Originally Posted by
Hybrid
That's a good point. Plus, it's not just Marvel, but Image was the hot new kid on the block and they dominated the market (as said, they displaced DC for a time, something no company has done since). Some of their titles were good, such as Spawn and Savage Dragon. Others, not so much, with Youngblood being the worst. WildStorm is a universe with potential, but looking at the early issues, it didn't find its footing until other creators signed on. The whole company was a mess, and they contributed heavily to the era's badness. They may be good now, as the best indie company, but not then.
That said, I could argue that DC got its own dark age with the New 52 era. That embodied many hated elements of the dark age, from bad stories, art, characters getting derailed, and the whole continuity reset completely undoing Post-Crisis which didn't need to be undone. The continuity was fine, and it was only so Dan DiDio could get his nostalgia back for old stuff, at least I think, because I don't know why they felt the need for it.
I know a lot of people didn't like that. It made the universe smaller by getting rid of the legacy characters from old and new. The Justice Society was gone, as were the previous Blue Beetles, Wally West, and the two Batgirls Cass and Steph, and that sucks because I actively enjoyed reading both of them and I really hated Barbara being shoehorned into being Batgirl again... it's like if Dick became Robin. It was also anti-marriage in general. And don't even get me started on the Teen Titans. Cyborg was shoehorned into being a Justice League founder, which reeked of tokenism since they were pretending he was an A-lister all the sudden when he never even had a title. Oh, and the WildStorm integration was awful, and that's a shame because DC integrated other companies like Fawcett, Charleton, and Milestone just fine yet they completely missed with WildStorm.
So they may not have hit the dark age in the '90s, but they certainly did later on. I am of the opinion that Post-Crisis never should've been messed with.