90's X-Men: The Journey Begins

 

The nineties are a decade with a certain reputation, especially when it comes to superhero comics. The decade was dominated by the hyper commercialization of the medium, from the move to character designs that translate easily to action figures, to the cheesecake pinups that dominated female character design thanks to artists like Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane. Comics, already a deeply unsubtle art form through nuance out the window and embraced the hyper masculine, slick and marketable aesthetics that have come to be the genres calling card. This shift is particularly noticeable in the X-Men. In 1991, long time X-Scribe Chris Claremont, who had authored the book for sixteen years, was either, depending on who you believe, forced out or fired over editorial disputes. Chris Claremont is a legend and helped shape the characters that we know and love into their most popular forms, but he is probably best described as an idiosyncratic writer. Once he left the franchise that he had been the de-facto god of for 16 years, its identity entered a period of crisis which has led the years between 1991 and 2003 to generally be considered a major down period for the franchise despite its immense commercial success. Now, all of this was literally before my time, I came into the X-Franchise in 2019 with the birth of Krakoa as a status quo and new golden era of storytelling and commercial success for the X-Men. But as I became more and more engrossed in the world of the X-Men the more older X-Comics I would consume and when I reached back past Grant Morrison’s generational run on New X-Men, most people I would talk to would describe those comics with a certain level of disappointment. The nineties for X-Fans was spoken about in much the same terms hardcore Transformers fans talk about the Michael Bay movies, and I became fascinated by the era’s excesses. On the most basic levels I had to see if these comics were as bad as everyone said, and this blog chronicles that odyssey, event by event, issue by issue.

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