90s, Marvel's dud-rate was much higher than it should have been. In theory, one could have 2-5 good Marvel series on their pull-file every year in the 90s. But, it took effort to find them.

I might be nostalgia blind but that book did a lot of things right for its occasional mishaps), but I honestly think that Marvel had figured out how to balance creating new characters and titles and respecting the older ones.

At a certain point, nostalgia needs to be discarded. I used to love Gruenwald "Captain America" and early issues of "the New Mutants". Years later, I re-discovered Gruenwald's run....and realized that it was pretty much everything wrong with comics. (That run has not aged well.) In the case of "New Mutants", it was good for the time it came out in a technical sense. And, the content was pitched to what I was at the time (a pre-teen).

(I can look at "the New Mutants" with legitimate nostalgia. "Captain America" just makes me ashamed of my past self.)

I think the only major title that maintained good quality ....

Exactly. The major titles all took significant hits at various times in the 90s. Assuming that a reader was unwilling to try non-Marvel comics (which was too often the case), they could not stay with any of the major (often habitual) series.

"Spider-Man" was unreadable by 1994. (The Ben Reilly stuff may have been good. But, nobody in their right mind would have trusted Marvel enough to buy in for it.)

The various X-titles kept adding baggage, and were only really accessible for long-term readers. (As a kid, I ended up getting priced out because I was not willing to only read X-titles.)

The various Avengers-related titles held out longer than the other major lines. But, when they faltered, boy howdy did they falter. Along with the above-mentioned (and exceptionally bad) run of "the Mighty Thor", there was "the Crossing".

A Marvel fan had to jump between series, and often read secondary series. The most memorable stuff was bad.

**Daniel22** · 02-12-2018, 10:36 AM

[QUOTE=CentralPower;3445909]I doubt we are going to see Price again any time soon. (i would like to be wrong. But, we know how this sort of thing usually plays out. Price might end up getting aced in the next event, or just being forgotten.)

I would say that Price was a villain. But, he was a comprehensible villain. Price's pre-origin background is comprehensible. He was a guy who fell on hard times, and he wanted to get up and out. (Who doesn't understand that?) Price wanted money. He wanted security through obscurity. (Again, reasonable stuff to want.)

But, about 5 minutes after getting the suit, Price totally murdered a guy (who had the misfortune to be a witness). Price is a bad guy, and he should be.

I think Price is a person who is strictly self-interested and extremely desirous of money that he feels he is owed. That sounds like a LOT of people that I have first and second hand knowledge of. It's not heroic, but if it's villainous, there's a lot of villainous people in the world. Him murdering that witness did take him to a place a lot of people wouldn't be willing to go, but it did make me wonder how many people would have done the same thing in his position? He had what he felt like was a winning lottery ticket and the witness jeopardized that. I think when a villain makes me ask a question like that it's a sign of an interesting character.

**Michael Watkins** · 02-12-2018, 11:52 AM

Bendis destroyed more than he created. And he often did it to put his new/blander characters over, imo.

**Marvel/DC Fan** · 02-12-2018, 11:57 AM

Today's Marvel reminds me a lot of the 90's and not in a good way. I dropped a lot of books back then when characters like Thunderstrike, Ben Reilly and teenage Tony Stark replaced the originals plus you had the whole extreme 90's thing going. The quality back then is just as bad as it is now. Still like then If I dig through all the **** I still find quite a few quality books I like.

**CentralPower** · 02-13-2018, 02:59 PM

If comics are really that bad, then why bother? (I just about got out in the 90s, and spent a few years reading non-big 2 content. Now, Marvel takes the bulk of my comics-attention.)

Bendis destroyed more than he created. And he often did it to put his new/blander characters over, imo.

Bendis only made the Avengers worth reading for the first time in....years. The fact he wrote the first tolerable Spider-Man (character or series) after the clone-saga means nothing. Hey, making Luke Cage something other than a joke...

My gawd, Bendis is such a bozo.

I think Price is a person who is strictly self-interested and extremely desirous of money that he feels he is owed. That sounds like a LOT of people that I have first and second hand knowledge of. It's not heroic, but if it's villainous, there's a lot of villainous people in the world. Him murdering that witness did take him to a place a lot of people wouldn't be willing to go, but it did make me wonder how many people would have done the same thing in his position? He had what he felt like was a winning lottery ticket and the witness jeopardized that. I think when a villain makes me ask a question like that it's a sign of an interesting character.

I would agree the Price is not much different from most people. How much the murder of a witness (who had nothing to do with the incident) sets him apart is up for debate. And, where one stands on that is going to depend on how cynical one happens to be.

Sadly, I stand by my original point. We are not likely to see Price in any significant appearances. (Not that I would mind being wrong about that.)

**Daniel22** · 02-13-2018, 03:06 PM