Week of Review - Generation X

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In 1991 ­X-Men volume 2 #1 came out and became the highest selling single issue of all time.  It was a huge milestone for Marvel comics as well as the entire decade, cementing the ‘90s as a time for comic book opulence and speculator driven sales.  More pertinently, it was the comic that launched the X-Men from a popular franchise into a moneymaking juggernaut that would dominate the next half of the decade.  Within a year Marvel had partnered with Fox to produce X-Men the animated series and its toy line, one of the most successful brand exercises in the entire superhero genre. 

Of course, this kind of success can’t last forever and by 1996 the X-Men were a lot less stable a franchise.  They were still producing hits, like that year’s Age of Apocalypse story, but the writing was very much on the wall for them and for Marvel, with bankruptcy right around the corner.  Still, they managed to produce one last hurrah for the X-Men franchise in 1996 with a live-action pilot film for a proposed X-Men TV show: Generation X. 

Comics Rainbow - Vampires

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Vampires; there’s a trend that really didn’t manage to survive the decade.  I’m not saying we don’t have vampire stories anymore, in fact, the upcoming release of the 5^th Underworld film is the entire reason I elected to dedicate this article to the subject.  But in a much more pointed way vampires just aren’t the cultural draw they were in that window of transition from 2007-2010.  

You can probably blame Twilight for that, as it both catalyzed vampires as a popular craze while also poisoning the well for all future vampire stories- hence why most of the Twilight imitators gravitated towards young adult fiction than vampires.  Still, the undead probably won’t be going away entirely given that they’ve been a staple of pop culture since Nosferatu, to the point they’ve thoroughly colonized comics as well as movies, TV, and books.  So let’s get the full spectrum on comic book vampires.