The Heckler came out in 1992, which put me at 40, though I found it in remainder bins a couple of years later. The fact that is was in remainder bins shows that it wasn’t very popular.
The strip was a comic strip – a parody of superhero strips. The Heckler was in many ways the least interesting character: it was everyone around him that made the strip. But since this was in the middle of the Dark Knight era, something that had a superhero who was having fun fighting crime was counter to everything else (though Giffen’s Justice League around the same time was successful, though not as wacky).
That would put me at 17.
From the last issue
(After a long fall)
“Don’t worry kids! It will take more than that to kill The Heckler!”
“Yeah. It’ll take crummy sales figures.”
Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu
*Crossfire *by Mark Evanier and Dan Spiegle
Both the First and Charlton versions of E-Man ended way too soon
Omega
The Puma Blues
A truly astonishing book by Stephen Murphy and Michael Zulli. It was never a huge seller but was great. Then there was the contrempas between Dave Sim (the publisher) and Diamond Distributors and they seemed to just run out of steam.
Surreal story
Beautiful Artwork
Creator owned
sigh I miss it now.
When I got old enough to get myself to the local comic book store as well as begin developing an interest in something other than the PG comics at the time, I discovered and was blown away by Marshall Law. I want to say this was shortly after Dark Knight Returns (and I was mostly a Marvel zombie at that point so Batman didn’t interest me) but really before all the grim and gritty, bandoliered heroes that were just around the corner. Marshall Law was a badass hero hunter who mercilessly went after the rogue heroes of his dystopian future and skewered comic book conventions of the time. There was a miniseries on Marvel’s Epic line and another one-shot or two, then it flopped around between publishers or something and never really stuck around.
And there was one panel where it appeared that Law’s boots were on the wrong feet. I remember looking at that panel endlessly trying to figure out what the heck was with that.
I just remembered the Creeper, a character that disappeared shortly after I first read his comic (and later I was no longer reading superhero comics. I remember noticing "Hey, what happened to the Creeper?’
Looking it up now, I see what I read was “Beware the Creeper” which lasted only 6 issues in the late 60’s.
However, apparently DC brought the character back in guest appearances and his own books at various times right up through 2007
Another vote for Wasteland. Could have been a huge title for Vertigo, but it was just a bit too early. Calibur Comics had a good run in the early '90’s.