Recently I’ve been reading The Dark Age: Grim, Great and Gimmicky Post-Modern Comics by Mark Voger, and it’s been making me think. Conventional wisdom has it that the 1990s were a bad time for American comics. This was the era of the speculation boom-and-bust, of Marvel’s acquisition of Heroes World distributors which led to the company’s bankruptcy and the effective monopoly of Diamond; more, it was the era of variant covers, crossovers, “grim’n'gritty” storytelling, and more gimmicks than you could shake a stick at. It became known as “the Dark Age” for some very good reasons.
But all of that happened to other people, in other people’s 1990s. In my 1990s, it was the era of Vertigo creating an outlet for weird and mind-expanding comics like Sandman and Preacher (me too, this period and these comics reinvigorated my love of the medium – Joe). It was the era of Image and Dark Horse growing big enough and important enough to be grouped with DC and Marvel. It was the era of manga and anime finally reaching beyond the tiny specialist audience they’d been able to reach in the West and becoming mainstream.
Most importantly for me, it was the era when graphic novels started being available in bookshops. I started reading American comics in 1993, and the path was pretty straightforward: a friend of mine got me into Terry Pratchett’s novels, including Good Omens, and when I saw a Sandman collection with Neil Gaiman’s name on it in a little bay next to the science fiction section, I said to myself, “hey, that’s the guy who co-wrote Good Omens! I wonder if this is any good?” (sadly as Neil once said, now he and Terry are so successful it would cost a fortune just for publisher’s lawyers to let them talk seriously about doing another collaboration – Joe) Well, it was more than good: it blew my tiny teenage mind. But it wasn’t the first volume of the series, and the shop didn’t have the first volume… so I figured that I should wander down the road to Forbidden Planet (for the first time since it had opened in Dublin) and see if they had the first volume.
(Dream of the Endless dies and is replaced by, well, Dream of the Endless – Daniel to his friends – in the final chapter of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, gorgeous art by Michael Zulli, soon to be seen in oversized glory in the final Absolute Sandman this winter,(c) DC)
They did, and a lot more besides. They had Jeff Buckley’s Grace on repeat on the stereo, and Sandman and Hellblazer and Swamp Thing on the shelves, and I was almost always the only girl in the shop but I was too busy reading the comics to care. I had loved comics for years before then, but it was in the 1990s that I fell in love; it wasn’t until then that my fate was sealed.
Part of the reason for this was that 1993 was also the year of the release of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. As well as being exposed to an array of fabulously brilliant comics, I had the luck to read an intelligent and thoughtful analysis of how comics worked and why they were so amazing. Without that reasoning – which I could never have come up with on my own – I might have drifted away from comics permanently when the first dry spell hit, convincing myself that the brief flourishing had been a fluke. McCloud’s argument for the potential of comics as a medium was enough to persuade me that there would always be something worth looking at in comics, because the medium was valuable and interesting in itself.
I think it may be time to reassess the 1990s. I don’t dispute that an awful lot of rubbish was published in that decade, but I wince when I see “well, it was the 1990s” used as shorthand for “well, nothing good came out of that period; what do you expect?” There was a lot of good stuff happening in the 1990s, and the fact that bad stuff was happening at the same time shouldn’t be allowed to blind us to that fact.
Katherine Farmar writes regularly on comics and culture from around the world, you can read more on her comics blog Whereof One Can Speak.
Fri, Jun 20, 2008
Comics and cartoons, Katherine's corner