Top Five Most 1990s Superheroes

CBR

By Brian Cronin

Published Jun 17, 2016

Who are the top five most 1990s superheroes?

Here is an archive of all the past top five lists I've done over the years.

Today's CBR Managing Editor Albert Ching's birthday, so I thought I'd do a special top five that I'm sure he'll appreciate - who is the most 1990s superhero?

Eligibility requirements for being the "most 1990s" superhero are 1. Character must be created in the 1990s and 2. Character must have been a serious creation and not a parody of the 1990s style of character.

Factors taken into consideration on whether said character is "more" 1990s than another: Do they have a mullet? Do they wear a trenchcoat or a jacket of some other kind? Are they any kind of cyborg? Is their codename just two unrelated words mashed together? Do they have claws and/or swords? Is their codename a word spelled incorrectly? Do they have pouches of some kind on their costume? How about shoulder pads? Are they extreme? All of these play a role in determining the most 1990s superheroes.

Read on for the list!

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Gunfire's costume was normal enough, but dude's name was Gunfire and his power was to turn any object into a gun!!

That's pretty darn 90s.

Cable and Deadpool took influences from so many older characters that I don't think it is proper to really view them too much as the MOST 1990s characters.

5. Stryker

Somehow, of all the Image books of the early 1990s, Marc Silvestri's Cyberforce ended up being THE most 1990s of all of them. And Stryker, he of the three cybernetic arms was one of the most 1990s characters on the team...

4. Ripclaw

THE most 1990s character on the team, though, was the "blades for hands"/"two words mashed together to make a name" Ripclaw, who at least had an interesting Native-American background to make him stand out a bit.

Commenter Third Man made a pretty convincing argument that this spot should go to Warblade instead, since he had a lot of the same concepts but was blander, to boot (like a lot of 1990s characters)...

So I'll just let you folks make the pick yourself - imagine this spot for either Ripclaw or Warblade.

3. Adam-X the X-Treme

Backwards baseball cap? Long hair? Blades on his shoulders for no reason? Name actually INCLUDES the word extreme, just misspelled? This guy was like he was built in a 1990s superhero factory!

Go to the next page for the top two!

2. Gambit

I feel a LITTLE bad for Gambit, since the things he introduced, like the long jacket, the headpiece, those were things that WEREN'T cliche when Jim Lee gave them to Gambit, but they ended up pretty much defining the decade...