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Probably my favorite era of Marvel.
That was when Quesada really started the “Vertigo-fication” of Marvel by bringing in a lot of Vertigo creators. And a lot of Indie ones too. That was when Marvel started the deliberate policy of bringing in guys that are not necessarily “superhero writers” to guide their universe.
There was a lot of experiments then, some of them didn’t work (like Rawhide Kid) but there was amazing stuff like X-Statix, Daredevil, Runwaways, Fantastic Four (Waid/Wierengo), Truth: Red, White and Black (a book that would be EXTREMELY CONTROVERSIAL TODAY), The Ultimates line, Supreme Power, Punisher (Ennis) and Morrison’s X-men. You also had some curious titles like Captain America by Cassady and Nieber which was a really gritty interpretation of Steve Rogers that’s largely been forgotten to be honest. And then there was some really crazy stuff like US War Machine, the aforementioned Startling Stories: Banner (which directly influenced Bruce Jones run on Hulk) and Eternal.
It’s unfortunate that a lot of that work has now been viewed through the lens of Quesada hating “mutants” (by re-launching X-Statix and Morrison’s X-men drastically reducing the number of mutants in the world) or hating traditional Marvel but after everything that happened to Marvel and the collapse of the direct market, I think they made the appropriate moves at the time. It was also a notable period because there were NO EVENTS whatsoever at the time.
That IMHO was the last time Marvel was truly experimental and I actually got back into comics during that era (although i dropped out again later).To me it just seemed that a lot of titles were a lot more mature than they were before which wasn’t a surprise because guys like Morrison, Milligan, Vaughn, Bendis and Millar (before he lost nuance), JMS, Ennis and Ellis were working on the books.