The Final ’90s Countdown: Prologue 2.
Okay, the voting, she is over, and I have counted your entries and there is one clear “winner” — but that said, all nominated are winners as they represent a solid representation of the variety of great comics the 1990s had to offer. Often a maligned decade due to the long shadow cast by the massive market crash, it was still a peak time for exciting works by talented creators.
I only had to disqualify a couple votes…since I had decided From Hell was disqualified having first appeared in the Taboo anthology in the late ’80s, I felt this also applied to Wolff and Byrd Counselors of the Macabre since it first showed up as a strip in 1979. Sorry, pals…it is a good comic.
Some of you lamented that Eightball was disqualified due to its 1989 debut, and that it was much a ’90s comic as its indie brethren. I was going to say it got covered during my Final ’80s Countdown…but rather, Eightball-precursor Lloyd Llewellyn was the title covered. I guess folks thought it was a ’90s title during that poll, too. …Maybe I’ll have to do a special review of Eightball as a sidebar to all this to make up for its borderline status.
The next thing I had to think about a bit was Peter Bagge’s Hate. Technically, it’s a continuation of material that had appeared in Bagge’s humor anthology Neat Stuff, which had started in the 1980s. It would seem to put this in the same category as From Hell and Wolff and Byrd, series that began in previous publications before continuing as its own title. But I think the shift of focus from “The Bradleys” in Neat Stuff to just specifically Buddy Bradley in Hate is enough of a transformation to make Hate its own thing. If it had been a series of stories titled “Hate” in Neat Stuff that eventually spun off into a separate comic of the same name, that would have been different. I realize it’s really splitting hairs, but I’m making the call that Hate isn’t disqualified.
A more general realization is that, looking over the final list of titles here, there are some comics I’m just plain not going to have much to say about. I mean, I recognize every single comic suggested, we definitely carried them at the shop, but I know literally nothing about them otherwise. It’s not like the ’80s Countdown where I had at least something to note about each title from personal experience, whether I read it or not. I’m chalking this up to my own transition from being a fan in the ’80s, being more immersed in reading the comics and reading about them in ‘zines and such, to working in comics retail through the ’90s, where it was more about selling the comics to customers. I mean, of course I had to know something about each title in order to do properly sell them, it’s not the same as being a fan and, y’know, actually reading them. It’s like memorizing something for a test and then immediately forgetting it afterwards once you don’t need it anymore.
Well, okay, not the best analogy there, but I hope you get my meaning. I’ll do my best discussing some of these titles I’m knowledge-deficient on…get ready for lots of Wikipedia links. …Well, okay, I’ll try to find more personal and informative links than that, but we’ll muddle through all this together, I hope.
On the other hand, a few of these titles I have plenty to say about, so gird your internet loins for that. I’ll start discussing these comics next week, starting with the lowest vote-getters in alphabetical order and working our way up through future installments over the next few…months, probably? Anyway, thanks to all you folks for participating (and I haven’t yet looked at the seperate discussion thread on the voting…I’ll get to that, too!)!
