Dark Reign Was the Last Time Marvel Was Great

Marvel is the biggest name in comics, and has been for a long time. While DC Comics has been making inroads to the top of the sales charts recently, for a long time, Marvel ran the board. The success of Marvel in the ’00s played a huge role in this. Marvel was put under the control of Joe Quesada at the beginning of the decade, and he brought in multiple quality writers. Marvel in the ’00s was the best it had been since the ’80s, but there were still problems. There was the edginess of the books, which at the time was celebrated but hasn’t aged at well in retrospect. There was the blatant editorial control of everything, which saw a lot of very bad decisions made. And there was the event cycle, which was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the events sold well and were used to create storylines that made Marvel as a whole a must-read. On the other hand, crossovers became the order of the day, and it hurt new readers coming on board.

Marvel in the ’00s is overrated, but there was a lot of great stuff going on. The event cycle created a lot of excitement, and it’s hard to deny that publishing initiatives like “The Initiative” didn’t drive reader engagement. However, the best thing that Marvel did in the ’00s was “Dark Reign,” a story that put Norman Osborn in charge of the Marvel Universe. “Dark Reign” was a masterwork in a lot of way and it was the last time that Marvel as a whole was great. The stories created by “Dark Reign” were fantastic, starting with Dark Avengers and running throughout the line. Every publishing initiative after “Dark Reign” has been rather disappointing as a whole, and “Dark Reign” often seems like the last gasp of Marvel quality.

“Dark Reign” Took Everything Marvel Did Well in the ’00s and Put It on Display

One of the best things about the ’00s at Marvel was that they were going in new directions and “Dark Reign” was a perfect example of this. We had just had Iron Man as the leader of the superhero community, with other heroes fighting against them, so pulling the trigger on putting a villain in charge of everything was the perfect next step. Dark Avengers is easily ’00s Avengers writer Brian Michael Bendis’s best work on the Avengers concept, all because of some of the things that made Bendis’s writing bad in other titles. Bendis was very character focused, to the extent that New Avengers and Mighty Avengers were actually kind of boring. However, that focus in Dark Avengers worked because it was an interesting look at a group of villains like we’ve never seen them before. We had seen insane Norman Osborn before, but we had never seen Norman Osborn like this. Bendis was able to capture the intelligent manipulator and the insane aspects of the character very well. Ares became a much cooler hero. We got to see Moonstone, Bullseye, Venom, and Daken in ways we never seen them before, and we got a comic that was in a lot of ways the exact opposite of late ’90s classic Thunderbolts. Instead of seeing villains who enjoyed becoming heroes, we got villains who used being heroes for their own purposes. Dark Avengers was an exciting book because it was unlike anything we had seen before. That feeling of newness spread through the line, and it made for some exciting stories.

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“Dark Reign” rebuilt Iron Man as a character after the years of him as a pseudo-villainous leader of SHIELD, hunting down his friends. New Avengers had more of a purpose than ever as a book, and Mighty Avengers actually felt like an important book. The X-Men books, which at the time had been going through the aftermath of the Decimation, had a huge existential enemy in the government, and readers got one of the best X-Men stories ever in Avengers/X-Men: Utopia. There was an energy to Marvel’s books at the time that was much better than what came before in “The Initiative.” The problem with “The Initiative” was that it pit heroes against heroes but never really made that fight interesting because no one could actually win. The New Avengers couldn’t actually beat the Mighty Avengers, and Iron Man could never get the comeuppance he deserved. There were still some great titles in “The Initiative” era (Captain America was outstanding), but it never had any kind of actual stakes. “Dark Reign” changed all of that. It was great to see the heroes battling against Osborn and HAMMER, getting wins and losses, and watching the situation unravel. Marvel in the ’00s had a lot of momentum, but the need to keep things relatively static hurt stories. “Dark Reign” avoided that. There were stakes, and both sides took major losses and had important wins. It actually felt like a real story with stakes in a way that superhero comics don’t always succeed at.

Nothing Since “Dark Reign” Has Captured the Excitement Inherent in Superhero Stories

“Dark Reign” lasted for almost two years, and it was the cap-off to Marvel’s method of using events to build new status quos. It was followed by the relatively mediocre “The Heroic Age” and since then, Marvel lost all feeling of momentum. “Dark Reign” was the apotheosis of Marvel in the ’00s, and the publisher has never been able to re-capture the energy of “Dark Reign” across their entire line. Now, this doesn’t mean that there have been no great books since “Dark Reign”; there have been. However, it was the last time that Marvel as a whole was actually great. There was danger and intrigue. It was exciting.

Marvel is trying something similar to “Dark Reign” with the “One World Under Doom” shenanigans, but it never really works because it’s not across the whole line. There are Marvel books that are almost completely ignoring “One World Under Doom”, and it takes away from the impact of this story. “Dark Reign” is opposite; every book mentioned it and had to adapt to the situation. Marvel went all in on “Dark Reign” and that’s what made it so great. Marvel will never do that again, and that’s a tragedy.

What do you think about “Dark Reign”? Sound off in the comments below.