Marvel Comics endured arguably its most maddening period in the 1990s.
Thanks to the speculator boom, shifting corporate management, and creative battles, the company sputtered after what had started as a profitable decade.
By the end of the '90s, Marvel Comics was in bankruptcy, fighting to survive, let alone become a multimedia juggernaut.
There isn't one key factor or event that led to this, but a rash of reader-unfriendly stories helped to wear on Marvel's sales. Well, this was the '90s, when Marvel embraced the direct market and pandered to its devoted fanbase with stories steeped in references to continuity, as well as heightened levels of sex and violence.
For the X-Men, this was worse than almost any other company franchise.
Chris Claremont and Louise Simonson, who guided the X-Men and their satellite teams for seventeen years, were ousted, which led to storylines like the one I recently read for the first time, "X-Cutioner's Song."
