Been reading old '90s Spider Man comics. Specifically those drawn by John Romita Jr, my favorite comics artist.

The period is mid and late '90s (1995-1998) and back then the stories were dominated for years by the Clone Saga/Ben Reilly saga. It was based on a 1970s Spider Man story in which the villain the Jackal had cloned Spider Man. The '90s story had a bunch of those clones still around and it turned out that the guy we thought was Spider Man/Peter Parker all those years since the '70s story was really a clone and a guy who was now calling himself Ben Reilly was the real Spider Man. So Ben Reilly replaced Peter Parker as Spider Man and Peter retired and lost his powers. Then after more than a year Marvel changed its mind and decided that Peter was the real Spider Man after all and Ben was a clone. Peter got his powers back and the Green Goblin returned after being dead for 23 years of comics and killed Ben. Peter became Spider Man again.

It all sounds pretty ridiculous and it annoyed a lot of people, but at least with the JRJR art the comics were good. There were multiple Spider Man comic titles out each month and there were lots of crossovers between them, but I got along just fine just reading the title JRJR drew and ignoring the others. I wasn't interested in Spider Man enough to buy multiple Spider Man comics each month, but I bought pretty much anything I saw done by JRJR.

In 1998, within around a year of the Clone-Reilly saga ending, the comics started to decline. Marvel was then trying to reverse '90s comic trends and their sales slump with a back-to-basics drive, but somehow this ended up meaning blander comics with less feeling and weaker art. In the Spider Man title you could see JRJR's art declining from 1997 to 1998. Same went for other Marvel comics of the time with other artists and writers. The Jurgens/JRJR run on the Thor comic around the turn of the century (1998-2000) should have been great, but it was a shadow of the quality of earlier comics due to the decline that swept comics. You do get some good comics from the end of the '90s and the beginning of this century, and they're often smoother-written than earlier ones, but they don't match up to the better comics of earlier eras. The spirit had gone out of them. And after that, comics, Marvel at least, went into terminal decline.

So I guess I look back on the Spidr Man Clone years more fondly than a lot of Marvel fans. A lot of people seem to to think the trend that started in 1998 was a golden age of quality and that the '90s stuff before then was terrible, a dark age. Well, there sure was some crap in the mid '90s. Decline in quality of the mutant (X-Men, etc) comics from 1995 to 1997 caused me to move on from superhero comics (and comics in general) in 1997. But still there was some good stuff back then.

Among the JRJR Spider Man comics I was particularly fond of the Lost Years limited series, which was about the clones, Ben Reilly and the mutated rogue clone Kaine. Dark, gritty story set in Salt Lake City, Utah, with no super-costumes. JRJR did some real atmospheric art for that and it had a good story by J M DeMatteis. And the finale of the whole Clone saga, in Spider Man 75, was very dramatic. I hated them bringing back the Green Goblin, because I felt he deserved to stay dead, but I couldn't deny it made for an effective story along with the death of Ben.