Marvel in the ’90s began the decade as the purveyor of the bestselling superhero comics, but would have a precipitous fall before slowly rising back to the top. In the late ’80s, the publisher began pushing a new cadre of fan favorite artists, and this led to the early years of the ’90s being more style than substance. This would be a major problem when the superstar artists left the publisher, and the company gained a new rival in Image Comics. The two of them tried to out-extreme each other in the ’90s, with Marvel copying the flavor of their rival’s comics. It was a creative time, at least, but not all of that creativity created great things.
The ’90s have a certain reputation among comic fans, and Marvel played a huge role in defining that rather unfortunate honor. There are loads of cringe characters from the publisher, and several of them have gone on to become extremely popular somehow. These five Marvel characters are the definition of cringe ’90s, examples of why the decade of extreme is mocked by so many.
Spawn helped define the ’90s, the popularity of the character allowing Image Comics to become a near unstoppable force in the comic industry. Copycat characters were always a part of superhero comics; a lot of Image characters were copied off Marvel characters, and the House of Ideas got in on that game as well after the new publisher’s debut. Nightwatch is the epitome of a copycat hero. Everything about the character’s appearance was meant to evoke Spawn. He feels like a character meant to fool parents buying comics off the newsstands for their kids who wanted Spawn comics. He’s cringe personified.
The ’90s weren’t the best time for the Avengers. The X-Men were much more popular than Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and Marvel decided to copy some aspects of the mutant team’s comics to give them a shot in the arm. Deathcry is one of those characters. Deathcry is a Shi’Ar warrior who came to Earth. Unlike most Shi’Ar, who were based on birds, she was more feline, and was based on X-Force member Feral (more on her next). She was wild and violent, using her sharp claws to cut her opponents down to size. She was a copy of a copy, a character with no originality in her. While Avengers artist Steve Epting made her look like a million bucks, she was so very cringe.
When the New Mutants first debuted, they had a member called Wolfsbane. She was a werewolf girl, able to transform into a wolf or werewolf form. She ended up leaving the team and when the New Mutants became X-Force, she was about to become a member of X-Factor. The new X-team needed a character based on her, and readers got Feral. She was a more feline Wolfsbane-like character, except she was all about the violence. She was mean and nasty to everyone, but followed Cable’s orders. She is as cringe as they come, and not just because Rob Liefeld drew her; she was just extreme Wolfsbane, a copycat hero, and would fade away before being killed by Sabretooth in the ’00s.
Let’s be real for a moment — this entire list could have just been Rob Liefeld characters. Stryfe was Liefeld’s design aesthetic to a tee, an ostentatious design that grabbed the eye but made no sense. Stryfe is several cliches in one, a clone of Cable from a dark future out to make sure that future happened and destroy his other self. He’s everything bad about ’90s X-Men comics brought to life, a character that was inexplicably popular despite being the lamest thing that you can imagine. Stryfe has lived past his ’90s heyday, but that doesn’t mean he’s a good character. He is ’90s cringe personified, and it will never not be odd that he got as popular as he did.
Adam-X the X-Treme is the most Rob Liefeld character that wasn’t created by Rob Liefeld. The character was like a ’90s Mountain Dew commercial made at the X Games. There’s blades, there’s the flowing hair, and the backwards baseball cap. Even his powers were extreme, as he was able to heat up the blood of his enemies (if he was a Liefeld character, “blood” certainly would have been in his name). There were rumors that Adam-X was going to be the third Summers brother, but someone at Marvel made the intelligent decision not to do that. He’s the epitome of a relic of the ’90s.
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