~timdunn

I was chatting with some fellow comic geeks earlier, and one posed the question: Why were the 90s so horrible? I sat and pondered for a short while. Most fanboys know that comics are a reflection of their era. What do the comics of the 90s say about us? This was my reply:

In the fifties we were coming out of world war and depression. It was a time of hope, a time of science. Then came the sixties, rise of the Flower Power movement. In the seventies the disillusion began to set in and more and more people turned became angry that the peaceful future we hoped for never arrived. That anger turned into the nihilism of the 80s, when greed was good and the world saw the first inklings of the gothic movement.

In the 90s we realised that appealing to the angry, rebellious youth was a damn good marketing strategy, so we watered it down and packaged it in easy-to-chew bites.

Here at the start of the 21st Century we have devolved further. Now we don't even pretend to be angry. We just want to be seen, to be heard, even if we have nothing to show and less to say

Oddly, the comics of today are not like the others. I don't believe they (or at least most of them) are doing what the rest of the media is doing. They're actually saying as much as, if not more than, they have before. In Marvel's Civil War we saw the death of Captain America, a patriot in the truest sense. He loved his country, right or wrong: if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be put right. He was shot outside a courthouse, never having recieved a fair trial. The death of the American Dream, the death of Freedom, all for the sake of Security. In Superman we saw the world's favourite Immigrant Son fighting the president of the United States (at the time, Lex Luthor) because the President was putting his own financial and moral concerns above the rights of the people.

We see in Hollywood that more and more studios are seeing the storytelling potential in comics. Many of the biggets and best films of the past decade have been based on comics, from the obvious (Spider-Man, Batman) to the unexpected (Road To Perdition, Sin City, A History Of Violence). Unfortunately Hollywood is still in 90s mode: they love the flash, but can't stomach the substance. A focus on sales rather than quality means even the best comic-to-movie adaptions will be watered down at least.