Back to the Future: Marvel 2099

We’ve still got 88 years to see if “Shock” catches on as a curse word or a religion gets organized around Thor, but already Marvel’s 2099 line of comics—despite only lasting six years—has proven groundbreaking in its own way.

The 2099 imprint kicked off in 1992 as a look at the possible future of the Marvel Universe with four core titles centered around three new versions of familiar characters and one all-new creation: Spider-Man 2099, Punisher 2099, Doom 2099 and Ravage 2099. It was an interesting mix with Marvel’s most recognizable figure, one of the most popular stars of the 90’s, a classic villains featured as a protagonist for the first time ever and a wild card co-created by none other than Stan Lee.

All four pillars of 2099 were a mixture of familiarity and experimentation. Miguel O’Hara, aka Spider-Man, was a scientist and a wisecracker like his predecessor, but notably older and with a darker edge, his humor coming in the form of cynicism rather than quips and his motivation having as much to do with revenge and survival as responsibility. The new Punisher, Jake Gallows, emerged from virtually the same circumstances as Frank Castle—his family being killed by criminals—but lived in a world where corruption generally trumped law and thus coming off far more sympathetic in his violent approach to justice than his counterpart. Doom’s origins were tinged in mystery, as he claimed to be the original bearer of the name, but in this time he acted more as a hero than a tyrant. Paul-Phillip Ravage—showing that Stan Lee had weaned somewhat off his alliteration addiction by the 90’s but not completely—was a corporate CEO forced into a life of fugitive vigilantism when he questioned his corporate masters and was framed for murder.

As far as my personal experience, I sampled Spider-Man 2099 and would check in occasionally, but wasn’t a regular reader. I bought the first issue of Punisher 2099—the first Punisher comic of any kind I ever purchased, I believe—and was intrigued, but for whatever reason did not get #2. I didn’t pick up any of the early issues of Doom 2099 or Ravage 2099, despite the concept of Doom as a hero and a new Stan Lee creation grabbing my attention at least in passing.

X-Men 2099 was the book that brought me into the imprint—as detailed here—as I was buying anything X-Men at the time and also loved the work of artist Ron Lim. When the five titles crossed over in “Fall of the Hammer” I got every chapter, which prompted me to buy a few more issues of Spider-Man 2099 as well as at least one non-Stan Lee-written Ravage 2099, but I disengaged quickly and then stuck with X-Men until Lim left before departing myself.

There were many additional points I contemplated checking out more 2099—when Doom took over America or when he got deposed and half the original characters got killed—but I never took that leap. It’s only now, having read a bit more of the imprint in trade and random issues as well as having the whole of its span to step back and look at, that I can see how prescient 2099 was in many ways.

Building the world of 2099 was not that unlike building the original Marvel Universe in the Silver Age must have been, with distinct and disparate characters linked together by their shared world. Where Stan Lee and his collaborators used the familiarity of New York City and little touches like newspaper headlines and cameos, the founding fathers of 2099 created an elaborate and thought out landscape where corporations became king and the comfortable heroes we knew were elevated to mythic proportions as avatars of an idyllic age. Big business as the ultimate villain and embodied by Alchemax, the company where Miguel O’Hara worked and came into his abilities, took central root in Spider-Man 2099, but played a major part in Ravage, influenced the creation of the Punisher, and would eventually show up in Doom, X-Men, Hulk, Ghost Rider and the rest. The Thorite religion was first touched upon by Jake Gallows, but would again spread across 2099 and serve as the core of its first crossover.

By 1992, the idea of an editorial office coordinating multiple titles was not a new one, as the X-Men fielded a minimum of four books at any given time and regularly crossed stories from one to the other. A fledgling imprint where characters shared aspects was not groundbreaking either, given the New Universe a few years earlier, Valiant hitting its stride and Milestone around the corner. Yet the cohesive future world imagined by 2099 and the ways in which the series within seemed to mesh so naturally and remain able to still stand on their own certainly merits some kudos.

It’s also interesting to look at the range of creative voices when it comes to the writers responsible for the 2099 books and impressive how in step such a varied group was. You had the already veteran Peter David on Spider-Man, relative rookie John Francis Moore on Doom—and later X-Men—the British duo of Pat Mills and Tony Skinner on Punisher, and of course Stan Lee on Ravage. Chuck Dixon and Len Kaminski would be among the others to dip their toes in the 2099 pool, and Warren Ellis made some of his first major contributions to American comics with a run on Doom 2099 that would revamp the entire line. It’s a testament to editor Joey Cavalieri that he was able to mesh these disparate voices into a comics symphony.

Speaking of the Ellis-helmed Doom 2099, it led to the kind of line-wide overhaul we see frequently today, but was not common practice in the mid-90’s. Ellis revealed Doom to conclusively be the original and then had him take over the United States, sending ramifications through every 2099 title—the whole imprints was renamed “2099 A.D.” standing for “2099 After Doom”—from the Punisher becoming his enforcer as leader of a reconstituted S.H.I.E.L.D. to the X-Men receiving their own West coast “Utopia” nearly two decades before it was trendy. Major characters like The Punisher, Ravage and The Hulk met their end when Doom got ousted from office and every title again underwent seismic changes (this is about the time I jumped off, as I was getting out of comics for a bit altogether).

Looking back, while Doom conquering America is the type of thing that would never fly in the Marvel Universe circa 1994 or so, it made for a great story 15 years later with Norman Osborn in a similar—albeit fairly different—position. I’m not saying Dark Reign was a retread of After Doom—beyond the surface similarities there’s far more different than the same, and the basic trope is a pretty well-worn one—but 2099 was in some ways Marvel’s testing ground of the early-to-mid 90’s; the place you could try stuff out and go wild with familiar but not identical toys, not totally unlike the Ultimate Universe of today.

2099 would only really have a four-year golden age, then two years of false restarts and final epilogues—after a tidal wave destroyed most of the world, Miguel O’Hara eventually found a frozen Captain America, restarted the Avengers, then became a figurehead who secretly had Thor’s hammer while the formerly dark corporate future became a paradise—but it left an indelible mark. Alternate reality storylines nearly always make a detour to 2099. Events by Robert Kirkman and Brian Reed have put new spins on the line. Miguel O’Hara frequently makes appearances in toy and video game form, including the upcoming Spider-Man: Edge of Time. And Jesse Thompson sent me this Jason Young cover of an old issue of Ravage 2099 that got me thinking about all this in the first place.

Despite a limited amount of time in the proverbial sun, 2099 made its mark and lingers as an influential and trendsetting imprint more than we likely even realize. There were also some darn good comics in the bunch that are probably not too hard to get your hands on.

Happy 4th of July, Jack Flag

When the patriotic vigilante Jack Flag showed up in Thunderbolts post-Civil War a few years back, I imagine many figured the red, white and blue-haired hero with the American flag Grifter mask to be a cobbled together Warren Ellis creation dreamt up for the purpose of giving the T-Bolts a disposable “good guy” to demonstrate their new status quo against. I was among those who not only recognized Mr. Flag, but both gave Mr. Ellis a serious kudos for raiding Marvel’s truth depths obscurity and smiled a bit to see the return of a character from my youth who both seemed ridiculous at the onset and yet to possess some intangible coolness about him.

The year was 1994, I was 12, and it was tough to ignore the dude with the jingoistic dye job wielding what appeared to be a boom box leaping at me from the cover of Captain America #434, particularly with his name emblazoned graffiti style to the side. The introduction of Jack Flag was part of the year-long “Fighting Chance” storyline by Mark Gruenwald and Dave Hoover that saw Steve Rogers’ super soldier serum begin failing on him and Cap embark upon a mission to settle his affairs before he had to hang up his shield.

“Fighting Chance” was an extremely 90’s storyline that certainly seemed to sit in the shadow or the Death of Superman or Knightfall, taking another iconic hero and doing the previously unthinkable by laying him low and potentially putting him out to pasture. There were some eye-rolling moments like Cap’s battle vest or his Iron Man-designed armor, but because it was Gruenwald, who loved the character like few others and always tried to have fun with whatever he did, there were quite a few bright spots and cool stories too. One promising aspect was exploring how the idea of the America hero had changed with a new Super-Patriot, the ultra-violent Americop, the female-empowering Free Spirit and, finally, Jack Flag.

Jack Harrison was introduced as a guy who was a member of Captain America’s computer hotline network—a Gruenwald creation established in the 80’s as a sort of nationwide Bat Signal or network of informants for Cap—and alongside his brother Drake decided to take a more active role, forming a citizen patrol. Hard times fell on the Harrisons when Drake got crippled attempting to break up a robbery and then the Serpent Society moved into their hometown, buying off local law enforcement and forcing folks out of their homes, including Jack’s parents. Inspired by Cap, Jack began wearing a costume and went after the Serpent Society; he ended up not only helping his hero and Free Spirit take down the Serpents, but helped save Steve Rogers’ life when his super soldier serum finally crapped out.

For a few issues after “Fighting Chance” wrapped, Jack Flag and Free Spirit hung around as Cap’s support squad and possible successors, but then vanished after Mark Waid took over for his own acclaimed run, shuffled off to limbo with hundreds of other characters from the 90’s.

As I mentioned up top, Jack Flag returned over a decade later in the pages of Thunderbolts, where Norman Osborn had just taken over the team and populated it with super villains who were responsible for enforcing the new Super Human Registration act. Jack surfaced as a street level hero who continued to do what he felt was his duty despite it now being against the law because of his innate goodness as well as a lingering obligation to and admiration for Captain America, who had opposed the Act and then apparently been assassinated. He saves an innocent girl from a gang attack and then is swarmed en masse by the T-Bolts.

Two things from this story are a testament to strengths in the Jack Flag character I didn’t even really know existed despite getting a tingle of excitement at seeing a trivia question I knew the answer to resurface on the national stage: First was that he represented the type of unfettered hero with a Cap-like strength of character Ellis needed to hold up against his new Thunderbolts and demonstrate how nasty and immoral they were. The respect Ellis showed by having Jack tear through his more powerful pursuers, including Moonstone and Venom, before being felled and paralyzed by nothing less than a Bullseye sneak attack makes a statement of legitimacy for somebody who could not have been reasonably considered anything but D-list to this point.

Second, cover artist Marko Djurdjevic and interior artist Mike Deodato do not change Dave Hoover’s original costume design even a little bit, they just do it up in their respective ways and show that it was a bold, memorable collection of stylistic choices; I kinda want to start a Jack Flag sketchbook.

Most would assume that would be it for Jack Flag—and for a character who only had a few appearances to his credit prior, taking on some of the Marvel Universe’s bigger bads and getting nailed by Bullseye while doing the right thing wouldn’t be a shabby send-off—but he would return in of all places Guardians of the Galaxy, courtesy of my pals Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. When Blaastar attempts to take over the Negative Zone prison where Jack is being held, despite being wheelchair-bound, he leads the other inmates to resist the alien tyrant, impressing Star-Lord in the process; Peter Quill gets Jack the heck out of jail and has the science whiz types on Knowhere fix up his spine so he could join the Guardians.

It always blew my mind a bit reading Guardians of the Galaxy and realizing that among cosmic powerhouses like Drax and Adam Warlock there was this footnote of a character from when I read Captain America as a kid standing shoulder to shoulder, but so much of the joy in reading DnA’s work is they love comics minutiae as much as any fan and jump at the chance to elevate characters with potential. They made Jack a fairly integral member of the team, even having folks who would know like Kang tout his grand potential in the universal scheme of things.

That a guy who called Captain America’s hotline in the 90’s and took the time to evenly separate three bizarre colors into his hair would eventually become an intergalactic champion for good is pretty much as good a representation that anything can happen in comics as you’re going to get; it’s also proof in point that the best creators in our industry not only make their own mark, but are never bashful about going back into the seemingly infinite backlog of those who came before to mine everything they can from the most forgotten of creations.

Our Comics Decade: 2000

Ben
I’ve given the cliff notes version here before, but after my high school graduation from Newton South in the spring of 2000, I migrated about two hours south to matriculate at Connecticut College. Conn used to be an all-girls school up until about the 70’s and thus it comes as no surprise that the only two people I knew from high school going in were girls—both very cool individuals, but neither a person I saw watching wrestling with me on Monday nights. Factor in that the girl I was dating at the time was going to school at Trinity—only about 45 minutes away, but neither of us had a car—and I found myself in the familiar situation of being psyched for college, but quickly going from the “I have so many friends!” rush that senior year at high school brings to the “I have nobody to eat dinner with” low that accompanies your freshman year at college.

Fortunately, I did have my interest in various extracurricular activities to fall back on when it came to meeting friends. While there was no wrestling team at Conn (and frankly my surgically reconstructed shoulder and torn up ankles were grateful for that), I did continue my interest in theater, and as a result met an outgoing giant (seriously, he’s like 6’5”) named Jordan Geary who would become my best friend in college and introduce me to most of the other folks I’d grow to consider my family away from home.

An interesting tidbit myself, Jordan and our friend Chris Everson discovered during one late night chat was that we’d all been hardcore comic book geeks in our younger years, but had each lapsed during high school in favor of not being shunned by the social majority (which still only like half worked). We found we shared a mutual love of the X-Men and immediately took to looking up clips of the old cartoon online and deciding which team members us and each of our crew most closely matched for nickname purposes (I was Iceman, Jordan was Cyclops, Chris was Wolverine, and we literally came up with dozens more for pretty much everybody we even casually interacted with).

Seeing as we had a big awesome freaking comic store a five minute drive away (and Jordan had a car), regular trips to Sarge’s became a foregone conclusion. When I first entered the store and gradually got past the overwhelming feeling of being a obsessive nerd away from his element for nearly five years, I made a beeline to the section housing the X-Men titles, eager to learn what I had missed since dropping out of the scene in 1996 with the end of the Onslaught saga.

The first title I vividly remember purchasing in my second life as a comic book fan was Uncanny X-Men #390, written by Scott Lobdell with art by Salvador Larroca and featuring no less an event than the death of Colossus. It was a deceptively welcoming comic to come back to, as Colossus was an old favorite, Lobdell was the same writer I remembered from my youth, and Larroca’s style was tight and colorful ala Jim Lee or Andy Kubert. Even the main thrust of the issue’s plot involved curing the Legacy Virus, a plot device I had seen the birth of at the conclusion of my beloved X-Cutioner’s Song.

In an interesting parallel to being away at school for the first time, that first issue of Uncanny X-Men was like coming home and finding your room exactly as you had left it (it was also a darn fine issue, as Lobdell always did know how to wring the pathos from a heroic sacrifice and write the “X-Men as a family” stuff decently rather than them just being a military-style strike force).

However, to follow the same analogy, in the subsequent visits I paid back “home” over the next several months, the more and more the furniture seemed to get moved around, and not particularly to my liking.

Grant Morrison and his New X-Men revamp were well in the hype stages even as I was trying to piece together what had become of the Blue and Gold teams. Picking up Wizard (another ritual I was glad to return to) and seeing Frank Quitely’s proposed visual re-imaginings of Beast (he’s a cat?!), Wolverine (no mask?!) and Emma Frost (…huh?!) certainly did not deliver the nostalgic comfort food of bright costumes, big action and ill-defined energy powers I was looking for. Indeed, I found those first few issues of New X-Men so distasteful to my old school 90’s palate that I was about ready to throw in the towel and get back out of comics no sooner than I’d returned. Fortunately for me (and all of you who enjoy this blog, I guess), that aforementioned at-the-time girlfriend got me a subscription for Christmas that year, meaning Grant and I were stuck with one another at least for a bit.

Bringing my little comparison to what will hopefully be a poignant or at least sensible close, I gradually learned to appreciate—or at least tolerate—Morrison’s different approach to the X-Men and also to sample new comics I would never have thought to try as a kid, which of course paid off big-time in the long run for me. I would have to take the same approach to college itself, learning not to focus all the time on how it wasn’t high school and instead come to find all the neat new stuff that I had to look forward to.

Today I can go back and actually enjoy New X-Men because I’ve got such a broader view of what comics can be and how they evolve. Similarly (I think?), I ended up becoming closer with most of the friends I made in college than I ever did with my old pals from high school.

At the time, comics ranged from a fun hobby for me to a survival aspect I utilized to feel safe in a new place; I had no idea that my decision to start reading X-Men again in 2000 would end up being one of the biggest turning points in my life.

Rickey
In 2000, I was a senior in high school and allowed myself $20 a week maximum to spend on comics. It's weird thinking back to a time when I didn't buy trade paperbacks online (if at all) - and how I got my hands on comics in general. Like a squirrel burying acorns in a rain storm, I'd hold on tightly to any books I bought, even if I eventually thought they sucked. By the time I dismantled my collection so my parents could sell their house in 2008, I had the equivalent of 12 long boxes and maybe 30 collected editions and original graphic novels back in the room I grew up in. That's why it's all the more impressive that I bought Warren Ellis's four Stormwatch trades in 2000.

I'd just finished reading Sandman through collected editions and that mission had taken almost 2 years and (what was at the time to me) lots of money. But my comic shop was cool about ordering stuff for me in advance and letting me pay for it as I picked up each new collection. That's why it was no hard task to talk myself into trying Stormwatch. At the time, I didn't know Warren Ellis's work at all and just knew that I read in Wizard that the title was fun and weird. Unlike most people my age, I'd never really gotten into Image at any point in my life, so I didn't know dick about Stormwatch or the WildStorm universe. I was a blank slate.

But over the course of January through December that year, as I wrestled with what college to go to, graduated high school, said goodbye to almost all my friends, moved myself into my dorm and started college living with a cockhead jock-turd of a roommate, the high-octane action-adventure sci-fi superhero bonanza of Stormwatch rocketed my notions of what could be done with spandex heroes into subspace eternity. In the first fucking issue, Ellis fires half the team and introduces new characters who went on to become cornerstones of the WildStorm universe. People got their jaws punched off, the leader wound up being the bad guy, several of the characters DIED in battle, they traveled to an alternate reality and introduced the Bleed (an updated version of the Multiverse), and, in the final volume of the regular series, a Superman-level hero returns to active duty after a self-imposed exile to round up a crew of partners to tell the world they better behave or the super heroes are gonna MAKE you behave. I'd never seen anything like this!

And the continuity! Ideas, themes and concepts debut throughout the run that later played into the Authority and Planetary, two books also written by Ellis and that I also bought in trade. And not just red sky continuity, I'm talking about stuff like the Superman-level hero I mentioned cameo-ing as a conversation piece in Planetary or how the mechanical blood of a bad guy in one arc was used to create the Engineer in the Authority. Or how a Green Lantern-esque character is hunted down and murdered in Planetary, but his lantern later shows up as a weapon wielded by a member of the covert operation that gave birth to Apollo and Midnighter in Stormwatch. I'm a sucker for tiny continuity nods that don't call attention to themselves and are directed at those paying attention - and this book is filled with them.

The tongue-in-cheek style of Ellis's later work hasn't really appealed to me, but this earnest superhero epic not only naturally built my love for the WildStorm universe, it showed me that superhero tales could be more than cookie-cutter stories at a time when my mind was looking for expansion in all the forms of art I was most interested in. And by expanding what was done with superheroes on a personal and wide-screen level, I credit Ellis alongside guys like Bendis for introducing the kind of radical ideas in the early 2000s that helped revive the aging mainstream scene by trying new things and for paving the way for that genre's fandom to change their visual prescriptions from following JUST artists to finally faithfully following writers.

Kiel
I'm not usually one to attribute any extra significance to supposed "milestone" occasions in time from the simple changing of years or the turning of significant birthdays to the conclusion of decades. Still, even I can't ignore that a lot changed in my life in 2000. I graduated from high school that spring, which comes with enough drama, awkwardness, excitement, fear, stress and joy without being a comic nerd even coming into it. Luckily though, my personal life and my comics life collided in a pretty significant way back then.

Towards the end of my senior year, I started dating this girl named Laura Gutierrez. She was a year behind me in school and a friend of a friend, but for some reason I never really met her until sometime around that winter. I always thought that a little STRANGE as she was someone who was extremely smart and unpretentious in a way few people (certainly not this guy) are at that age. We hit it off pretty quickly and were fast on our way to the kind of brief, crazy, doomed relationship that you can only have when you're a teenager.

When school ended that year, Laura was set to fly to Finland for the summer on some kind of foreign exchange student program, and by the time she returned I'd be away to East Lansing for college. Faced with the choice of whether or not to date knowing full well that we weren't going to try and make anything out of it once she left, we totally went for it. It was one of those go to a lot of parties but ignore your friends, get caught making out in your parents basement, go park on a dead end street and lay next to each other on uncomfortable reclining car chairs talking about everything and nothing in intense marathon sessions for hours on end kind of things.

And at some point in this long string of dramatically impassioned yet timed to expire conversations, we talked for a while about comics and my impractical plan to try to work in them some day. And at one point Laura looks at me and says, "I have something you should read. It's kind of like a comic. At least I think it is."

Then she gave me her copy of Craig Thompson's Good-Bye, Chunky Rice.

At that stage in my comics-reading life, I'd been reading comics outside the superhero mainstream for a while, but most of them still fell into that "published as a monthly serial with some vague adventure ties" category like Bone and Skeleton Key or at least something with a certain level of reality to it like Palooka-Ville. To be that age at that moment and have my girlfriend drop Thompson's lavishly rendered, formally playful graphic novel on my head was a mind-blower (and to the professed comics expert in me more than a little embarrassing).

More importantly, the story hit me in a way that I'll honestly admit I couldn't even comprehend at the time. More than any other comic I've ever read, Chunky Rice draws out the sad, strange, sweet set of emotions and experiences that accompany letting someone fall out of your life. From the titular character's painful choice to leave his best friend Dandele through the tragic fable of Solomon and Stomper to all the bizarrely forlorn characters Chunky meets on Captain Chuck's boat, every thread Thompson spins in the story echo that feeling of loss and in their own way the bittersweet joy that comes with accepting the fact that though the ones you love may be out of your life, they're still with you in other ways.

It took me a long time to process everything that book made me feel, partly because at the time I was so far up my own ass I wasn't confronting the very obvious parallels to my own situation and relationships (hooray for being 18!) and partly because when you're still so close to letting so much go to try something bigger, it feels like you'll never get beyond the worst feelings to appreciate the best ones.

All in all, knowing that girl and having that story with me in 2000 helped me through the next ten years in ways that I'm still insanely grateful for and hope to never let go of completely.