Making fun of the 90s is day in, day out here, as if the 80s, 70s, 40s, or any other decade didn't have it's share of ridiculously embarrassing characters and a mix of quality and terribly incompetent art, sometimes on the same book month to month. So, I thought, let's make it harder:

Who was created in the 90s that you actually love? Whose 90s iteration you like, to be specific. If Deadpool only "becomes cool" in about 2004, that doesn't count. If you love Lyja the Lazerfist from the moment she wasn't actually Alicia Masters, though... you're good, and there are then, verifiably three of us in existence, who do. Cable took forever to catch on with me at all. Kestrel and Birdie were okeh, but they're there for a story, then gone, and I didn't care they were gone.

The 90s, for me, is apparently the decade of stylish women with two-word names who hung around with men who tended to shout orders. (It's comics, or two-word name would just be most people.) The Ragged Robin decade.

Jaine Cutter



was a supernatural assassin and good-timer, who was having sex with Daimon Hellstrom when his wife was talked into suicide. She was violent and funny and intense and sweet. San Francisco native. Posed for porn at sixteen. Cut two albums by eighteen. By twenty-four, she had a gun that could kill anything supernatural and armor made of the iron silt at the bottom of the river Styx that lived just beneath her skin.

Sister Nil, the traumatized, carcinogenic-voiced monstrosity who Dr Strange kept as a sort of D/s pet (because Strange isn't remotely dodgy, oh no, he just "knows best"). David Quinn put Strange, Nil, and the reader in a genuinely awkward position with their working relationship.

Free Spirit



was one of the two Cap-apprentices towards the end of Mark Gruenwald's run. I may be the only person, but I love the latter part of his run, the ennui and struggle and parody, much more than the early years, and Free Spirit was the culmination of a lot of that, given the form of a bright, goodnatured young woman who was going to superhero it up despite everything.

And, to break the mold...

Slapstick!!!



The wacky, goofy, idiot jerkface with the powers of a living cartoon and an arsenal of grand guignol jokes! The comic was hilarious, the character was a well-meaning egomaniac, and for four issues it was beautiful. Then, we didn't see him again for a fifteen years or something.