John Romita Jr in the 1990s

JRJR:

THE NINETIES

Let's continue our road trip through Jazzy John Romita Jr.'s * career in comics with a look at his work in the last decade of the twentieth century. I decided to separate out all of John Romita Jr.'s Spider-Man work for its own post. (I had no idea there was so much of it! This will likely take me awhile.) 

* Is it offensive to call the Jr. by the Sr.'s nickname? Hope not. I didn't want to just make something up - "Jeremiah John" "'Who Shot' JRJR" etc, so I kept it in the family.

I quit reading new Marvel somewhere around 1991 (see here for at least part of the story), so I missed out on experiencing firsthand some of the decade's more outrageous excesses:

Ridiculously big guns.

Holographic covers.

I agree that "x-Ecutioner" doesn't look so good, but that just means "X-Cutioner" is worse, not a way to make it work. The 90s really disagreed with me, though. (They were wrong.)

Iconic male Marvel characters 'roided out beyond comprehension.

Iconic female Marvel characters disfigured. I love that the letters page runs a correction (l) for the dialogue balloon that was printed without dialogue (c) but not for the Botox given to Jean Grey (r).

On the other hand... it wasn't all bad.

That's not an exhaustive list by any means. And of course it's true that any decade has stuff you can point to and ask "What were they thinking?" But man. At the very least, physical anatomy took a shellacking in the 90s from which it perhaps has never quite recovered.

As evidenced above, JRJR could be right there along with everyone driving the decade's illustrative trends, but he rose above it as often as not and continued to develop the action-movie storytelling panache from Man Without Fear. 

Most especially in Punisher War Zone -

I love the pace and arrangement of these panels -

and Thor, too, where the action veers more to the cosmic energy blasts and super-strength hi-jinks.

In the 30th anniversary tribute issue that Marvel put out, he was asked where he thought he got his gift of storytelling. He answered: "It comes from a couple of things. (1) Watching movies with (my father) and understanding what he was talking about. We used to watch movies back when there were only five or six channels (and) there would be some Burt Lancaster marathon on Channel 5 in New York. The film noir aspect of it, if I have any of that in my artwork, came from those movies. The Crimson Pirate... I learned a little bit of storytelling from those types of movies, but specifically movies like On the Waterfront, Twelve Angry Men, Inherit the Wind - the character-driven stories instead of the visuals. The storytelling came from that. And (2) watching my father draw, looking at his pictures for detail, and paying attention to choreography, which he was a stickler for. When something happened in a panel and you turned the page, you better damn well be sure that it was coordinated properly on the next page, or in the next issue. (These two things) made my artwork look better than it was and makes my artwork look better than it is. I have a sleight of hand going on here. (laughter) I also have great inkers who make me look good!"

Frequent collaborator Klaus Janson touches on each of these things in his quote from the same tribute issue: "I love the fact that John embodies two generations of comic talent. He would not be the artist he is today without his Dad's influence. So when we talk about John, we talk about the history of comics. Which is way cool. Then we begin to dissect his work: his unmatched ability to be dynamic, his clarity in storytelling, his ability to manipulate the reader's attention."

Not everyone John worked with had such a benevolent opinion of "his father's influence," as we'll see when we get to X-Men. JRJR definitely has a bit of a chip on his shoulder - like many gifted sons of gifted fathers - on the topic in this anniversary interview. But we'll get to that.

IRON

MAN

I had a subscription to Iron Man for most of the 80s but was only an on-again/off-again reader after issue 200 or so. The covers for this stretch of issues (starting with #256) leaped out at me, though, and I bought them all. I was a fan of both Byrne and JRJR, but I didn't recognize his style from the cover and had no idea Byrne was the writer until I got home.

For my money, this team-up of Mandarin and Fin Fang Foom is the best thing to ever happen to either character.

JRJR's New Jack Swing re-design of Rhodey works pretty well, I think. This could just be my 90s-ness talking. (Something I just realized: given that most of my consistent Iron Man reading was 1983 to 1985 or so, Rhodey actually wore the armor more than Tony Stark.)

As you may recall Iron Man was JRJR's first regular gig as an artist. Amazing Spider-Man was his second, and it was to Spidey he returned in the later 90s and beyond. But from 1992 to 1994 he returned to another of his 80s stomping grounds: 

X-MEN

Continuing this shading business from his Daredevil days.

He had an ambivalent time on the book. He enjoyed working with Dan Green again, and of course the royalties were nice. But behind the scenes JRJR felt mistreated:

"When Marvel went away from having an Editor-in-Chief to having an 'editor in chief by committee', I heard venom from one of them. I won't name his name but I always wanted to take a swing at him after he was out of the industry. The comment was 'Just because your last name is Romita doesn't mean you're gonna get what you want.' And it was in front of a lot of people. His name isn't important. He was a jerk then, and he probably still is. It's an example of people that had positions of power who didn't like me for various reasons. I heard it from fans, I heard it from people in the industry, at conventions. I was able to keep my hands in my pockets and not punch anybody. I wanted to punch people, but I couldn't do it. And then to have it happen from this Editor-in-Chief was beyond the pale. 'If this guy feels this way, I'm not gonna get any work.'"

Okay, so who is the editor in question? Probably Bob Harras, right? He was a) the X-Men editor, b) one of the EICs-by-committee he mentions, and c) by at least some accounts one of the main supervillains of the whole 90s implosion. And yet, Harras and JRJR seem to get along just fine at DC in 2017. Also, Harras has never been "out of the industry." After Marvel he worked for Jim Lee at Wildstorm before joining up with DC. So, it has to be one of the other EICs-by-committee. In a different part of the interview, JRJR mentions that he and this person both started out doing fill-ins and other work for Marvel UK. He also clearly says "he" and not "she," so Bobbie Chase is out. And that narrows the field down to Mark Gruenwald, Bob Budiansky, and Carl Potts. Gruenwald "left the industry" by way of death, so (judgment call) I don't think it was him.

Who do you think it was, Budiansky or Potts?

Obviously, who cares, just hey. The human mind likes a mystery.

This stretch of issues (Uncanny X-Men 287, 300–302, 304, 306–311) has - for my money - the most excessive "90s moments" in JRJR's catalog. I mean, look again at that freakin' Sabretooth pic up there. WTF, America. Whether or not that was on him and Green or on writer Scott Lobdell or on just the times themselves, who knows, probably a little of everything. The art never approaches Liefeldian levels or anything.

Fewer examples of the era's crimes are on display in:

PUNISHER

WAR ZONE

It's got the sort of violent-anti-hero-with-huge-weapons stuff, sure, but Chuck Dixon wrote a good Punisher. Frank Castle is more of an "anti-James-Bond" cypher in these issues, which is a good angle on the character.

Including anti-Bond-girls.

Lots of rain, too. Just while we're here.

At the time of Punisher War Zone's release (1992) the Punisher was - along with Spidey and Ghost Rider - Marvel's most popular character. Wolverine, too, I guess - can't forget him. Those four were shoehorned into everything. It was annoying. I was a fan and regular reader of all Punisher-related material, though, particularly those early issues of The Punisher by Klaus Janson, and some of those Punisher War Journals by Jim Lee before he was "JIM LEE" up until my break from Marvel.

All of which is to say - this Dixon/JRJR/Janson story was fun to read for the first time in 2017.

Blast from the past.

In hindsight (speaking to a convention audience in 2007) JRJR said PWZ was his first inkling that the boom time was over. It had all the elements to sell the kind of record number of copies all event comics were selling in those days: new #1, hot creative team (Dixon was a fan-favorite writer, JRJR was coming off Man Without Fear, and Klaus Janson was returning to the character he'd helped kick into high gear some years before), and "Marvel's number one non-mutant anti-hero!" And it did sell well - at first, but not in the numbers they anticipated. The great comics die-off had begun.

Well, "die off." Pronouncing comics dead is nothing new; both the 70s and 50s saw similar extinction events in terms of sales and over-extended product. And comics are still around. Distribution models change; on a longer timeline, things really aren't all that different than they ever were. Undoubtedly, though, the floor shifted underneath the industry's feet in the 90s. JRJR weathered the change far better than many. 

THOR

JRJR teamed up with Dan Jurgens for Marvel's "Heroes Reborn" take on the God of Thunder. I never saw any of these before gathering material for this post. Jurgens is a writer I know primarily from that whole Death of Superman business. Of which I'm not a particular fan, but this  (Thor v2, #1-8, 10-13, 16-18, 21-25) is a fun and totally-Marvel group of issues. And the art movies it all along quite agreeably. 

SOME FAMILIAR FACES

(While we're here, I like the ordinary non-superhero JRJR gives us almost as much, sometimes, as the big-time superhero stuff. His interiors/ non-costume work is always on-point.)

And some less-than-familiar faces: Hermes and Pluto. I always felt the Olympian gods were criminally underused at Marvel. They usually only appeared - as they do here - to falsely accuse Thor of destroying Olympus.

And even JRJR's Mephisto re-design! (Briefly.)

Thor gets his fifth or sixth new secret identity:

Jake Olson. (Here with a reconfigured Jane Foster.)

Asgard babies.

There's one issue (#25, I think - for some reason this Jurgens/JRJR run is tough to track down info for, and I neglected to bring my comics flashdrive with me today to check for myself) where the style of art changes noticeably; maybe it was a rushed deadline or something. Or maybe it was Dick Giordano inking JRJR instead of Janson? Can't recall and see explanation just-given. Anyway, see for yourself:

And here's a little section I call:

I'VE MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE

...

HAIR

NEXT: All that Spider-Man is going to take me awhile. Hopefully by Halloween but definitely by Thanksgiving. But despair not, Dog Star Reader - JRJR in the 2000s will appear before too long.

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