The history of Marvel's collapse and resurrection.

Meedyah Morsels #190.

-OR-

Disney/Fox Part 1.5.

The long-delayed prequel to "The history of Marvel's movie deals".

All right, so in the preamble to that one, I said...

All righty, so, back in the 90's, Marvel the comic book company was being mis-managed as badly as WB/DC movies are being today.
There's a whole long saga I could write about that, but let's skip past that for now.

Well, strap in, cuz I'm finally gonna tell that story now.

To say it was all Marvel's mis-management that did them in is brushing past a lot.
But, I needed to at the time to get to the movies thing quickly.

It was really a perfect storm that threatened to take down the whole comics industry.
But Marvel had a leaky boat when that storm hit.

So, Marvel really got hit on four levels.

-Comic shops.
-Speculators.
-The evolving state of comic companies and fandom.
-Their own bullshit.

Let's take each one of those in turn.

Comic Shops.

Comic shops exploded in the 90's, and then a shitload of them died and stayed dead by the 00's.
They've never really recovered.
They might even be on their way out I'm terrified to say.

And here's a summary of how the crash happened.

A little company called Diamond Comics Distributors came along, and made themselves the go-to company to deliver the comics to all the comic shops.
They're still around for some reason, and comic shops are still stuck with them.
Well, Goldman Sachs is still around too, aren't they?
Equifax are still around, aren't they?
These corporate bad actors are like herpes.

Anyhoo, Diamond was shaking down comic shops like Nintendo was shaking down Toys R Us for shelf space.
They quickly became a cartel flexing their muscle.
You hurt the comic shops, you hurt the comic companies, because they can't move their product.

There are YT videos out there of the complicated maneuvering and hustling Diamond was doing, but the short version is "nice place you have here, be a shame if something happened to it".

They were yet another company in the centuries long history of corporate America that thought they could strangle the golden goose as hard as they liked for as long as they liked, and the goose would never die.
But, the goose always dies.

Diamond was factor one hurting the shops, factor two was speculation, and this hurt the shops and the companies.

Speculators.

So, in the 90's, the big two, Marvel and DC expanded into the big four, Marvel, DC, Image, and Dark Horse.
And that big four were making money hand over fist.
For a while.

Naturally, this finally got the attention of some Wall Street goons, and they sniffed around, and did some research, and this led to news stories on collector's issues being valuable, and these stories told parents they could sack away these valuable issues, and pay for their kid's college with them,

This led to the companies doing all kinds of stupid stunts with a million collector's covers, and all this stupid bullshit was a glut on the market, and had the opposite of the desired effect, and plunged the value of these books into the Earth's core, and pissed off the parents who tried to cash in and get rich off this worthless pulp,  and hurt the shops, and hurt the whole business.

The evolving state of comic companies and fandom.

As said in the speculator section, the big three became the big four.
And they were even more than that, but Marvel, DC, Image, and Dark Horse were the biggies.

Here's what I said about image here...

Created in the 90's by a bunch of douche-y little Marvel artists who didn't know what they were doing, and thought they were hot shit in a cup, this company has finally evolved into something respectable, and is home to a lot of inspiring creator owned success stories.

They used to regurgitate formula with a hipster edge, now they have a lot of outside the box storytelling you couldn't get done at DC/Marvel.

I've been impressed by their turnaround.

That sums them up pretty well.

And here's what I said about Dark Horse in the same post...

Another one born in the 90's. They let in indie creators like Image does, but made their big bread and butter on movie licenses.

Their big ones they birthed into the pop-culture world are "Sin City", and "The Mask".
They also created the premise behind "Alien vs Predator".
The comics were vastly better than the movies, trust me.

And finally, just for shits and giggles, and extra hot sauce, here's what I said about Valiant.
Again, same post...

Valiant was founded by Jim Shooter after he was ousted as Editor-In-Chief at Marvel by corporate fat-cats, and then maligned by ingrate fanboys in the fan rags of the day.

His business partners turned out to be scumbags, who kicked him out of Valiant, ran it into the ground, and then sold it to Acclaim, who ran themselves into the ground, and took Valiant with them.

So, in modern times, some fans got together, and have rebuilt Valiant, resurrected its stable of characters, and they cut a deal with a Chinese company to make movies, and the Valiant/Chinese hybrid has cut a deal with Sony, and bam, now Valiant is not just back, but in the Cinematic Universe business.

True enough, the trailer for Vin Diesel's "Bloodshot", is out, so that's a thing.

But the Jim Shooter stuff pays off in the "their own bullshit", section, so I figured I ought to set that up now.

Right, so all these new companies are crawling up out of the woodwork to meet the demand to fill the shelves of the shops, but the kids have the same amount of allowance money to spend on this shit, so they're having to get selective, there's just not enough money to go around for all this stuff.

Even before the speculators stuck their dicks in.

And as said above, Image was made by the top talent from Marvel bailing, so that took a big chunk out of them.

And then Jim Shooter got driven out.
Without his leadership, Marvel just didn't know how to steer in this new environment and the evolving tastes of the audience all this was creating.
They'd under-correct, they'd over-correct, it was a mess.

Think DC trying to figure out their modern movies times 100.

That's where Marvel was.

And finally....

Their own bullshit.

This one breaks down into its own sub-sections.

-Internal strife.
-Draining of talent.
-Over-extending into too many new territories.
-Just plain arrogance.

Internal strife.

See above about Marvel driving away the guys that split off and created Image, and then Jim Shooter, who created Valiant.

This mis-treatment wasn't unique to Marvel, look up the history of DC's black comics line, Milestone, and how those poor creators were treated.

Or, go all the way back to how Siegel & Shuster were treated, or Jack Kirby.

All big companies have their bullshit, but all the different strains of bullshit were coming to a head in the 90's, and were about to explode.

Draining of talent.

See again the founding of Image.

Over-extending into too many new territories.

Marvel seemed to think they were on way more solid ground than they were, when in fact, they were on a bed of quicksand.

Under this delusion that quicksand was concrete, Marvel made moves like they were still 80's Marvel instead of 90's Marvel, and expanded into toys, games, and trading cards.

The trading cards are what really bled them.
Cards were even more unstable than comics.
Due to the same speculation forces as comics.
But magnified 100 fold.

Sports card speculation and glutton-printing brought down all cards with them.
And Marvel were the only dumbasses of the big four on that sinking torpedoed ship.

Add in that the video games were shit, and the toys weren't moving, because the kids all loved Spawn now, and well...

And the guy who made Marvel make all these bonehead moves, especially the cards??

Isaac "Ike", Perlmutter.

Yeah, you might have heard of this guy.
He ran the TV division of Marvel until very recently.
"Agents Of Shield", "Inhumans", that's all Perlmutter.

He's a Trump-sucker.

Keving Feige hated his ever-living guts, and got Disney to split TV from movies just so Feige could get the fuck away from him.

His toxic relationship with Feige is why we never got The Defenders in "Endgame".

"But if he helped run Marvel into the ground in the 90's, how the fuck did he run Marvel TV?".

I dunno. He's just one of these fucking suits who fails upward.

...UNTIL NOW!
Marvel just re-absorbed the TV studios in order for Feige to be the boss of all Marvel, in order to guide the Disney+ shows, so Perlmutter is finally gone!!!
He's gone!!
Hooorayayy!!!

Just plain arrogance.

Thinking they could shit on their talent, and they'd keep taking it?
Thinking they could make all their stupid investments?
Thinking glutting the market with crap wouldn't have consequences?
Thinking their boat wasn't full of leaking holes?

All arrogance.
It blinded them as surely as the gooey acid spit from the spit-osaur in "Jurassic Park".


And that's what brought it all down.
They got hit with all of it.
Diamond, Wall Street, failing shops, changing tastes, changing business landscape, and bad investments.
And seeing none of it coming due to pig-headed hubris.

BTW, Stan Lee had nothing to do with any of this shit.
He was just being the lovable mascot as usual.
He had nothing to do with the day-to-day running of the company.

So, DC, Image, Dark Horse, they all weathered the storm.
They took heavy damage, but they lived.

Littler indie companies were obliterated into bloody moosh.

Marvel almost died by this > < much.

And the aftermath of that is what lead to them crawling out of the hole with movies.

But it took three goddamned decades for them to get from absolutely devastated, to the big dogs they are now.
That bankruptcy wasn't a case of the sniffles.
That damage hung on for awhile.

And even though comic book movies are a booming industry, comic books, not so much.
In the 90's, the top titles sold in the millions.
Now?
A few thousand.
Its nothing like what it was.

That 90's crash gutted the fucking business.

We're still feeling it.
Shops are still closing.
I don't know how to save them.
It's a bummer.

At least we've got the movies.
And the games have gotten way better.

But every gen-x fan who was alive and aware for all this drama can attest to what I've laid out above.
It still shapes the landscape now, as I showed with the Perlmutter thing.

We're going to be feeling it for awhile to come.

I honestly can't tell you if the comics medium will survive the 2020's.
With the increasing reliance on digital, paper period might be on the way out.

And yeah, Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man, they'll live forever in whatever media comes along, but what about the little guy?

Little guys made Superman in the first place.
The little guy matters.

I see less and less of a place for little guys in this future world that's forming.
I wanted to end on a happier note, but rooting for giant gluttonous corporations feels dirty.

Who's gonna be the next Siegel & Shuster? Stan Lee? Kevin Eastman? Todd McFarlaine?
Will the business foster that kind of up-and-comer anymore?
I dunno.
I dunno.
We'll see.


Previously with Disney/Fox-

Disney/Fox Part 14: New Mutants is really happening!


Previously with MM-

Ditto.