CAPTAIN AMERICA, Annual 9 (Thomas / Valentino, et al; Marvel, 1990)

Every Wednesday morning, I make a blind pull from Siri's (randomized) choice of one of the 20 alphabetically-organized shortboxes that constitute my comics collection, (re-)read it, write about it, and publish the resultant review / memory / whatever. Earlier installments live here.

(Box05): One of the first issues that sent me into this 34-year comics collecting spiral, its Iron Man blasting Cap cover drawing nine-year-old me to the stand at The Grocery Bag in Millersburg, OH, one of two local 90s gateways to the comics world but the only one that had Smurf Ice Cream (vanilla colored blue with Smurf blood or something) and an omnipresent smell of wet cardboard (unrelated to Smurf ice cream, probably) wafting about but the comic itself, revisited after 33 years: if CIVIL WAR was an entertaining Cap-v-Iron Man throwdown, it's got nothing on TERMINUS FACTOR's volcano-creature tainted fish-fry-laden Cap-v-Iron fisticuffs in a small mountain town: did the first chapter of CIVIL WAR end with an angry, red-eyed, tainted-fish-infected bear striking a pre-Image Jim Valentino-drawn pose after killing a deer while an Anti-Monitor lookalike hovered overhead? I think not. By virtue of a pre-COCAINE BEAR cocaine bear, it wins. Millar, eat your heart out.

The two other stories – a WWII-flashback by Randall Frenz and a pre-Spidey Mark Bagley and a prelude to the NOMAD limited series (which ends with Jack Monroe assuming the mullet and eye-dilation sunglasses look that would define the EXTREME nineties) – are, as per most annuals, largely forgettable – following tainted-fish Cap-Iron Man throwdown is nothing if not an unenviable task but it does bring up a point: I've long been dismayed that annuals were (and are) treated as an afterthought, a fifth-week stuffing of second-rate material to fill space, a lost opportunity. Feels like every approach has been tried – company-wide crossovers in the nineties, but even those were second-rate (BLOODLINES, anyone?), the "story behind the story" approach (Superboy Prime punched a wall and reanimated Jason Todd) in the naughties, etc etc – but nothing ever felt right.

Clearly, the only solution is more tainted-fish-fry cocaine bears.

BLOODBATH, No. 1 (Raspler / Wojtkiewicz, Willingham; DC, 1993)

Every Wednesday morning, I make a blind pull from Siri's (randomized) choice of one of the 20 alphabetically-organized shortboxes that constitute my comics collection, (re-) read it, write about it, and publish the resultant review/memory/whatever. Earlier installments live here.

(Box05): oh god you did it again (inauspicious box-selecting debut, Siri) but what an opening line: "WE DON'T KNOW WHERE THEY'RE FROM OR WHAT THEY WANT -- OTHER THAN OUR SPINAL FLUID."

How very, very 1993: Super-mullet! AzBats! (for whom I still have an odd affection – perhaps because he was so exemplary (by design) of the 90s aesthetic, as if it vomited all over an institution) Bloodwynd! (Martian Manhunter, IIRC – even though he's behind Pres. Clinton one page and Bloodwynd is on the next as part of a group getting chewed out by Amanda Waller nevermind that later he and MM are fighting the same creature on the same page; J’onn was a busy bee in the ‘90s) heavily-armored male characters interspersed with barely-clothed female characters spouting cheesy expository dialogue!

IIRC, this was the bookend to a series of annuals, back when each of DC's annuals had an overarching theme: one year was Elseworlds, another Year One, another ECLIPSO: THE DARKNESS WITHIN. Didn't this one, BLOODLINES, spawn a whole bunch of new, EXTREME, takes on DC characters (the ones who survived their spinal fluid being consumed)? Fate, Manhunter... there were a few others that escape me. Was this the one that Robinson's STARMAN series spun out of? If so, not all bad. (Note: need to pick up that omnibus...)

As for the content: mostly a bunch of fighting and hitting things with aforementioned cheesy, expository dialogue. See photo excerpt above and you get the picture.

What I've come to recognize about the 90s in comics was that it wasn’t entirely devoid of good ideas but rather that most of them were ruined by the EXTREME stylistic excesses of the day: look to the Graham / Roy 2012-16 redux of Liefeld's PROPHET or several of the WILDC.A.T.S. revivals to see this stuff work in the hands of less baroque hands. All that being said, I'm not sure there's much to salvage with BLOODLINES / BLOODBATH – though I suppose it could be argued that the CW's FLASH merged this (minus the spinal-fluid-sucking creatures) with FLASHPOINT to create that whole "new metahuman" storyline in season three.

Someday, randomness, you'll remind me of the good in my early comics collecting days. Someday – but not today.