8 Terrible Comic Book Events Marvel And DC Wish You'd Forget
8. Onslaught
Marvel Comics
Now, you may not be aware of this, but the nineties were a pretty weird time for the industry.
Onslaught is the visual and literary embodiment of a midlife crisis, typified in full by the edgiest looking... thing to have ever featured in the history of Marvel Comics. That 'edgy' thing - by the way - happens to be Charles Xavier. How did he end up that way? Well, he tried to mind-wipe Magneto after the master of magnetism stripped Wolverine of his adamantium skeleton, only to lose his own conscious to Magneto in the process. Why's he called Onslaught? Because he's cool, obviously. Just look at all those spikes and muscles.
In reality, of course, Onslaught was nothing more than a dated cacophony of nineties cliches, and the storyline that featured the character could be summarised as such as well. It crossed over into pretty much every Marvel ongoing at the time, and, despite being met with almost universal derision right off the bat, the character has gone on to make successive appearances in various Marvel comic books since.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
