Quotes / The Dark Age of Comic Books

Fiction

"Revamped for the nineties
So much more exciting
Pointy elbows and lots of lightning
Edgy and angry, so zesty and tangy
There's new demographics
When nobody asked for it!"

— Xeriouxly Forxe theme song, Homestar Runner April Fool's intro

Don't touch that dial
It's just that goodness is out of style
Be dark, be cold (So conflicted)
No hand to hold (Heart constricted)
Dark knight, bright soul, (We're addicted)
No room here for the bold

— I Fight Dragons, "No One Likes Superman Anymore"

"We thought by making your world more violent, we would make it more "realistic," more "adult." God help us if that's what it means.

— Grant Morrison, Animal Man 26

"These 'no-nonsense' solutions of yours just don't hold water in a complex world of jet powered apes and time travel."

—Superman, JLA Classified

Meet Switchblade McGurk, another punk-looking anti-hero running around a depressing post-apocalyptic city that's ripped off from Blade Runner. Crammed with plenty of violence and sleaze that readers will defend as 'cutting edge.'

— MAD #382, "If Truth in Advertising Laws Applied to Comic Books"

"Our entire reality changed and darkened. Working a dreadful reverse alchemy, Marcus Langston let our world slide from a Golden Age to a Silver Age, and finally to a Dark Age. Now, heroes motivated only by money or psychopatholgy (sic) stalked a paranoid, apocalyptic landscape of post-nuclear mutants and bazooka wielding cyborgs."

— Toby King, Youngblood: Judgment Day

"Seems like my style of professional behavior is out of fashion, at odds with this increasingly violent society. Maybe guys like the Punisher, Cable, and Wolverine are the answer to the kinds of threats America faces today. Maybe bad attitudes and lax moral codes are the only way to make headway. The values I've striven for my entire career seem so... untenable in this present clime. But without them, what am I?"

— Captain America, Operation: Galactic Storm Epilogue

Reviews

"It was an examination of the flaws in superheroism as seen through the lens of realism of ordinary humanity. But instead, we gets angsty superheroes completely failing to remember why they superhero at all."

— Red on Watchmen, Overly Sarcastic Productions, "Trope Talk: Realism"

In the eighties, some comic book writers 'deconstructed' heroism by showing the good guys to be unpleasant, greedy, lascivious — traits many readers found titillating, especially when grafted onto heroes from earlier eras. Those stories had some immediate shock value — they certainly got the audience's attention — but, over time, deconstruction is a very limiting narrative strategy. Where do you go, once you've shown your hero to be a creep?

— Denny O'Neil, The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics

Laura: BLOOD PACKS sounds like it should have been an insane New 52 comic written and drawn by Rob Liefeld. Just blood-filled pouches as far as the eye can see.
David: Blood Pack was a DC comic, Laura.
Laura: NO. Did I just invent the past with my mind? When was this? Was it the ’90s?
David: Of course it was.

— Laura Hudson and David Wolkin, "The Complete and Utter Insanity of Batman Odyssey"

The fact that Urich tried to call himself Green Goblin as a hero is the part of all this stupidity that really kills me. He could've used, like, the Flying Prankster or Happy Halloween Man, or anything that hadn't been used by a guy who killed people. Instead, he opts to do the equivalent of dressing up in a magical Adolf Hitler costume and striding out to become a superhero. This is not a fucking good idea. People aren't going to take it well. That didn't stop motherfucking Phil Urich.

— Topless Robot, "The 13 Dumbest Spider-Man Stories... Just from the Clone Saga"

The creators felt that Superman's moral, by-the-books boyscout routine was getting a little hokey, so they went ahead and violated everything that Superman stood for by having him grow a wicked beard, go shithouse-crazy on a couple of Hitlers and burn himself alive, and it was still one of the worst comics of all time.

— Cracked on Superman: At Earth's End

Creators

"I tend to think that I've seen a lot of things over the past 15 years that have been a bizarre echo of somebody else's bad mood. It's not even their bad mood, it's mine, but they're still working out the ramifications of me being a bit grumpy 15 years ago."

— Alan Moore, AV Club interview

"At the time, it was a dreadful setback for the idea of 'grown-up' superhero comics. In hindsight, it was America's inevitable reaction to Watchmen, and the only response that could possibly be effective: Fuck realism, we just want our superheroes to look cool and kick ten thousand kinds of ass."

—Grant Morrison, Supergods

"Comics in the '90s were profoundly shitty — they were dreadfully cynical exercises in whorish crap."

— Howard Chaykin, "On Superhero Absurdity"

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