Most die-hard comic fans who lived through the speculation market of the 1990s recall a decade of horrid gimmicks and multiple variants the like of which we would all love to forget. Were there some good stories and amazing art? Of course there were, but even though some gems broke through (let’s not forget this was the decade Image began and Valiant was hot), there was a lot of… well, let’s face it: garbage. This isn’t a hit on the artwork or the stories, but really a conversation of the horrible gimmicks employed by EVERY publisher of the time to try and get us to buy their books. It didn’t seem to matter whether or not the story inside was any good, only that we bought multiple copies of every book we wanted. Whether you were buying comics because you loved to read them or because you thought they were a good investment (they weren’t), most people felt that they needed to get one copy to read and one copy to keep safe in the hopes that nobody else would, thus rendering theirs the diamond in the rough worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. This speculative market nearly destroyed the industry and it took years before it could recover. In all fairness, many of these were innovative and creative, but that’s not really what we are discussing here. We dug through the back issue bins and found these 15 ’90s Comic Book Covers That TANKED The Industry.
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