I picked up comics intermittently as the 80’s gave way to the 90’s and my middle school years became my high school ones. I certainly know it’s true for me, and I assume it’s equally present in the mind of anyone else around my age who was into comics back then, but there’s a huge difference between “80’s comics” and “90’s comics”, or at least in the concepts those broad and oversimplified divisions might evoke. In the 60’s Marvel comics went from brand new upstarts in the superhero periodicals biz to basically the leading light of the industry. Then in the 70’s they got weirder, bigger, more complex along every axis. The 80’s were the decade when they knew what they were doing and did it with exemplary competence (give or take a misfiring New Universe or two). And then the 90’s got weird again, but not in a good way. In my recollection, the 90’s were when flashy hyperstylized art became way more important than storytelling, and if you haven’t already surmised, I was always way more into the stories than the art. I liked the art, but I was hooked by the characters and the plots. It also was far enough past the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” lessons of the mid-80’s for people to have forgotten those missteps, and even the more traditional artists and dedicated storytellers found themselves somehow tasked with producing updated takes on classic characters, with new costumes, new motivations, new origins or legacies or what have you, which were more in line with the cultural zeitgeist of the the end of the millennium - all things edgy, extreme and “kewl”.
But I am getting ahead of myself! Yes, when you say “80’s Marvel comics” I think of solid, classic best-of-breed and when you say “90’s Marvel comics” I think excess, over-indulgence, and oh yeah Marvel actually went bankrupt for a while. But on the one hand these are, again, broad generalizations and exceptions certainly existed in both directions. And on the other hand, there wasn’t some massive switch that flipped on January 1, 1990. So as my mid-teens progressed I checked in on Marvel’s newsstand offerings every now and then and found them, generally, to be recognizable and enjoyable.
And then a funny thing happened in the spring of 1990, the end of my sophomore year in high school. I had been in the marching band since I was a freshman and that year the band performed in Walt Disney World, which was a pretty sweet gig. Not the Main Street USA parade or anything, just a random little open-air performance in Tomorrowland, so we didn’t have to, like, spend a whole day showing up two hours early to assemble behind the scenes or anything like that. We mostly got a couple of days to go to the parks and have fun, except for a very short walk on/play a couple songs/walk off performance that justified the whole thing. I had been to Disney World with my family when I was younger, but going with my friends as a high schooler was something else.
Anyway, one evening we were at MGM Studios (which was less than a year old at the time) and roaming through a gift shop and they happened to have a comic book rack in the store. This was just a weird coincidence, as this was decades before Disney acquired Marvel. But my eyes happened to fall on this cover:
You guys. YOU. GUYS. That exact moment was the first I became aware that Marvel, after cancelling What If…? back in 1984, had brought it back. This was brand new What If…? and they were already up to issue #13, which featured my beloved X-Men. Of course I was gobsmacked, and my girlfriend took notice and said I should go ahead and buy it. That, in turn, was the exact moment I went from thinking “I’m trying to be a mature teen with a girlfriend, I probably shouldn’t obsess over comics anymore” to “maybe she wouldn’t totally object to my passion for comics?” I did buy it, I dug it, and I was newly re-interested in comics collecting.
(Also not for nothing but my parents balked a bit at the cost of this band trip to Florida so I had to save up for it some myself, which marked my entry at age 15 into the part-time workforce. Said afterschool employment continued after we got back from Disney World, as you might imagine, but now my paychecks became disposable income rather than being saved toward some specific goal. And comics were happy to eat up a good chunk of that.)
The wrinkle in all this was that What If…? was not the easiest comic to collect. The Disney World experience of stumbling across it notwithstanding, it was more of a direct market title than a newsstand title. Ugh, I will try to explain this as quickly as possible, but I lived through the retail transition which went from comics being something you would find at grocery stores or convenience stores, kept on spinner racks with no rhyme or reason whenever the store owner remembered to restock them, to comics being something you can only find at your Friendly Local Comics Shop which is dedicated primarily to comics, keeps everything organized and up to date, etc. And for a while there both of those models co-existed, and also for a while your Spider-Mans and X-Mens (and Supermans and Batmans) would be at the 7-11 pretty dependably, but your more obscure titles didn’t make the mass appeal cut as potential impulse buys, and so they had to be sought out specifically at the FLCS.
So yeah, if I wanted any more What If…? comics I would have to go to the shop, and fortunately we had one in town. But of course, once you get in the shop and you are surrounded by walls and walls of new comics plus a decent back-issue selection equivalent to what two or three dealers might bring to a show, are you just going to buy the one issue you came for? Especially when that comic only comes out once a month and maybe you go to the shop once a week or more? In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. Soon enough I was regularly picking up X-Men again, and the Avengers, and other random things as they struck my fancy.
Weird side-note, around this time my little bro got deeply into Spider-Man, specifically the title Web of Spider-Man, and once again our strange sibling rivalry dynamic reared its head. X-Men and Avengers were MY thing, and therefore not his, and Spider-Man (and the FF, as it happened) were HIS thing, and therefore not mine.
I still loved Spidey, and still do to this day! And partly it came down to economic efficiency, as I certainly read plenty of the Spider-Man and FF issues my little bro brought home, and saw no need to buy my own separate copies of what he was already going after. But I do admit there were some deeper issues of territoriality at play as well.
One last random note because I have to acknowledge it: I did eventually backtrack and get the first 12 issues of What If…? (vol. 2) I had missed. In a crazy bit of timing I would discover that the issue I had just missed, in other words the issue that would have been on the stands at the gift shop if the marching band trip to Florida had been a few weeks earlier, was this one:
Which, yes, would have likely led to the exact same outcome because once again it’s an X-Men-related cover. But not just any X-Men story! It’s the EXACT FREAKING STORY from X-Men Annual #10 that I had read in TD’s room years before which sent me down the Claremont mutant misadventure rabbithole. (Also, THROG! Thunder-god Frog!) I might not have actually gotten back into comics collecting because my head might have just exploded.
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