July & August 1992

Marvel struggled at first to replace the Image guys. Spider-Man was the most problematic book. Given it had been a vehicle for McFarlane to write and draw his own stories, it didn't have much reason to exist without Todd at the helm. Larsen was a decent replacement as folks were conditioned to him replacing him on Amazing Spider-Man. However, when he left, Fingeroth was in a bind. His initial idea seemed to be to treat Spider-Man as Spidey's version of Legends of the Dark Knight and have different creative teams do Spider-Man stories. They tried that for a while without much success. Occasionally, they'd have the other Spider-Man writers do crossover issues, or Fingeroth would write the issues himself. Finally in '94, Howard Mackie and Tom Lyle took over. 

The X-office scrambled for a while, but eventually were able to secure Andy Kubert on X-Men, Brandon Peterson on Uncanny X-Men, and Greg Capullo on X-Force. X-Factor is a bit of a mess with Larry Stroman leaving prior to the crossover, Jae Lee guest penciling those issues, and Joe Quesada coming on board just as Peter David was leaving. Alan Davis would remain on Excalibur for a while longer, though I'm not sure if it was considered an X-book as Harras wasn't editing it and it never featured in the X-book crossovers. 

The Midnight Sons line began and would grow to include Morbius, Darkhold, Ghost Rider/Blaze: Spirits of Vengeance, and Nightstalkers. This was one case where I thought it was smart to introduce the new books with a crossover. It was also much clearer that this line was based around Ghost Rider, as opposed to The Big Guns with its vague Punisher focus.

The Spider-Man books are taking turns having hologram covers to celebrate Spidey's 30th anniversary. Fingeroth was against this idea, but was encouraged to about the royalties his creators would receive. J.M. DeMatteis still managed to produce his classic Spectacular Spider-Man #189 story despite the nuisance cover. 

Captain America turns into a werewolf during the bi-weekly summer story. People hate this storyline almost as much as they hate Liefeld's Heroes Reborn.

J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Zeck produce Amazing Spider-Man: Soul of the Hunter as some kind of PSA against suicide after complaints surrounding Kraven's suicide in Kraven's Last Hunt. 

There aren't any curiosities at this point as Marvel seems focused on sales. 

Is that the "Ceremony" graphic novel by Dwayne McDuffie and Robin Chaplik? Knowing Byrne, he objected 50% to the concept of someone else writing a character that he was writing, and 50% to something they had that character do.

Claremont was thinking, "If I'm not allowed to use Elektra, I'll make my own Psylektra!" And people ate it up (and still do), so I guess he was right.

Fingeroth may have taken this idea from the cover of McFarlane's #1, which said "the legend of the arachknight."

September & October 1992

Marvel couldn't have been anymore boring at this point if they'd tried. There were more books being published than ever before, but so many of them were mediocre. That wasn't reflected in sales since Marvel still had its cash cows, but the company felt stale and no longer innovative. It wasn't from lack of trying since they produced the books that were asked of them, but there was a definite shortage of ideas at the House of Ideas.

Occasionally, something interesting from Epic would slip through the cracks, like James Robinson and Steve Yeowell doing a book called 67 Seconds. I wasn't buying that type of stuff in 1992, but as an adult reader, I'm much more interested in stuff from the UK being filtered through Epic than I am in foil embossed covers. It's hard to blame DeFalco, or editorial, since the Andrews Group was running a fine toothed comb over sales figures, but it's such a mediocre product they're pedaling to the consumer.

That said, how hard did they have to try? DC sales were terrible at this time. Image sold well, but they only had a handful of titles released each month. Marvel was competing with itself and that meant pumping out the same crap month after month. 

I do want to make note of one book, however, and that's the two part Cable series. It was written by Fabian Nicieza and drawn by John Romita Jr. The reason I want to highlight it is that not only did Nicieza try to make sense of the millions of ideas that Liefeld threw out into the world but never had an explanation for, but it launched an ongoing Cable series that lasted until 2002. That feels like a miracle within the 90s environment. I'm not saying it's worth reading. I just think it's an example of what might have been if Cable had been one of a handful of new characters to debut in the early 90s instead of a handful of new ideas per month. 

This was the time when you could put "Punisher" on your shopping list and it would be a best seller.

November & December 1992

Marvel's most successful new line of 1992 was Marvel 2099. It started out as project between Stan Lee and John Byrne. Stan talked it up for several months in his Marvel Age column, but Stan and Byrne differed on their vision for the project and Byrne wound up taking his ideas to Dark Horse where he published his 2112 graphic novel and Next Men series. Stan's idea morphed into Marvel 2099, and he remained involved in the project for a short time with his work on the Ravage 2099 book. Spider-Man 2099 was the most successful of the new titles, but all of the books sold well, particularly the first issues. It's no surprise that Spider-Man 2009 was successful as it was written by Peter David, who was arguably the best writer Marvel had at the time. It can rightly be considered one of the bright spots in an otherwise dreary year for Marvel.

The summer X-Men crossover became a fall X-Men crossover. It's purpose was to clean up some of the mess Liefeld had left behind. I was here, I bought it, but I can proudly say that I ripped open the poly backs to get at the trading cards.

Fall was a big time for Hulk fans with the publication of Incredible Hulk #400 and Hulk: Future Imperfect. The latter was one of the best series of its era, and really an outstanding piece of work for its time. 

Digging through the crates, so to speak, there's a Bill Sienkiewicz Wolverine story with some pretty cool art, another Moebius Airtight Garage spinoff, and the Ren and Stimpy comic.

The award for Most Annoying New Character of 1992 goes to Slapstick. 

The best selling Marvel comic of 1992 wouldn't be published until the second week of December. Can you guess what it was?