By Shaenon K. Garrity
Our columnists are independent writers who choose subjects and write without editorial input from comiXology. The opinions expressed are the columnist's, and do not represent the opinion of comiXology.
Comics will break your heart, said Jack Kirby, and sometimes the comics world gets me down. I read bad webcomics and depressing graphic novels and stuff about zombie Green Lanterns, and I start to ask myself why I've been rotting my brain with funnybooks all these years. That's when it's time to turn back to the good old days of adolescence, the golden age when I first became a comic-book junkie, to bask in the remembered glow of happier times.
No, wait. That's a terrible idea.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Surely nothing could illustrate the horror of 1990s comics more perfectly than a
Wizard cover credited to Todd McFarlane Productions" (the artist is Greg Capullo). But you'd be wrong. The perfect distillation of the 1990s is a
gatefold Wizard cover credited to Todd McFarlane Productions:
Violator, Vacillator, Vindicator, Vaporizer, and Vandalizer are all both TM and © McFarlane Productions. Respect. Wait,
Vacillator?
When I was in high school, a comic-book store opened within walking distance of my house, allowing me to blossom from an awkward, friendless sci-fi geek into an awkward, friendless sci-fi geek who was also really really into comics. The store owners let me have any issues of
Wizard left lying around after their newsstand date, and I compiled a sizable library. I'd like to claim that I was too smart to take
Wizard seriously, but, flipping through these old issues, I can't help noticing that my teenage self filled out all the contest entry forms (except for the ones where you won a date with a Dawn model or something), underlined all the titles she owned in the price guide, and cut out all the pictures of
Sandman characters to tape to her bedroom wall.
I got into comics hardcore through
Sandman and later graduated to indie books, so to me the 1990s were all about Vertigo comics and
Bone. I was vaguely aware that there were superhero comics about guys in giant kneepads and sword-wielding women with perfectly circular breasts three times the size of their heads, but most of that material passed outside my radar. Then I'd open up a
Wizard magazine and plunge deep into a sea of tiny-crosshatched crap.
This issue (December 1994) isn't too awful. Cover date notwithstanding, it's a Halloween issue, peppered with cute features about monsters and stuff. There's a pretty good article on the history of horror comics, and another one on
Seduction of the Innocent and the Kefauver hearings. The #1 Pick from the Wizard's Hat is
Sin City, not a bad choice even if it's only there to flatter that month's interview subject, Frank Miller. (The #2 Pick from the Wizard's Hat?
Youngblood Year One. You win some, you lose most.) Todd Palmer continues to fight the good fight with his "Palmer's Picks" indie-comics column, written from another planet. The rest of
Wizard tells you about the new clear-plastic Predator action figures, Palmer tries to get you to read Paul Pope's
THB. If it helps at all, Palmer, you got at least one nerd into Tom Hart.
And my dumb-nostalgia switch is always flipped when the back-page interviewer asks the subject (in this case
Lobo artist Val Semeiks) what he'd do if he had the powers of the Beyonder. It was the beginning of the end when
Wizard stopped using that line. For the record, Semeiks would give himself the power to draw with his left hand so he could get twice as much work done. The correct answer is, always, "Try to bone Dazzler."
Still, there's a whole lot of awful going on in the sewer-dive into the ugliest excesses of the direct market that is classic
Wizard. When the "hottest issues" of the month are
Gen13 #1 and
Gen13 #2, followed by several different comics featuring
Lady Death characters, you know it's a bad time for comics. And there's the always embarrassing "Hunk and Babe" column, discontinued when
Wizard ran out of hunks. Which was pretty early on, actually.
Steel, "the crappiest of the four Supermen introduced when the true Supes was suckin' wind"? I believe you once again misspelled "best," unfortunate
Wizard intern stuck writing lustful descriptions of beefcake superheroes.
Rereading these old issues, one thing that keeps jumping out is that even the editors of
Wizard were horrified by what they had wrought. They just wanted to wallow in self-abnegating fanboy excess and make a mint jacking up the resale value of unreadable comics from Valiant and Malibu. They didn't realize people would take them seriously. This is especially evident in any piece written by Jim McLauchlin, the closest
Wizard editorial ever had to a voice of reason, who seems to understand with dawning despair that his magazine had let the stupid genie out of the bottle and there was no way to get the stupid back in.
This issue's letters column includes the very moment when McLauchlin realized that no matter how far he and his co-conspirators dumbed themselves down to the most violent, avaricious, bigoted, misogynistic, illiterate, truth-and-beauty-hating depths of the geek mind, there would always be someone pushing them to go lower. Here is that moment:
Ah, retailer Peter Lewis Bosch of Hollywood. How're those investments working out these days? (Actually, a quick Google search shows that Peter Bosch exhibited at Comic-Con as recently as 2007, so he survived the speculator bust.) McLauchlin tries to defend himself, patiently explaining that, no, he really was serious when he suggested that 100 issues of a classic Jack Kirby war comic would bring more pleasure than five mint copies of
X-O Manowar #3 (SVe JSh 1: X-Caliber, Harada, priced at $20 in the
Wizard Price Guide that month).
But you can sense a nervous edge to his defense, a realization that this guy, and the hundreds like him, would not be moved.
Holy crap, you can hear McLauchlin thinking.
People actually believe the bullshit we made up about the value of all those shitty comics we've got stacked in the break room! They're actively trying to stop people from reading good
comic books so they can sink all their money into "investments"! Maybe we should tell them the whole thing's a joke before they destroy every comic in America that isn't a Spawn
ripoff… Nah, no way am I getting a real job. Okay, Gambit's card-throwing: how does it work?
The second half of Bosch's letter refers to another debate raging in the
Wizard letters column, between people who wanted to see Spider-Man kill Carnage and people with some remaining shred of decency, perspective, and understanding that Spider-Man and Carnage are fictional characters. "Spider-Man is a coward because he can't even sacrifice a little bit of his soul to kill an almost non-sentient, psychopathic slaughterer so that he will not murder any more innocents," complains Ben Ziegler of Covington, Lousisiana. "A person that selfish is not a hero."
In the end, Peter Bosch's argument lost to history. The direct market crashed, the speculator bubble burst, and, sixteen years later, my husband is trying to find someone on eBay willing to take thousands of bagged, foil-plated comics off his hands for a nickel apiece. Me, I shouldn't have bought all those
Sandman trading cards. But Ben Ziegler (whom I desperately hope is the same Ben Ziegler now working as a "mediator, consensus builder, and systems thinker" who includes comics among the storytelling forms he uses to facilitate peaceful communication) won. Superheroes, even the most heroic, got mean. These days most of them are happy to kill, maim, and traumatize. The Spider-Man of 1994 wouldn't sacrifice his soul. The Spider-Man of 2007 made a pact with Satan.
Happily, there's more to comics than the state of Spider-Man's eternal soul. In the 1990s, I escaped into
Sandman and
Bone and
Hutch Owen. Today I've got good webcomics,
Moomin reprints, and stacks of manga. But through the rose-colored lenses of nostalgia, the badness of the 1990s is starting to look better than the badness of today. In its pimply, awkward incompetence, it's almost…charming. It's like the dumb teenage boyfriend I never had because I was too busy taping pictures of cartoon goths to my walls.
That's why my next column will be all about
Wizard, July 1995.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2010
