Recovery and Marvel Knights

Marvel files for bankruptcy, loses its way, and then quietly gets good again. The X-line drifts through four writers in three years. Everywhere else, Kurt Busiek rebuilds the Avengers, invents the Thunderbolts, and Joe Quesada starts an imprint that will hand him the whole company. Read the parallel tracks, not the mutants.

Why you are reading this era

This is the only era in the book where the X-books are the weakest thing on the shelf. The Onslaught fallout left the mutant line with no direction, and editorial changed that direction every eight months. Two good writers were hired and pushed out. A third, Alan Davis, was handed both books and then handed a crossover he did not want.

The recovery happens in two other places. Kurt Busiek puts the Avengers back together after Heroes Reborn and writes 56 issues that are the clearest statement of what an Avengers comic is. He and Mark Bagley then take the leftovers of that same event and build Thunderbolts, a book with a premise so good it is still being filmed thirty years later. Second, in September 1998, Marvel outsources four low-selling titles to Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti. Marvel Knights hires people who are not Marvel people and lets them work. Daredevil, Black Panther and Inhumans all come out of that corner better than they went in.

Three threads start here and pay off much later. Bastion is beaten in 1997 and returns as the architect of Second Coming in 2010. Norman Osborn is confirmed alive in December 1996 and runs United States security in Dark Reign in 2008. Daredevil volume 2 launches in 1998, and its issue #16 in 2000 is Brian Michael Bendis’s first Marvel work of consequence. Everything the next chapter stands on is already on the stands when this one ends.

The reading list

In time: Operation Zero Tolerance and Thunderbolts #1 are 1997, Avengers volume 3 starts in February 1998, Marvel Knights starts that September, and the X-line finishes with The Twelve in early 2000. Read Track B first.

Track A: Mutant

Operation Zero Tolerance is the last time the 1990s X-office tries an event at full volume. Bastion is a Sentinel wearing a man, and his Prime Sentinels are ordinary people who do not know what has been done to them. Good idea, eighteen chapters, six titles, and it is capture-and-escape by part nine. Read the two issues in the table. The verdict is skeptical, but note the name. Bastion is the one thing this era builds that a later writer uses properly, in Second Coming.

Then the line drifts. Seagle and Kelly were hired in late 1997 to make the books strange again, and most of what they set up was reversed. Alan Davis produced clean, classical superhero comics for about a year before The Twelve consumed them. One sentence is all you need from The Twelve: Apocalypse takes Cyclops as a host body, so Cyclops leaves the X-Men, and Jean Grey’s search for him is what Grant Morrison inherits in 2001.

Deadpool #1 is the outlier. Joe Kelly took a Liefeld mercenary with no interior life and gave him a conscience, a hostage roommate, and a habit of talking to the reader. Every version since, on paper or on screen, comes from this run.

Track B: Avengers and cosmic

Avengers volume 3 is the best pure superhero Avengers run there is. No deconstruction, no grim reinvention. Busiek’s argument is that the Avengers are a public institution with a roster, a charter and a public relations problem, and that this is interesting. Perez draws crowds better than anyone alive, and the book uses that. Ultron Unlimited is the high point and the most violent thing Busiek wrote at Marvel. Ultron does to a small nation exactly what a machine that hates humanity would do, and the Avengers arrive too late. The run continues past this era into the Kang Dynasty, Avengers #41-55.

Thunderbolts #1 is the other essential. Do not read a synopsis and do not let anyone tell you the premise.

Track C: Street level and Marvel Knights

Guardian Devil is a Catholic guilt story with a baby in it, and it works better than that sounds. Its real function is structural. It makes Daredevil a book serious people want to write, it kills Karen Page in issue #5, and it puts Quesada on the path to Editor-in-Chief. The handoff is the point. Bendis writes Daredevil #16-19 with David Mack in 2000, then takes the book with Alex Maleev from #26 and stays to #81.

Priest’s Black Panther is the sleeper of the imprint. It is told out of order by an unreliable American bureaucrat, it treats Wakanda as a state with foreign policy, and it reveals that T’Challa joined the Avengers to spy on them. Read the first twelve issues and decide.

Track D: Spider-Man

Track F: Solo and standalone

Inhumans is the pinned hidden gem of this era and the best-looking Marvel comic of the decade. Jae Lee draws stillness and negative space, Jenkins writes a royal family as a political problem, and the twelve issues need nothing from any other book. Read it even if you never touch another Inhumans comic.

Earth X is a future-history of the whole Marvel Universe told as an exegesis. It is dense, talky, and it assumes you recognize every third-tier character on the page. It is also very good, which is why it is Optional and not Skip. Come back to it after Era 8.

Cross-book checkpoints

Characters introduced

Retcon notes

Adaptation notes

Checkpoint