“Extremely Cool Youngblood Toys” from McFarlane Toys in 1994
I found this two-page spread in Youngblood Strikefile #9, one of the Image Youngblood books from before the collapse of the comic industry and Liefeld’s departure from Image. The mid-nineties were a time of comic book excess and this ad for McFarlane’s Badrock and Chapel action figures screams “I have access to desktop publishing!” with a completely unnecessary background pattern that makes the ad tough to read.
This 1994 ad is so very different from the late nineties McFarlane Toys ads that it doesn’t even feel like it relates to McFarlane Toys. I’m glad they found some graphic talent to help them, otherwise just imagine what McFarlane Toys’ products would have looked like as the company expanded in the nineties.
I feel like the 90s were a particularly horrible time for a lot of graphic design; computers were becoming a more prominent part of the process, and the technology didn’t necessarily quite match the designer’s vision yet.
@Wolf – I know I was guilty of some bad design back in 1995 and 1996. It took me about three years with Photoshop and Quark before I had a handle on the tools and figured out how to _not_ abuse them.
Haha! Just the way things go at the time, I guess. I often feel this way when I look back at magazines from the early 2000s, too — everything’s lit in really peculiar ways, because digital cameras were just starting to make inroads too. Again, the tech hadn’t quite caught up to the vision.