Stop calling every 90s comic 'grimdark' when it was just regular noir

I been collecting since 1994 and the way people talk about 90s books now is so off. Every time someone posts a Spawn or a Shadowhawk cover they go 'oh so edgy' but half those books were straight up detective stories. I pulled my old Shadowhawk #5 last week and it reads like a police procedural. The art was dark but the writing was basic crime stuff. Compare that to actual grimdark like Nemesis or early 2000s stuff where the hero is the villain. Its not the same thing. Why do we lump all 90s comics into one box instead of looking at what each book actually did? Has anyone else reread an old 90s run and found it way less over the top than the internet says?

2 comments

2 Comments

reed.elliot1mo ago

Man, I gotta disagree with you there, but respect for pulling out Shadowhawk for research. I was right there with you in the 90s, grabbing books off the spinner rack, and yeah, some of that stuff was just detective noir with a cape. But the label fits more than you're giving it credit for, because the whole vibe of the era was about pushing anti-heroes to the extreme. Spawn's early issues had that gritty street level thing, sure, but then you got characters like Violator or the whole "tortured soul" angle that tipped it into something else. The art alone, all those shadows and pouches and huge guns, set a tone that writers had to match, even if the scripts were tame. When everyone's copying the same dark template, it sort of becomes grimdark by default, whether the writing was actually there or not.

rose_reed1mo agoTop Commenter

Man, that's a solid point and honestly kinda comforting to hear someone else who actually lived through it. The art style really did drag the whole tone into dark territory even when the stories were just regular detective stuff, so calling it grimdark feels fair in hindsight. I never thought about it that way, so thanks for laying it out so clearly.