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The nineties for me was very much divided into late nineties and early nineties. Sometime around 1990 I defected from being a Marvel kid to a DC fan pre-teen. What I loved about DC from 1990 to around 93 was that the incredible burst of creative energyand variety that had burst out of DC following the crisis was not nearly spent - I could pick up half a dozen different DC books and they'd all be offering completely different stories and styles, and most of them would be pretty decent, from the Giffen/Dematteis JLI to George's Animal Man, to Messner-Loebs Flash and beyond. So much variety.
The later nineties was something different for me, and perhaps in some ways more homogenous, but still belonging very much to DC. That was my Vertigo period. At one point in the mid nineties I was buying pretty much everything Vertigo put out and very little else. At that point in my life as well as enjoying Shade and Doom Patrol and Hellblazer etc I actually liked the ongoing Black Orchid book, the grungey House of Secrets, and even Jerry Prossers Animal Man, to name but three. That period went on till about 96 or 97, when I found that Vertigo wasn't putting out many book I was that into anymore, and that as I student I couldn't really afford them anyway, and prefered to spend what little cash I did have on drink and CDs.
Beyond that the only other comic that was really important to me during the nineties was Peter David's Hulk, which had already been going for years when the nineties started. But what I do find interesting is how my relationship to the book changed as the decade went on. At the begining of the nineties I was eleven, about to turn twelve - and I despised Peter David and his Hulk work, and I really hated the boring Grey, smart Hulk. As I recall I barely understood much of what went on in the book, and that what I did understand I mostly found boring as hell - but Hulk was the first book I'd started collecting back in '85 and I was damned if I was going to drop it. Then as the decade wore on a funny thing happened. Sometime around 93, 94, I found I quite liked Peter David's Hulk, and sometime after that realized it was me thathad changed, not the book. By ninety-eight when he departed it was the only book I was still finding the money to buy, and I was incredibly sad to see him go. |
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