Spider-Man 2099 was the first 2099 superhero to burst onto the scene, and was the most popular of them all. His comic lasted the longest out of the 2099-lot, and he still gets featured in some Marvel comics occasionally, such as Captain Marvel, even though the 2099 line has been dead for years.
The man behind the mask was Miguel O'Hara, a scientist at one of the previously mentioned evil corporations known as Alchemax (which was pretty much in total control of the New York region). When he tried to leave Alchemax, he was given an addictive drug that bonded with his DNA and ensured that he would have to take it forever in order to survive, and the only way he could get it was by remaining with Alchemax.
Miguel wasn't too happy with this and ended up trying to use one of his inventions to revert his DNA back to its original state. Unfortunately, the whole process went wrong and he ended up getting his DNA mixed with that of a spider a'la Jeff Goldblum.
He got the standard Spider-Man powers package, with the addition of claws that allowed him to climb as opposed to just sticky hands and venom packed fangs. Shortly after he reluctantly became the Spider-Man of the year 2099, fighting off the evil Alchemax while acting like a complete asshole when he was just plain old Miguel.
It's obvious that this comic was the most popular due to the fact that Spider-Man was involved, as anyone who was a comics fan in the 90s can attest to the Spider-Man mania at the time. If you were to take out the Spider-Man connection, this would be a comic you couldn't pay people to read.
This is actually my least-favorite 2099 character, as there's nothing to set him apart from traditional heroes and make him unique. I guess the only thing setting him apart is his super angst. In the heroic age, Aunt May loves Peter Parker while talking bad about Spider-Man. In 2099, Miguel's mom loves Spider-Man while talking about Miguel. It's so totally different and original!
They couldn't even bother to come up with original villains, unleashing Vulture 2099, Goblin 2099, and Venom 2099 onto the public. Oh, the humanity. It's a good thing this got cancelled or we might have seen Carange 2099, and that's something nobody wants.
Ravage 2099
Where do you start for a comic like this? This is one of the most reviled comics of the 90s, a comic that changed direction so many times it went into a fucking circle, a comic that ruined everyone's reputation of Stan Lee as greatness, a comic that I absolutely LOVED.
I collected every damn issue of this comic as a kid, even when it started becoming impossible to even find the newer issues in stores. Reading it now, I know it's awful. Everything tells me I should hate this damn book, but nostalgia prevents me from doing anything but loving it. Hell, I love it even more now because of just how AWFUL it really is.
Here's the scoop for those of you uninformed about Ravage: Ravage 2099 was the first "original" character to have his own book in the 2099 universe. The other comics were all based on "heroic age" characters. Another noteworthy thing about Ravage is that the immortal Stan "The Man" Lee came out of retirement to pen the story of this new hero. Couldn't go wrong, right? Well, more like nothing about this character ever went right.
When the comic first started out, Paul Ravage was an executive at Alchemax and loved his job of being a snooty rich guy. Unfortunately, he also had some morals and went poking around in some corrupt affairs he shouldn't have. To discourage this, his boss sent a mutoid (I'll get to it later) to frame Ravage and make him a public enemy.
Ravage fled from the cops who were now after his hide and underwent a transformation. He took off his snooty rich clothes and put on rags and a kevlar fest. He grew a beard out to make himself extra-grizzled.
He picked up a bunch of garbage like cogs at a junkyard and used them as weapons. He used a fucking garbage truck as his mode of transportation. Yes, the super snooty rich guy became the superhero garbage man overnight. He went from talking in a rich guy way to using the word "ain't" and the 2099 version of a curse word ("shock") constantly. In essence, he became the 2099 version of Lobo and Wolverine, except that he sucked.
The writers of the comics denied trying to create the 2099 Wolverine, but that's probably a load of shit as he became more and more like Wolvie as the series progressed. Eventually Ravage went to the land of the mutoids (mutants created by pollution), a giant island of garbage known as Hellrock.
Exposure to the air there turned warped his body and gave him super-powers, and as the series progressed he started growing claws and long hair, looking like a beast-man a'la Wolverine. Stan Lee was off the title by this time, as everyone could see that the super-hero garbage man wasn't going to work.
The next team took the title in the forementioned beast-man direction, the team after that took the title in a Mad Max post-apocalyptic wasteland direction, and the team after that took the title in a king of the beasts direction where Ravage became king of Hellrock. When a title has that many creative shifts, you figure it isn't doing well.
The funny thing is, Ravage lasted pretty damn long, all the way up to issue 33, in which Ravage and all the mutants of Hellrock were frozen in adamantium by the Doom of 2099 in one of the better series finales.
Doom 2099
In terms of a cult following, Doom 2099 probably has the biggest audience. Mainly because Warren Ellis wrote a story arc for the series. This story arc, known as "One Nation Under DOOM," is probably the only thing most people remember from the 2099 line, as Marvel made a pretty big deal out of it and it was a kickass story to boot.
You can probably guess by the title that it involved the Doom of 2099 seizing control of the United States, as he felt it presented a great threat to the rest of the world. The american public didn't really think having Doom as a president was a very good thing, and so he was shortly disposed of and fled to the past to fuck with Reed Richards. Those ignorant bastards didn't realize the greatness that is Doom.
I'd pay to have him as my merciless dictator any day of the week. He was driven out of the white house by none-other than a clone of the occursed Captain America, although he later liquidated him so it's all good.
The big mystery that the writers of Doom 2099 tried to sustain for the duration of the series was whether or not this Doom was the original Victor Von Doom that we all love and cherish. Unfortunately, the big secret was never revealed, although the writers of the comic have confessed that in their minds he was always the true thing.
Throughout his longish comic run, he pretty much managed to either kill or piss off every hero in the entire 2099 universe. He killed Ravage, he reprogrammed Ghost Rider to be his servant, he got the Punisher to head his police department in a dazzling rip-off of Judge Dredd. He also befriended the outcast mutants of the world and helped develop the X-Nation of 2099.
Doom 2099 bit the dust at the end of the 2099 saga, in the horribly written "2099: World of Tomorrow" in which the writers tried to combine all the 2099 characters into one book after cancelling the individual titles. He sacrificed himself to stop the Phanlax, the Borg-ripoff aliens trying to take over the world.
Most people who hold Doom 2099 in high regard tend to forget about the lows like that. Hell, they pretty much forget every single part of the run except for when Ellis was writing it, and with good reason.
The story arcs before and after "One Nation Under Doom" ranged from bad to awful, with the worst coming when Doom jacked into the internet and helped Sherlock Holmes on a mystery to find his memory. There was also the awful visit to the Savage Land, but the less said about that the better. Let's just pretend Doom 2099 didn't exist until Warren Ellis came to town.
Punisher 2099
You guys know Judge Dredd, right? He's the cop from the future, played by Sylvester Stallone, who acts as judge, jury, and executioner. He also wears a fruity outfit. Well, it appears Marvel knew about him too. They seemed to love him so much that they made a comic exactly like it!
Oh, wait. Not "exactly" like it. This comic has a dude in a skull outfit. My mistake. I'm a fan of the Punisher, but even I don't consider the essence of the character to be that deep. That's what makes him appealing.
There's no government conspiracies or space aliens in the Punisher (at least not anymore), it's just a dude who kills people that deserve it. Where else can you go with the Punisher character...in the FUTURE? All the writers of the book could think to do was to give the man futuristic weapons and make him MORE insane.
Whereas Frank Castle totally became the Punisher, the Punisher of 2099 had a secret identity and alternated in between being a respected police officer and a raging psychotic. Otherwise the characters were exactly the same. Hell, the future Punisher's family was murdered in the same way and he didn't become the Punisher until he lucked upon Frank Castle's old war journal. Inspired comic writing at its best folks.
The writers tried to do something different with the character in the later issues, having him sell out and work for the MAN, the man being Doom. Doom was displeased with the corrupt police of the future so he eliminated them, instead re-forming SHIELD with Punisher 2099 at the head, giving him the authority to kill as many criminals as he wanted.
The Punisher then changed into a Judge Dredd-lite costume and beat the shit out of criminals everywhere, at least until Doom was thrown out of the country and everyone wanted the Punisher dead as well. He fled to SPACE, where he got his hands on a giant space laser cannon and vowed to dispense justice across the galaxy.
Too bad that the writers of the "2099 Apocalypse" one-shot hadn't waited until the last issue of the Punisher 2099 to write their story, as at the beginning of the comic the Punisher is killed on EARTH by Captain America. Way to work as a team fellas. Then in an even more bizarre move, the Punisher returned to life in the "2099 Manifest Destiny" one-shot a few years later. Make up your damn mind folks.
If you've read this article you probably don't have a very nice mental picture of the original four 2099 comics. That's because they ARE bad, they ARE contrived, and they ARE completely unoriginal. Unfortunately, I didn't quite realize this as a kid and found myself enjoying the 2099 universe.
Unless you've got some weird nostalgia for the series such as I do, you probably won't enjoy any of the 2099 comics. That is, unless you like buying bad comics out of the quarter bin and seeing just how bad comics writing can be. I still think 2099 was a good experiment for Marvel, sort-of the follow-up to the Marvel New Universe.
Marvel tried the alternate universe again with M2, which used a happy future full of super-hero kids as opposed to the dark future of 2099. It seems Marvel has finally nailed the alternate unierse thing with the Ultimate universe, which I think has some comics that outsell their regular Marvel counterparts.
I respect the Ultimate Universe, but I just can't get into it. There's only one alternate Marvel timeline in my heart, and it's a testament to my love for it that my chief regret in life is that I won't live to see the real year 2099.
