#but u can obv rb. spent all that time typing it out might as well put it out there into the world

[ufonaut]

i don’t speak for marvel as i don’t care for marvel but something that’s sincerely disconcerting to me about the constant dismissal of 90s dc comics as being “edgy” and nothing more from professionals within the medium and fans alike is that the countless complaints sound like a genuine refusal to engage with the material at best and an echo chamber at worst. the fact of the matter is that the majority of dc’s 90s output leaned visibly towards the sentiments of indie & underground comix and can be easily categorized as alternative at least in some manner.

in fact, a not negligible number of the protagonists of the post-zero hour titles were noticeably punk, grunge, goth or otherwise moving away from the squeaky clean images of their silver age predecessors not just in aesthetics but also in the values of the subcultures they represented. the “edgy” label on a whole lot of books hides the very clear anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist principles embedded in their text.

for example, take some of the titles most commonly dismissed as embodying everything a certain subset of comic readers seemingly hates: fate 1994/the book of fate 1997 and manhunter 1994. in both instances (and here, i’m counting fate & book as one thing since the latter is a soft reboot of the former), these books have been cited as not worthy of carrying on the legacy of their respective mantles.

yet, fate & the book of fate feature a working class protagonist living in abject poverty who’s turned to small-time crime when no other opportunity had come up for a person like him; even once jared stevens -- fate -- becomes the bearer of that iconic title, he’s resolutely distrusted by mainstream superheroes due to the way he looks and acts, arrested several times (with the implication that he’d already been intimately familiar with the process), and finds himself a wanted man despite saving the world because the justice league refuses to speak up on his behalf. the book of fate, especially, serves as a subtle commentary on social class dynamics and how despite effectively fulfilling a ‘chosen one’ role, jared would never be welcome into the superhero community at large solely because he’s unable to carry himself the “right” way (the straight, upper middle-class, sanitized way).

similarly, companion piece scare tactics 1996 has jared stevens and his best friend arnold burnsteel -- a hacker with explicitly radically left politics who’s hacked into government databases a number of times -- free several teenage ‘monsters’ (a werewolf, vampires, etc), two of whom are lgbt, from a government facility. arnold and the kids spend the rest of the series on the run. fantastical premise or not, you’d be hard-pressed to find a modern comic book published by one of the big two that has the fbi & the cia as its villains.

beyond that, we’ve got the aforementioned manhunter 1994 and the commentary on an exploitative music industry contained within. chase lawler, down-on-his-luck session guitarist, practically sells his soul to save his girlfriend and brother from a downward spiral of drugs and greedy management and a media circus that had destroyed them. within the text, the blame is squarely placed on capitalism and abusive aspects of the media industry still widely talked about and criticized today.

and these are just the most reviled titles in dc’s 90s catalogue. if one cared to read through the rest of it, it’d hard not to notice these themes cropping up again and again: the hacker files 1992 follows an anarchist collective hacking into the pentagon and canonically equates the justice league to a us military task force, green arrow 1988 #102-103 (which came out in 1995) has connor hawke going up against an obvious disney expy looking to build an amusement park on the grounds of the ashram he’d grown up in, the creeper 1997 explores psych wards as an inherently violent form of incarceration, etc etc.

this is getting long enough but it’s all to say, if your sole opinion on 90s dc is that it’s some gritty edgy nonsense with no merit then you’re a cop :/