Well I'm glad you haven't listed Peter David's 90s Hulk run as being bad. If you had, well comments like that are what get me to take my boxing gloves out.

'90s comics I like:

• Amazing Spider-Man #400 (Ask me why I dislike John Byrne so much, and his nullification of this perfect sendoff for Aunt May is the top reason why.)
• Bone
• Essentially any comic illustrated by Mark Bagley featuring Venom
• The few "Ben Reilly-as-Spidey" storylines where Ben was allowed to be Spider-Man without Clone Saga nonsense gumming up the works
• Hellboy
• Most of Dark Horse's Star Wars output
• Simpsons Comics
  
• Spider-Girl (This title allowed me to get my Spidey fix after the death of Reilly and the coming of Byrne ruined the mainline titles for me.)
• The Triangle Era (Admittedly, there are large swaths of this era I haven't read.)
• Untold Tales of Spider-Man
• Many of the Valiant titles

They were in certain areas: variety within the marketplace, the advancement of the artform, the level of quality at the Big Two, and the health of the Direct Market. The biggest problem of the 90s was the catering to the Speculator Boom. That took precedent over good storytelling and quality material. Suddenly, everything had to have a gimmick to make it a collectible. It didn't matter if you had To Kill A Mockingbird for a story, you better have a trading card, a chromium, die-cut cover, a pog, or 18,329 variant covers, which interlocked to form a mural. And no, that's not an exaggeration. Much.

In terms of advancing the artform, we lost a lot of the real supporters of comics as art. Some of them stuck it through; but, we lost a lot of great companies who published art, first. now, you can say they went under because they published art and not commercial products; but, that art was selling well, not long before. The 90s saw DC and Marvel (and then Image) just flood the market with crap and because it was DC and Marvel (and Image) distributors and retailers lapped it up and left no space for alternative material. There are artistic works in the 90s; but, there was so much more experimentation with the form and within the form in the 80s (end the late 70s). A lot of that fell by the wayside. Even some of the indies spent more time doing commercial junk, than what had been a profitable bread and butter. Dark Horse decides to do a superhero universe and it was a fart in a whirlwind, except for one title (maybe two, as X lasted longer than the others). The concepts weren't especially original or well developed and laid there. Thankfully, Legend had some strong stuff to whet your appetite.

The quality at the Big Two plummeted. They became obsessed with event programming and gimmick tie-ins that they lost sight of story and concept. Not in everything, but across broad swaths of their lines. Marvel was in total chaos, after Shooter was gone, with DeFalco not being a strong leader and the McAndrews owners bleeding them dry of revenue, then imperiling them financially, with ill-advised acquisitions. The end result was bankruptcy. That proved to be a crucible that helped Marvel rebuild. DC was less a mess, editorially; but, dumb things were happening. they churned out Batman material until you vomited grey and blue; some of it good, much just average. Lots of books lost direction and started floundering. Events disrupted the momentum on titles. Spin-off concepts were dubious, at best, with many of these events. Zero Hour produced one good title: Starman.

The health of the market was severely damaged. The Speculator boom suckered all kinds of dreamers and idiots into the market and retailers lost their heads, as always happens when you have an investment bubble that is based on unrealistic fantasies than historical market forces. It was the Tulip Bulb Futures and Debentures/Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis of the Direct Market. It had to give and it did, in spades. Once the suckers tried to sell their irrational hordes of new comics, they found that there was no demand for them and they were worthless. demand drives market price, not scarcity. An item can be scarce; but, if there is no need for it from consumers, it has a low market price. High demand and low availability brings a high market price. That's basic economics. What we had was High quantity, low demand, but high buying of books because they were #1s or gimmicks, or whatever. The speculators left in droves, retailers and distributors were left with cases of unsold product (upon which they had speculated) just as had happened in 1987, with the Black & White Boom. Problem is, this was way bigger. On top of that, Marvel (rather, McAndrews) decided they should own their own distribution to force higher rates on retailers, their real customers (not fans or readers). If they were the sole source, they could dictate terms and freeze out the rest, effectively. So, they bought Heroes World, a regional distributor, tried to run national accounts, with nearly every shop in the country, with the same level of staffing. it was a fiasco from day 1. Orders were mixed up, went unfilled, payments were lost, you name it. they sunk millions trying to straighten it out. DC, recognizing what Marvel was trying to do, instead of backing all the existing distributors, decided to play the same game, with Diamond, entering an agreement that made Diamond their exclusive distributor, with the right to purchase Diamond, outright. Dark Horse and Image, could have helped shore up things by keeping the status quo; but, they believed that the way to move was with DC, as the Number Two. So, Capital was left only with the independents and threw in the towel, selling out to Diamond. That sank most of the vibrant indies, as they had no one working with them to promote their titles to retailers. retailers had all of their cash tied up in buying from at least two different distributors, with very different terms. It killed their liquidity and many, who already ran on margin before, started falling like dominoes. Then, Marvel crashed an burned and went back to Diamond, while they went into Chapter 11 to keep Carl Icahn from getting his hands on the company. In the end, McAndrews still lost the company and Ike Perlmutter, of Toy Biz, made out like a bandit, when Disney bought the company for a hell of a lot more than he paid for it, to take it out of bankruptcy.

So, in those areas; yes, the 90s sucked and sucked harder than a black hole trying to drink a McDonald's shake. As for content; it depends on your tastes. I was losing interest in superhero comics, by the 90s and was reading more alternative work. there was plenty of that: Sin City, Hellboy, Grendel, Bone, A Distant Soil, Starchild, Eightball, Hate, Vertigo, Negative Burn, Strangers in Paradise, Iron Empires, Sandman. If you were a superhero fan, there were people who were doing engaging work: Marvels, Kingdom Come, Flash, Hulk, Astro City, Starman, Morrison's JLA. If you liked quirky, idiosyncratic stuff, there was a ton of it, from Chris Ware, to Dan Clowes, to Sarah Dyer, Evan Dorkin, Harvey Pekar, R Crumb, Terry Laban, Martin Wagner, Greg Hyland, Sam Kieth and Bill Loebs, Jason Lutes, Jessica Abel, Seth, Los Bros Hernandez, James Robinson, Eric Shanower, P Craig Russell, on and on.

Alan Moore started the decade leaving mainstream comics to do his own stuff, got sidetracked, did work for Image to give them some kind of direction, then found the fun in comics again and ended with his ABC books. You could find personal works, like Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby, the comics of Alison Bechdel, Dan Clowes, Harvey Pekar and Joyce babner's Our Cancer Year.

Tons of great product, floating in a sea of drek, like Youngblood, endless Lobo mini-series, umpteen Wolverine guest appearances, and every bad girl on the planet. There has always been crap with the good stuff; but, ther per capita of crap in the 90s was much higher than the previous or subsequent decades. Thing is, the bulk f it appeared in a narrow window of time, yet the repercussions were felt across the decade and after.

I have several hundred comic books from the '90s in my collection. They wouldn't be there if I thought they were bad.

Cei-U!
I summon the testimonial!

I think there were some good comics coming from Marvel and DC from 1996-97. I've gone back and investigated some of them. I feel badly that a lot of the people who might've enjoyed them would, like me, have left completely by that point. The worst of the wee grimacing heads, huge thighs and massive fantasy guns thing seemed to have subsided, not to mention the insane grinning mad person shtick. So maybe it's more like 1988-95 was really bad, at least for the super types of comics.

yes.

yes they were