I have a confession to make....

Although my personal favorite era of American comic books happens to be the Bronze Age (John Byrne, George Perez, Jim Starlin, etc.), I have a very special place in my heart for the comics of the early 90s.

You see, I first got into comic books around 1992-1993 (when I was around eight years old). It was a very....magical time for a little geek like me.

For one thing, comics were experiencing record sales numbers (which they've never been able to match since). In fact, X-Men #1 is still the biggest selling comic book issue in the history of the medium. This was partly because Marvel came up with the idea of creating four variant covers for the issue, all of which formed a single image when put together (yeah, It's kind of an underhanded gimmick by today's standards, but it was a new thing back then).

But something else started to happen back then. All of the sudden, the artists were actually getting as much attention (if not more attention) as the titles they were drawing. No longer was it just X-Men, but Jim Lee's X-men. No longer was it just Spider-man, but Todd McFarlane's Spider-man. It wasn't just New Mutants, but it was Rob Liefeld's New Mutants (the latter even starred in a commercial for Levi jeans).

This all culminated in one of the biggest events in comic book history. In 1992, seven popular artists from Marvel Comics -Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen, Whilce Portacio, and Jim Valentino- left that company, and went on to form their own company: Image Comics. The first book to be published by Image was Rob Liefeld's Youngblood (I still have this issue), which was then followed by such others as Jim Lee's WildC.A.T.S and, most famously, Todd McFarlane's Spawn (whose first issue is the single biggest selling independent comic book in American history).

What followed was a....weird time for comics. These days, many will often mock the early 90s as the dark age of comics. The speculator market crashed and nearly killed the industry. Worst of all, many blame Image for it.

In fact, to be honest the only artist to remain in the industry unscathed and still find regular work (and to still be highly popular), is Jim Lee. Todd McFarlane hasn't drawn an issue of Spawn since around issue 13. Rob Liefeld, although he still gets work and is still a big seller, has become the punching bag of the industry (I've met him once or twice. He's a pretty cool guy).

You had to have been there, I guess. *shrugs*