The early ’90s were a wild time for comics, and it’s no exaggeration to say that seismic shake-ups were happening all across the medium. Nowhere was that more true than at Marvel, where creative teams of many years were being ousted in favor of new directions brought in by “fresh new artists” like Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Todd MacFarlane, and a handful of others. Stylism over substance took the industry by storm, and the effects of that, both positive and negative, are still felt to this day.
Amid the changing creative teams and the industry-wide trends that would ultimately define the era, there is Marvel’s Acts of Vengeance crossover. A core group of elite supervillains including William Fisk, Magneto, the Red Skull, and the Wizard (among others) recruited dozens of villains to attack different superheroes than they normally would under the premise that fighting slightly changing up the heroes’ rogue galleries would leave them permanently defeated. This… didn’t… work, mostly because there was zero strategy behind it. This razor-thin plot is typical of the time period: highly disjointed, and still completely badass, because it allowed months of page space dedicated to big, pointless brawls that didn’t really have to adhere to any kind of a coherent overarching plot outside of the ongoing stories within each individual book.
Collects: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (1963) #326-329, SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN (1976) #158-160, WEB OF SPIDER-MAN (1985) #59-61 and #64-65, WOLVERINE (1988) #19-20, ALPHA FLIGHT (1983) #79-80, NEW MUTANTS (1983) #86, UNCANNY X-MEN (1981) #256-258 and material from X-FACTOR (1986) #50 [Read more…] about Big Brawls and Brooding Babes in Acts of Vengeance: Spider-Man & The X-Men
. While it doesn’t rewrite the rules of superhero stories, Kirkman’s passion for the genre crackles on the page. The ideas and characters beg the question, “How has nobody ever thought of this idea before?” The story of Mark Grayson becoming the young superhero Invincible isn’t a Watchmen-style deconstruction, but a celebration of all the goofiest parts of the genre. I was a big fan of the comic when it was coming out, and I’ve returned to it a few times since the series concluded in 2018. Even with all of that in mind, Invincible the cartoon is a major step up from the comic. 
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, and we talk about what it’s like to be an editor-in-chief of a comics publisher in 2021!