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Post by Cei-U! on Nov 29, 2023 7:41:14 GMT -5
Nothing said in this thread so far has given me cause to regret walking away from Marvel when I did, but it sure has been an interesting read.
Cei-U!
I summon the entertaining trainwreck!
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Post by commond on Nov 29, 2023 9:06:02 GMT -5
February 1992 & March 1992
In the middle of February, Barron's magazine ran a story that several of Marvel's leading artists were preparing to defect in an article warning investors that the comic book bubble was about to burst. Marvel's stock dropped by more than $11 a share on the same day the article ran, and the Los Angeles Time, CNN and USA Today ran stories about the Image guys, portraying their struggle as though they were David battling Goliath. Marvel president, Terry Stewart, did his company no favors by saying creative people were secondary to the characters.
When the Image founders announced that they were starting their own imprint through Malibu Graphics, DeFalco allegedly assured Marvel staff that no independent comic book creator had ever sold numbers to do anything to them, however, by DeFalco's own admission when there had been previous spikes in the direct market due to the success of the Batman and Ninja Turtles movies, Marvel's response was to flood the market with as many books as they could so that when people walked into specialty stores, the majority of the books they saw were Marvel publications. Whether it was the threat from Image, or the pressure to improve on sales form the previous year, DeFalco turned the dial up to 11 in 1992. There were endless crossovers, non stop gimmick covers, and an explosion of new titles. It reached the point where there were over 100 comics being published per month. Thanks to price hikes and gimmick covers, Marvel ended up doubling their profits from 1992, but it came at a price. The actual consumers, not the comic shop owners or the speculators, were growing tired of all the BS.
But let's dial it back to the Feb and Mar cover dates. Things seem normal enough. A Warlock and the Infinity Watch series spins out of the Infinity Gauntlet, but I didn't like Angel Medina's art as a kid. There are random Punisher stories like Blood on the Moors by 2000 AD'ers Alan Grant, John Wagner and Cam Kennedy, and Bloodlines by Gerry Conway and Dave Cockrum, licensed stuff like Captain Planet, James Bond Jr, Kid 'n Play, and Tiny Toons, and truly odd stuff like The Punisher becoming a black man. I haven't read that storyline so I don't know how offensive it is, but good luck explaining how that was a good idea.
Northstar came out as gay in Alpha Flight #106, which was a big deal at the time. The fact that he was gay was an open secret. The decision to acknowledge it was well-intentioned but upper management reacted badly. To DeFalco and Stewart's credit, they generally shielded their editors from the higher ups.
The Galactic Storm crossover begins in the Avengers books, which to be fair, is the most relevant the Avengers books have been since Acts of Vengeance. One of Marvel's Big Guns titles launches, Punisher War Zone, which is a third monthly Punisher series that folks probably didn't need but has cool JRJR artwork. Death's Head II gets a series and gains more traction in the US than the original character did. Marvel has a bunch of other projects on the horizon and has a special Marvel Age preview issue out. Most of the titles will be cancelled when the market crashes, but comic store folk don't know that yet in '92.
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Roquefort Raider
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Nov 29, 2023 11:57:07 GMT -5
February 1992 & March 1992(...) When the Image founders announced that they were starting their own imprint through Malibu Graphics, DeFalco allegedly assured Marvel staff that no independent comic book creator had ever sold numbers to do anything to them, however, by DeFalco's own admission when there had been previous spikes in the direct market due to the success of the Batman and Ninja Turtles movies, Marvel's response was to flood the market with as many books as they could so that when people walked into specialty stores, the majority of the books they saw were Marvel publications. It did look like a knee-jerk reaction, true... and it was a little pointless. Sure, losing a handful of top-tier creators (in terms of sales, if nothing else) is a drawback... but as history would show, very few of the "Image 5" were capable of handling a monthly schedule. Image might sell umpteen millions new #1 issues, but I doubt Marvel lost many readers in the process. At the time, it was a treat to see Dave Sim gleefully proven right about self-publishing: yes, creators could make it without selling away their rights. Personally I had enjoyed Medina's art on Dreadstar, but his work here seemed rushed and uninspired. I didn't like the way Warlock was now presented, either; he came across as pretty unlikeable. I didn't buy issue #2, even if I really wanted to like this series... The Magus storyline had been one of my favourite ever (and still is). I had forgotten that had happened! But then, they also later turned him into the Frankenstein Monster and into an Agent for Heaven. As long as it sells, I guess... Ooooh, what a mess. |
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Post by commond on Nov 29, 2023 18:33:36 GMT -5
April 1992
David Michelinie and Mark Bagley bring us the first full appearance of Carnage, who had a nice character design if nothing else. Spider-Man had managed to avoid most of the 90s craziness so far, and David Michelinie was somehow still employed. J.M. DeMatteis was writing the best Spider-Man stories at the time, but Michelinie at least kept the flagship title on an even keel. I wasn't thrilled about Peter's parents returning, but I wasn't thrilled about their Silver Age reveal to begin with. Bagley has more of a classic Marvel style and is an antithesis to a lot of the Liefeld clones who crawled out of the woodwork at this point. I'm looking at you, Mark Pacella.
Speaking of pencillers with classic styles, Steve Epting had begun his run on Avengers at this point and Paul Ryan was going strong on Fantastic Four. A lot has been said about these runs over the years, but from a purely visual point of view, I think they appealed to me because they resembled the house style when I first began collecting comics. Unobtrusive, draftsman-like. Story first. Stability is a world I keep returning to, but as a kid it was bothering me that all these creators were up and leaving, and then had massive delays on their own books. I just wanted comics I could buy off the racks and read at my own leisure, and books like Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Incredible Hulk and Avengers fit that bill. I really liked the Vulture story that J.M. DeMatteis was doing in Spectacular Spider-Man, but I either ignored that title at the time or it wasn't carried by my local newssagent.
Sam Keith was getting a steady dose of work on Marvel Comics Presents. Keith's work was some of the stranger stuff seen in a mainstream Marvel book since Sienkiewicz, and IMO, better suited to indie books, but kudos to Terry Kavanagh for giving him the assignments. MCP was a shitty gig for an editor. I read a story from Kavanagh the other day about how Marvel's sales people didn't want Kavanagh to run Weapon X in MCP because it was too good for the book, and a frustrated Kavanagh went to DeFalco saying he had this mandate to produce these bi-weekly Wolverine stories for MCP, but if the story was too good to be used, did that mean his mandate was to publish crappy Wolverine stories that couldn't be published anywhere else. MCP did ultimately become a dumping ground for a of stories, but that had a lot to do with the bi-weekly format, I imagine.
The new comic for this month was Cage. This was your quintessential 90s makeover. He didn't want anyone calling him Power Man anymore and the series routinely made fun of his old yellow costume. He was still a hero for hire, but he's just Cage now. The series was written by Marc McLaurin, who had been an assistant editor at Marvel, and interestingly McLaurin decided to build Cage around obscure characters from the titles he had previously edited. The series only lasted 20 issues, but I was surprised when I began reading stuff by Bendis and Brubaker where Cage was a reoccurring guest star. A lot of that spun out of the MAX imprint, but nonetheless, he was successfully brought back.
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Post by codystarbuck on Nov 29, 2023 22:05:16 GMT -5
Barrons was writing for the investment crowd; and, in that context they were right. The comic book bubble was about to burst, though not for a couple of years, As far as Marvel's core business, they weren't making their money on the comics; like DC, merchandizing and licensing earned far more cash. At that point in time, Marvel wasn't a strong investment. Their media presence was still pretty small and they had had failure after failure to launch a movie or tv series, beyond Saturday morning fare. They had a certain toy store presence, with their Toy Biz merch; but, not as much apparel and gift items, especially relative to DC, as a whole, and Batman, in particular. Thus, Marvel's strength lay in comic book publishing and it was clear to anyone relatively objective that speculative buying was out of control and driving publisher releases. It couldn't sustain itself and was likely to tumble as soon as cash flow was shut off, at the retailer level, which is what occurred, when speculators found out that books that sell maybe 150-200,000 copies that sell a million for one issue, aren't scarce and the demand for them has been more than met, leading to a low market price, according to basic economics. Actually, there was an over-saturation, as large chunks of those copies sold were to shops and individual speculators, in case lots, hoping to turn them for a fast buck. Problem is, the 200,000 faithful had theirs and everyone else was someone hoping to flip the same book and finding no buyers.
Marvel was heavily saddled with debt, due to the junk bond issuances, by the mid-90s and their owners were buying and buying properties, and what profit there was to be had was financing the next acquisition, along with borrowing. Marvel publishing reaped no rewards from the initial stock issue and the two rounds of junk bonds. So, in Wall Street's eyes, they were cash-strapped and in a declining business and the defection of a large segment of creative talent meant they had management issues; and, therefore were unlikely to turn things around quickly. That would take the massive influx of cash for hit movies, at the end of the decade, and further properties and mass market licenses. Even then, most of that was going towards outstanding debt, until Disney backed up a dumptruck full of money.
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Post by commond on Nov 30, 2023 6:03:38 GMT -5
Here is the Barron’s article — link |
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Post by commond on Nov 30, 2023 8:15:47 GMT -5
May 1992
The first line of books that Marvel launched in 1992 was called The Big Guns. These books weren't linked to each other in any way, shape or form, other than a few of the characters carried very big guns. The drawing on the Quarterly Report looked pretty stupid, but I thought the retail poster was a nice piece of artwork. The titles included were Cage, Punisher War Zone, Silver Sable and The Wild Pack, Death's Head II, Nomad, and Terror Inc. Death's Head II was a Marvel UK title and Terror Inc. was a character from Epic's Shadowline Saga. The Quarterly Report described them as hard hitting action titles built around The Punisher. Cage had been featured in the Punisher story where the Punisher turned black, but I'm not sure what the Punisher's connection was with the other characters. Perhaps they intended for him to guest star in the books or be more closely connected with them in the future.
According to Sean Howe's book, when the orders came in on Sable #1 and they only amounted to half a million units, DeFalco told Lou Bank that it was the beginning of the end. I have no idea why DeFalco thought Sable should sell a million copies. According to editor Tom Brevoort, the office was like "cocaine culture without the drug use." Everyone was getting hopped-up on sales and would lament the fact their books only sold half a million copies when under normal circumstances those numbers would be amazing.
Oher problems were emerging too. Editors were doing anything they could to boost their royalties. The company also hired a superstar marketing consultant, Richard Rogers, who was in charge of the special covers, the crossovers and double-sized issues, and he was constantly putting pressure on the editors to increase the number of special issues. There were a lot of people within Marvel who knew this was unsustainable, but it didn't matter to Marvel's owners so long as sales and profits continued to go up. They didn't care about the readers or the retailers.
Mike Baron did a lot of coke in the 80s and possibly the 90s as well. Punisher G-Force is a one shot where the Punisher trains to become an astronaut so he can go into space to kill a drug dealer. Cocaine is a helluva drug.
Captain America #400 comes and goes with a special gatefold cover. It was a flip book, meaning you could turn to the back cover, flip it over and read a reprint of Avengers #4.
Avengers #347 has the conclusion to Operation Galactic Storm, which is an unofficial sequel to the Kree/Skrull War from the early 70s. Iron Man and a small group of Avengers, including Sersi, Thor, Iron Man, Vision, Wonder Man, Hercules, and Black Knight, break away from the main group and intentionally kill the Kree Supreme Intelligence despite Captain America's objections. I'm not sure if this was the origin of Cap's frosty relationship with Iron Man, but it's certainly where the idea began for the creators which followed.
Hulk #393 is an anniversary issue and gets a special foil cover. I think it was only a variant cover, however. The interesting thing about this book is that it's 68 pages, but you only get 22 pages of what would have ordinarily been a regular issue of Hulk and a bunch of filler. That was common practice at the time, but it had a detrimental effect on the sales of regular issues. There would be a spike in sales for Hulk #393, but when #394 came out they would lose 20% of the readers from issue #392.
The X-Book annuals came out this month and they were shoddily put together with a million different artists and a makeshift Fabian Nicieza storylines. When DeFalco took over, X-Book annuals were still an event. I am pretty sure I skipped these annuals as a kid. I hope I skipped them. I wasted my money on plenty of crappy comic books as a kid, but I'd like to think I knew better than to collect the '92 annuals.
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Post by commond on Nov 30, 2023 8:22:57 GMT -5
I'm looking through an old issue of Marvel Age and it has the official results of the first annual Forbie Awards, where the readers of Marvel Age vote for the best comics of the year. Assuming this is legit (and it's still somewhat interesting if it isn't), here are the results:  |
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Post by Calidore on Nov 30, 2023 9:06:31 GMT -5
But then, they also later turned him into the Frankenstein Monster and into an Agent for Heaven. This makes me imagine Frank Castle as the Spectre. |
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Post by codystarbuck on Nov 30, 2023 12:43:12 GMT -5
That Graphic Novel category pretty much sums up the state of those publications, by that point.
Groo over Akira?
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Post by zaku on Nov 30, 2023 13:34:53 GMT -5
I'm looking through an old issue of Marvel Age and it has the official results of the first annual Forbie Awards, where the readers of Marvel Age vote for the best comics of the year. Assuming this is legit (and it's still somewhat interesting if it isn't), here are the results: DeathTrap: the Vault which today is all but forgotten (I had to google to understand what they were talking about) better than the Hulk by Peter David and Todd McFarlane??? |
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Post by MDG on Nov 30, 2023 13:39:29 GMT -5
Here is the Barron’s article — linkI'm surprised that at this point publishing was still 85% of revenue for them (first page, top of column 4). I'd always been under the impression that licensing was really what was keeping Marvel and DC afloat from the 70s on. |
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Post by Chris on Nov 30, 2023 14:46:55 GMT -5
Here is the Barron’s article — linkI'm surprised that at this point publishing was still 85% of revenue for them (first page, top of column 4). I'd always been under the impression that licensing was really what was keeping Marvel and DC afloat from the 70s on. DC did very well with licensing, but not so great with publishing. Some Superman titles and New Teen Titans were among the very few high selling books. Marvel did very well with publishing, kicking tail on the newsstands and in the direct market, but not so great with licensing. My personal recollections from the 70s to early 90s is that Marvel did do some successful licensing, but it was mostly t-shirts and posters and the like. DC was producing all those but also had success with action figures, movies, TV shows, cartoons, hobby items, and more. Marvel had the Hulk TV show (let's ignore the Captain America TV movies, even though I liked them as a kid) but that was about it.* DC licensed products were all over the place. I'm not sure how successful this one was overall, but I tried it and thought it was ok. Not super, but ok. The live action Spider-Man TV show did decently enough, but reportedly CBS, which already had Hulk and Wonder Woman, killed it because they were worried about becoming pigeonholed as "that superhero network." |
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Post by Cei-U! on Nov 30, 2023 14:58:48 GMT -5
Superman Peanut Butter actually dates back to the early '40s, so it was successful for at least three decades. There was also Superman Bread to spread it on.
Cei-U!
I summon the market saturation!
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Post by commond on Nov 30, 2023 19:07:50 GMT -5
June 1992
With the success of Infinity Gauntlet, Marvel was in a rush to publish a sequel. The original series had 19 tie-ins, but Infinitely War had a whopping 45 tie-ins over 18 titles, which was more than Secret Wars II. The story and art suffer from Marvel pushing for a sequel so quickly, but as far as company-wide crossovers go, it was a step above the usual fare. That said, crossover fatigue was real in '92. Operation: Galactic Storm had just wrapped up when Infinitely War hit, and the X-office was scrambling at the time, trying to find artists to draw their summer crossover, X-Cutioner's Song. For the sake of everyone's sanity, the Avengers and X-Men books don't tie into Infinity War.
An odd little limited series originates from the pen of Larry Hama and co-writer, Joe Jasko. It was called Cops: The Job, and focused on the dangers facing two New York City police officers in the course of their jobs. Jasko was a former NYC policeman and brought real life stories to the book. No connection to the TV show, but it had to have been part of the pitch.
Jae Lee was penciling Namor at this point. I thought his stuff was so cool in '92, but looking at it now, he was raw.
Roy Thomas has a Conan graphic novel out that I know nothing about. The last graphic novel Marvel released was a strange Stan Lee/Gerry Conway/Ross Andru collaboration where the original Baron Zemo was resurrected as a woman.
Epic Comics marks its 10 year anniversary with a new anthology series. It was kind of sad, actually, as it was a four issue limited series featuring characters from books Epic already published. There was a better anthology released from Epic around the same time called A1 that was a British anthology series which featured work from a New Zealand artist named Martin Emond. It was a big deal when New Zealand had anyone working in the business and he was a bit of a cult hero at the time in Auckland. Sadly, after reading his name in the A1 credits, I discovered that took his own life in 2004.
The next line of comics launched in 1992 comes from Marvel UK and is dubbed Genesis '92. This was a bit of a surprise as Marvel UK had always been a bit of a money loser, but Paul Neary had been given a mandate to create UK books for the US market. Initial sales were good thanks to intense marketing, but the books wouldn't survive the impending crash.
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