On the Star Wars - Star Trek crossover...

Luke : "I got a bad feeling about this".

Han : "I got a bad feeling about this".

C-3PO : "I got a bad feeling about this".

Obi-Wan Kenobi : "I got a bad feeling about this".

Spock : "I do not".

Usual hyperbole that misses the point.  Deathmate didn't kill the market; it was dying rapidly.  Deathmate was just a more notable example of what was going wrong within the industry.

Did I read it?  Yeah, sort of, as much as you could, because the Image side of things was pretty incoherent and the Valiant side wasn't all that, either.  It was just a bloated mess that fell apart because the Image side, specifically Rob Liefeld, couldn't get the work done in a timely manner.  Bob Layton has stated that he had to close Liefedl up in a hotel room and make him finish pages, so he could ink them and get the book out.

The 90s fallout was not down to Deathmate; but, it represented one of the biggest issues, at the retailer level, speculative buying.  It was bad enough that deluded consumers were buying up "collectibles," expecting fast turn-over for a profit and send their kids through college.  It didn't happen.  When the comic normally sells about 200,000 copies and you sell a million or more, how scarce is that comic?  How many people who desire it do not have it in their greedy little hands?  The answer is that everyone had it, often in multiples that they thought they were going to sell off and make a fortune.  Until they actually tried to sell it.  The bigger problem is that retailers were doing this and buying case lots of titles like this and then found themselves stuck with massive inventory.  The publishers were feeding this mentality, with gimmicks, variants, a new first issue every week and similar silliness.  So, te retailers ended up with all of their cash tied up in excess inventory that nobody else wanted, because they got their copies or didn't give a flying @#$% about the latest X-title or derivative comic book from one of the Image guys.

Deathmate is kind of where this lack of business sense caught up with a lot of retailers, as Deathmate, being an Image and Valiant crossover, was a highly touted project.  It got tons of press and speculators were salivating.  Image and Valiant were hot commodities, because they were launching a lot of new titles (more image) and back issues (for Valiant) went for high prices, due to legitimate scarcity (early Valiant print runs were fairly modest, until Unity, their big crossover event).  So, retailers went nuts ordering the issues for this, which had color designations, rather than issue numbers (as if 0 issues or counting backwards weren't dumb enough gimmicks).  Then, Image, true to form, couldn't hold up their end of things and get their portions out on time.  By that point, speculators were cooling on the book, as the general fan and critical consensus was that it was a fairly mediocre story (what there was of one) and by the time the next installment came out, you had forgotten what happened before.  By the time the end came, no one cared and abandoned it and retailers were sunk, as they had back rooms full of unopened cases and no buyers.

Speculative buying hurt the industry; but what nearly killed it was Marvel trying to self-distribute, without the infrastructure to support it, and with rather questionable terms that encouraged buying excessive inventory to get better discounts.  The fallout of the speculators, which fell within the timeframe of the end of Deathmate hurt the industry; but, Marvel's fiasco drove far more retailers out of business, as they started dropping like flies.

You need to have liquid cash to run a business and purchase new inventory.  However, every unsold comic on your current inventory is a detriment to profit.  By not selling those comics, you are increasing your costs of doing business and you have to sell that much more to earn a profit.  Comic books, being driven by what is new, meant that you had to keep buying more and more new stuff and sell it quickly or you lost more and more liquid cash, until you reached a tipping point and had no money to buy new and couldn't sell the old.

Deathmate was just a milestone on the path to self-destruction among retailers; it was not a cause.

Know what really bothers me?

This:






Five issues were published. And not one of them - NOT ONE - matches up with WWF continuity at the time, as seen on the likes of the USA Network and in syndication. Clearly, wrestling needs its own continuity correction (Crisis in Infinite Wrestling Rings?).

Seriously, I loved the issues.

Fantastic comment, Calidore.

At best, they had maybe a two month lead time on publication, which would make it hard to coordinate storylines, without the WWF let them in on the booking plans.  As it was, Vince just wanted their name out there and Shooter was just trying to get licensed products with name recognition, since his backers weren't ready to try something more daring, until the licensed stuff did nothing.  As it was, Vince reneged on promises that the comic would be sold at wrestling shows, as they were rarely seen outside of newsstands and few of those.  The Nintendo books did better, but not huge numbers.

It didn't help that the WWF was at a creative low point and Shooter was just trying to bring himself work.

If ever there was a Harbinger of Doom, it was Dixie Carter!

The same thing is true of pro wrestling fans.  Superstar Billy Graham built a career out of being a bodybuilder with a carnival barker ability to talk nonsense, Daddy, and made people want to see him, then need an opponent to carry him in the ring.  He was then made champion, because he sold truckloads of tickets; but, because their model was a hero champion facing monster and evil opponents, he was told the exact date he would lose the title, which was more than the few days or weeks of past heel champions.  He is hugely popular, even as a heel and they don't do the sensible thing of turning him babyface, because they are committed to that end date, to transition to the All-American babyface Bob Backlund.  Graham gets depressed and changes his look, wearing karate pants instead of tie-dye tights, wild sunglasses and earrings, which was a look and style swiped by others, like Jesse Ventura and Hulk Hogan.  he shaves his head (he was balding long before; but, let what was there grow long) and starts doing a martial arts gimmick and won't do the old Superstar, confusing fans.  he leaves the area and does the karate bit elsewhere, but then switches back to the old Superstar in another promotion, before coming back to the WWF, thereby confusing those who first saw him in the karate gimmick.

Similarly, there was an African-American wrestler, Pez Whatley (his given name was Pezavan, it had nothing to do with the candy dispenser company), known as Pistol Pez Whatley, who had been a collegiate amateur wrestler and wrestled in several southern territories and prominently on cable tv, for Jim Crockett Promotions, on TBS.  He then was working in the Alabama promotion, the Continental Wrestling Federation (it was one continent, and a very small area of said continent), under the name Willy B Hurt, but all of the fans knew he was Pez Whatley, because they had seen him there before, as Pez Whatley and saw him in national tv, as Pez Whatley.  The announcers even acknowledged it, but he just cut these promos about "just trying to be me."  It was weird, but he got over with the fans and they kept calling him Willy B, even though the fans would chant Pez during his matches.  He moved on and became Pez Whatley again, like Willy B Hurt was a split personality, or something.

The WWF like to repackage wrestlers as something new and couldn't understand why they didn't get over, when fans kept cheering their old name.  Mick Foley was made Mankind, a monster heel, when he came in; but, tons of people had seen him regionally or nationally as Cactus Jack. They would cheer Cactus at him, during matches.  To get him over more, they did a sit down interview, where they worked in a lof of Mick Foley's actual childhood, but exaggerated it to give this idea of a mentally warped individual.  One of those things was showing a tape he made as a teenager, portraying a wrestler, called Dude Love, based on guys like Billy Graham and Jimmy Valiant.  The fans responded well to the segments and the video they showed and they hit on the idea of having Foley come to the ring as Dude Love, believing he was Dude Love, like a split personality.  It got over.  They then decided to have him come out as Cactus Jack, though there were people involved who knew nothing about wrestling outside of their WWF jobs who thought no one ever heard of Cactus Jack, before Mick foley came to the WWF, since it was the Big Time.  Others knew better and he came out, in front of a Madison Square Garden crowd, as Cactus Jack, to a massive response, because the crowds had seen him on WCW national tv as Cactus Jack and ECW tv, as Cactus Jack.  They even did a video of him morphing from one to the other, to lead into the entrance to the ring.

Steve Austin started in the WWF as The Ringmaster and crowds were indifferent.  he shaves his head, starts talking like an exaggerated version of himself and throws in catch phrases and suddenly the crowds forgot he had ever been the Ringmaster.

Conversely, Randy Colley had wrestled there as part of the Moondogs team, dressed like a hillbilly and gnawing on a big bone, then was put together with Bill Eadie, the formerly masked wrestler The Masked Superstar, as a Road Warrior clone team, Demolition.  Most didn't know what Eadie looked like, under his mask, so the face paint didn't matter; but, as soon as he spoke they recognized him.  With Colley, as soon as they came out, people were chanting Moondog at him and they ended up quickly replacing him with Barry Darsow, who was less familiar to the crowds in the WWF (though a certain percentage knew him as Krusher Kruschev, on the Crockett program, on TBS, and he had to hide a distinctive tattoo, with an elbow pad, pulled over his bicep).

Much like comics, the announcers basically told the fans the past didn't count, which used to be the basis for editors doing soft reboots.  That was then, this is now.