70 Years of Marvel - 1994

Can you believe there was a time when we weren't all just a bit tired of Alex Ross' painted artwork? Or when hardly anyone had heard of Kurt Busiek? Marvels made stars of both men, and deservedly so. A retelling of some of the most iconic moments from the 60s and 70s of Marvel Comics, through the cynical eyes of a photojournalist, Marvels managed to make events like the coming of Galactus and the death of Gwen Stacy come to life in a way that even Jack Kirby and Gil Kane could only dream. Like all classics, it's probably a bit overrated, but it holds up a damn site better than most modern classics, much like the source material that Busiek and Ross were studying.

1994 was also the year that saw Avengers West Coast shut down and replaced with the much more EXTREME Force Works. It featured some of the earliest Marvel US work by the 2000AD team of Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, who would do much better on books to come. Mostly made up of disaffected ex-Avengers, Force Works handled cases too EXTREME for other super teams. I'd take the piss out of this more, but it doesn't really deserve it. Not compared to the awful terribleness that was Fantastic Force, an attempt to create an FF franchise. This starred mysteriously grown-up Franklin Richards leading a team of heroes so obscure that they arrived without trace, and vanished the same way a year or so later. Interestingly, the team was brought together by the Black Panther, who somehow managed to wriggle out of membership. Good choice, T'challa.

Less terribly awful, at least at first, was Generation X, an attempt at the whole "mutant kids learning to adjust to their powers in a school environment" concept, that the New Mutants had tried a decade or so back. This saw the transformation of Emma Frost from White Queen of the Hellfire Club to the sarcastic schoolmistress we've all come to know and love.

Another new book, and one which whilst somewhat better regarded, would vanish without trace after barely a handful of issues, was Clan Destine, Alan Davis' follow-up to his Excalibur work. Quirky does not usually equate with longevity, and this was no exception.

Oh, and was there something else? I'm sure there was some other event. Oh, yes, of course. Spider-Man began to share book space with a young man calling himself Ben Reilly. Disaster lay ahead...

In the real world, or close to it, Kurt Cobain broke teenage grunge hearts all over the world, Ayrton Senna crashed into a wall at 135mph, and John Smith died, giving God's Gift To Labour a chance to rule Britain in a couple of years.

70 Years of Marvel - 1989

The X-Universe was getting busy by 1989, with 5 full-time books: Uncanny X-Men (under the control of Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri); Excalibur (Claremont and Alan Davis); Wolverine (Claremont, again, and John Buscema); X-Factor (written by Louise Simonson, and drawn mostly by husband Walt); and New Mutants (Simonson, again, and mostly Bret Blevins, although the issue above was drawn by John Byrne). Of course, had we known what was ahead of us, in terms of the apparent exponential expansion of the X-universe, we'd have counted ourselves lucky to just have five books.

The New Mutants themselves were pretty busy too. They started 1989 by being embroiled in the Inferno saga, with Magik going crazy and turning into a demon. They lost the school and their headmaster, Magneto, turned back into a villain, and they finished the year stranded in Asgard, trying to save the 9 Realms from Hela. By this point, the book had abandoned any of the notion of being a story about school kids who just happened to be mutants, in favour of standard superhero stuff. We weren't quite at the annual "event" stage yet, but we were getting there.

Speaking of events, 1989 saw the "Acts of Vengeance" storyline, where some of Marvel's biggest bad guys decided the best way to beat their foes was to trade opponents. This led to such fights as Doctor Doom versus the Punisher, Daredevil versus Ultron, and the Fantastic Four versus Plantman. That storyline also saw the introduction of the New Warriors, another team of teenage superheroes, whilst, back over at the X-Books, future X-Woman, Jubilee, made her first appearance. Thor had a new secret identity, in the person of Eric Masterson, who'd later become the pseudo-Thunder God, Thunderstrike.

The real 1989 saw author Salman Rushdie get into a spot of bother, the introduction of the somewhat unpopular Poll Tax in the UK, and the decline and fall of the Berlin Wall. Yay!

70 Years of Comics - 1988

Excalibur had been devised in 1987, in the aftermath of the two X-Events: the Morlock Massacre, which had seen Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler injured and forced to retire from the team; and The Fall Of The Mutants, in which the rest of the X-Men had been apparently killed (in fact, they hadn't died, they'd just gone to Australia, but that's another story). For no particularly good reason, Kitty and Nightcrawler, along with Cyclops' daughter from a possible future, Rachel, teamed up with Marvel UK's Captain Britain, and his girlfriend, Meggan, moved to London and embarked on a series of trans-dimensional adventures. The best of these adventures were written and drawn by Chris Claremont and Alan Davis, and no-one else really seemed to have a feel for how to write this book, which mostly turned into just another X-Book, except for a brief stint where Warren Ellis tried out some of the superhero noir stuff which would make him a name on Image's Stormwatch a few years later.

Elsewhere, in '88, Speedball the Masked Marvel was making his debut, courtesy of Tom DeFalco and Marvel legend, Steve Ditko.

In the real world, 1988 saw the Lockerbie Disaster, and George Bush Sr winning the US Presidential Election. On TV, tiresome sci-fi show, Red Dwarf, was using up money which might have been better spent elsewhere, and Roseanne Barr was making a star out of John Goodman, whilst Roger Rabbit was the talk of Hollywood.