More on how Things got Fucked and Why Your Spawn Comics are Worthless

ROUND TWO -- FIGHT!

Okay, so it's 1993 and superhero funnybooks are riding high saleswise, even though qualitywise they're pretty consistently crap. (There are exceptions, sure. There are always exceptions.) DC has "Reign of the Supermen" and "Knightfall/Knightsquest/Knightsed" running interminably, Marvel is pushing out polybagged-collector's-card-super-collectable-six-different-title crossovers like X-Cutioner's Song and Rise of the Midnight Sons, and a bunch of other companies are nipping at their chromium die-cut holographic heels, with Valiant and Image at the forefront. So imagine the excitement when Valiant and Image announced a big cross-company crossover: DEATHMATE!

This was tipped to be the collector's item classic bonanza of the year, and people ordered lots and lots and lots of this hot book, scheduled to come out over the summer of 1993.

Except the Image issues came out in October, December, with Rob Liefeld's Deathmate Red issue finally coming out in late January 1994, somewhat after the summer excitement wore off.
This was hardly a new development for Image Comics, and as the company approached its third birthday, retailers and fans were getting less and less patient with the new company's excuses at being "new at this". Retailers were particularly hurt by this, since they were sinking a lot of money into pre-ordering (collectively) a million or more copies of hot books like Spawn and Wildcats, only to find the books delayed several months. At a certain point the late books would be made returnable due to the publisher's breach of contract, and lots of books barely squeaked in under the deadline, often with shortened main stories with the solicited artist/characters and lengthy "special previews" of the next books.

In a move showing amazing chutzpah, Todd McFarlane took Spawn #19, which was something like six months late and returnable, and shipped it out as Spawn #21, which was in fact not returnable because it was only two months late. He later resolicited an obvious-rush-job fill-in story about Spawn vs. Houdini for issues 19-20. None of this sat well with retailers, who were starting to run into some money troubles in ordering super-late issues of Spawn or Youngblood, especially since they hadn't raked in the big bucks with their unsold cases of Spawn and Youngblood from two years previous.

The speculators were also getting tired of not getting a big return on their crates of collector's item #1 issues. They were starting to leave in droves, forcing the retailers to eat even bigger stacks of all these books. Marvel was in financial trouble too, as Pereleman was doing some really scummy money-swapping deals with his corporations, and Marvel corporate was in an insane buying spree, purchasing Toy Biz, Fleer, Skybox, Malibu Comics and various other things that had no positive impact on their comics line, which while still managing to make money every quarter, was starting to get mired down pretty severely with very shitty comics.

All of these conditions combine to lead to what was really the Perfect Storm of fucking over superhero comics, which came along in December of 1994 when Marvel purchased Heroes World Distributors. Heroes World was a pretty small little distributor, mainly servicing comic shops along the northern East Coast, and Marvel purchased it with the intention of making it their sole distributor across the entire country. This made sense in terms of Perelman's vision of Marvel owning (and therefore profiting) from every step of the process (this is why he wanted to buy a toy company, a trading card company, etc). But it was a spectacularly bad idea. I cannot stress this enough.
At the time that Marvel bought Heroes World, there were probably around a dozen or so distributors set up to accomodate the direct market. Diamond and Capitol City were probably the two largest, but lots of smaller ones dotted the country, mostly specializing in a particular region or in independent comics or something like that. There was competition between distributors for the business of different shops, which American Capitalism will tell you is healthy.

So Marvel buys Heroes World, and announces that in a few months, HW would be the sole distributor of Marvel Comics to the direct sales market. All comic shops would have to divide their monthly order between at least two different distributors: Heroes World and [another distributor for everyone else]. Given that even during the boom, Marvel usually made up ~40% of the market in a given month, this reduced their total outlay to Diamond/CCity/etc. quite a bit. This is not only a hassle, but since comic shops' ordering discount is often contingent on their total order, this pushed practically everyone down to a lower discount tier.

Almost immediately after Marvel bought Heroes World, Steve Geppi and Diamond went on an Exclusive Signing Spree and got nearly everyone else that mattered at the time signed up to exclusive distribution deals: DC, Image, Dark Horse, Valiant and Wizard, and some other companies to boot. It was at this point that Diamond created the "premiere" section or whatever the call it in the front of their Previews catalog, putting all of the "big" [then-exclusive] publishers up front and prominently displayed, and shoving everyone else into the back ghetto.

Most distributors, faced with a loss of ~90% of their comics business, folded very quickly. Capital City managed to get a few exclusives with who I guess we'd call the "indie" publishers -- Kitchen Sink and Viz are the two I remember, and this was before manga was big so Viz was not really any sort of force. So now comic shops were forced to order from three different distributors, or more likely just not bother ordering various indie books because it would be such a pain in the ass. So not only were the store owners boned by this decision, but some of the smaller publishers got hurt too.

Once Heroes World got off the ground... well, there were some growing pains. To add to the lateness troubles that still plagued many Image books (as well as other indies, several of which, like Valiant, were in the middle of going out of business), now Marvel was trying to ship out every comic they sell out of a regional distribution business that was accustomed to servicing a few dozen shops in a radius of a few hundred miles. Books were regularly delayed -- not neccesarily for months, but often shipments wouldn't show up on Wednesday, or wouldn't be the right comics, would end up damaged, at the wrong address, and everything else you could imagine going wrong when someone unprepared for a shipping business starts up. This all spells further trouble for already struggling retailers, who start dropping like flies, or depending more and more on Magic the Gathering cards and other non-comics stuff to pay the rent.

The whole industry at this point pretty much goes into a free-fall. The best selling comics start selling about a tenth of what they used to, with the hottest books barely poking into six figures. All the publishers buckle down to really hit their "core constituency", the sort of people who will gladly buy in excess of five or six titles featuring Batman/Superman/Spider-Man, who will buy every single issue of Zero Hour or Onslaught, who will follow their favorites through anything. And even those people started getting bitter and declaring crazy boycotts over the treatment of Hal Jordan, over the Spider-Clone saga, over Heroes Reborn, whatever. We'll get into the sort of comics these people inspired a bit later.

Anyway, after a few months of the Heroes World experiment, Capital City (now lacking the ability to distribute comics by Marvel, DC, Image, Valiant, Dark Horse, Wizard, and about a dozen other publishers) shuts down, and is purchased by Diamond, who as of 1996 distributes literally every comic book sold in a direct sales comic shop, except those published and distributed by Marvel. Following a whole bunch of bad business shit (little to none of it involved with the publishing of funnybooks), Marvel Comics declares bankruptcy in 1996. As a result of this, Heroes World shuts down and Marvel signs an exclusive with, you guessed it... Diamond! Proud monopolistic distributors of everything you buy in a comic book shop since 1997!

I imagine a lot of you have been reading comics for less than a decade and don't really remember a time before the big ol' Previews catalog was the only game in town. Diamond is to blame for a lot of the shittiness of comics in the mid to late 1990s, as they had a pretty sweet racket going on as de facto Tastemakers of the direct sales funnybook market.

Besides stripmining the loyal old school comic fans, the other market that could almost be considered "successful" in this period were the BAD GIRL books -- Vampirella, Shi, Witchblade, Lady Death, Avengylene, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. In a funny bit of synergy, almost all of these were published by Diamond Exclusive publishers, and given a lot of attention in the "Diamond Premium" section of the catalog, the bit up front with all the color pages and feature "spotlights". This got the books a lot of attention, and considering that Wizard (another Diamond Exclusive publisher, what a coincidence!) kept touting these books as the greatest thing ever, and the prices on back issues kept shooting up (a price guide organized by Wizard, how strange!) suddenly this became a big hot thing, even though I defy you to find more than a dozen people alive today that could describe the plot in any given issue of one of these books. And I open this contest to the writers, artists and editors of these "bad girl" books.

So here we are, 1996. Two thirds of the comic shops in the country have shut down. Superman has a mullet, at least five (often closer to a dozen) books churned out a month, and a readership that is about 6% of what he got when he was dead. There's only one distributor pushing comics to the remaining stores, and only the most hardcore and devoted of superhero readers left standing after all the bullshit drove away the people who are not extremely dedicated or patient.

Comics are fun!

Why Superhero Comics Sucked in the 1990s and the Industry Tanked pt 1

People often talk about the 1990s as the Bad Old Days of comics; this is obviously an over-generalization as there were plenty of good funnybooks that got released between 1990-1999; the 1990s were also the decade that saw Vertigo flourishing as its own imprint, and the "indie" comic really come into its own, with people like Peter Bagge, Daniel Clowes, Seth, Chris Ware, Evan Dorkin and others making their mark. Marvel and DC always have some reliable creators on staff who manage to poke their head above the current trends, and even Valiant, Ultraverse and some other aborted lines had some really good concepts at their core that got sucked under by the shit-tsunami.

But when people talk about the 1990s, they're mostly talking about superhero comics. And they're really talking about 1988 (or so) to 1996 (or so). It's easy to pick up on the transparently Bad Ideas of that period, like the Superbitch Sue Richards, Liefeld's fifteenth iteration of Cable or six different limited edition chromium die cut covers polybagged with a hologram. But the factors behind the scenes were as ugly as what was often being published. As ugly as Herb Trimpe, longtime Marvel Bullpen workhorse and ordained minister forced to grind out his last years in the industry pretending he never learned how to draw, throwing together horrifically ugly Liefeld pastiches of grimacing women in thongs because that is what, for a moment, the Market Demanded.

There were really several factors that led to the frequently extraordinary "badness" of superhero comics in the 1990s. This is going to be really long, and I apologize for that, but fully understanding how fucked superhero comics (and the industry in general) were circa 1997 or so takes some explaining.

In the mid 1980s, DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths and Marvel Superhero Secret Wars were two big twelve-issue "event" mini-series that featured practically every character in their respective universes and crossed over into a number of ongoing series. They were both huge successes sales-wise, and so this started both companies off doing frequent "events", which usually involved a core mini-series and dozens of crossover issues. This came to a head in the 1990s, which we'll get to in a minute.

At the same time, the 1980s saw a lot of attention being cast on comics and other collectibles (toys, baseball cards, etc.) as baby boomers started spending insane amounts of money to recapture their childhood via Mickey Mantle and Spider-Man. When people learned that comics from 20-30 years were now selling for hundreds or thousands of dollars, people seemed to think that hey, if they bought comics today they could put their kids through college in 20 years.

The big flaw in this theory, across the board, is that old collectables are valuable because they are rare. Most Mickey Mantle rookie cards and X-Men #1s were sold to kids that beat the hell out of them, rolled them up, stuck them in bicycle spokes, left them outside in a tree-house, and got them thrown out when they were grounded or left for college. Their rarity is what drives the prices up, not neccesarily their age.

So when Marvel started hyping up Spider-Man #1, X-Force #1 and X-Men #1 in 1990-1, they nudged the reader to believe that one day soon, they would all be worth thousands of dollars. However, these books all had print runs in the millions, and the majority of these copies were being immediately placed in bags and boxes so that they will be in mint condition. Consequently, these comics can now often be had for a quarter or less.

But at the time, comics were riding high, with lots of books regularly selling a million copies or more per issue. The readership was almost certainly lower than that, since a great many issues were being purchased in bulk, either by collectors or by a store-owner who salted them away dreaming of future profits. Hearing about the big business being made in comics, corporate raider Ron Perelman bought up Marvel in 1988, and triggered the next wave of ridiculousness in his bid to strip-mine the living shit out of any company he owned.

Many of Marvel's hottest artists jumped ship a couple years later. Guys like Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee were hyped up and widely credited with helping create the buzz that resulted in those million-selling #1s I mentioned, but after requesting better pay they were literally compared to hired fieldhands and easily replaceable cogs by a Marvel executive. They quit en masse and formed Image. These guys were mostly in their mid-20s, and without any sort of editorial constraint really kicked off the "XXXTREME" phase of superheroes, with Shadowhawk running around all HIV-positive and breaking heroes backs, Spawn running around as a demon from hell with an enormous cape and skulls everywhere, and dozens of more or less forgotten characters like Cyberforce, Bloodstrike, Ripclaw, Cybernary, Warblade, Bloodwulf, Deathblow and pretty much every other cliched "hardcore" compound name you could imagine. These books were pretty terrible and aren't remembered fondly (or at all) a decade later, but at the time they were HOT HOT HOT and spurred on by speculators they sold like hotcakes.

So pretty soon, Image became the model that Marvel and DC emulated. DC continued the mega-events and special "collector's item" foil/hologram/die-cut/embossed/polybagged" cover trend (originated at Marvel but really brought into its own by upstarts Image and Valiant in the early 1990s) and struck gold in 1992 with the Death of Superman. It was the last big mainstream story about the collectibility of comics, it sold millions of copies, was seen as some sort of historic milestone (people really seemed to think he would stay dead), and launched a series of comics where DC would kill or replace all their big characters -- Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, etc. -- to diminishing returns saleswise.

Marvel, who had already gone through the whole "replacing all the big name characters" gag in the 1980s when then-editor-in-chief Jim Shooter thought Jack Kirby might regain copyright of these characters, simply brought in newer more "extreme/Image" anti-hero ersatz versions of their flagships:


Spider-Man --> Venom

Thor -->Thunderstrike

Avengers --> Force Works

Iron Man --> War Machine

Captain America --> USAgent

Fantastic Four --> Fantastic Force

Ghost Rider --> Vengeance


Not to mention any character with a halfway decent following being given multiple titles of their own, launching dozens of secondary or tertiary heroes into their own mini-series or series, starting side-lines like "Marvel 2099", etc. Story quality be damned, Perelman was looking to maximize profits, maximize shelf-space (the better to crowd out all the upstart companies trying to start up) and just generally make as much money as possible.

At the same time, there was a serious talent shortage in comics. Marvel and DC were both operating on the (sadly somewhat true) assumption that their comics sell on the basis of their iconic characters alone, not the talent attached to them. So most of the better writers and artists jumped ship to companies that at least promised better treatment for creators, like Image, Valiant, Dark Horse and the Ultraverse. Other people just left the industry alltogether for jobs in film, animation and elsewhere. But even without these factors, there were so goddamn many comics coming out each month that really really rushed and substandard material was getting released every month. At least when the comics actually came out, which was another mitigating factor in the complete disaster of 1990s superhero comics.

Imagine if you will the peak of the comics speculation boom circa 1993-1994:
there were close to a dozen companies trying to promote themselves as the premiere superhero line. Pretty much all of them were taking their cues from a company being run short-sightedly and incompetently by brash artists with remarkably little business sense beyond hype and surface sheen. The creative impetus boiled down to "make a bunch of flashy changes involving deaths and costumes changes, slap a #1 on the cover of everything possible, ideally have some sort of gimmick cover or insert, and cross the book over with as many other books as possible" and very little attention was paid to boring things like who would actually write or draw the comic. But they were all still selling really well.

You can see how this leads to trouble.