LWIA v4 Chapter 1: The 90s Bust (Patreon)

From later in the chapter, as I figured I'd write the other digression first and then fill in the comics analysis on either side of it.

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The circumstances that allowed Moore to rake in easy paydays like this were not, however, the signs of an expanding industry in good health. Quite the opposite—the early 1990s saw the comics industry caught up in a massive financial bubble, the endgame of which was the same as all financial bubbles: a massive crash. This happened in 1994, as fully 40% of American comic shops went out of business. By the time the death spiral reached its bottom, the number grew to 90%. There is ultimately no singular reason why this happened so much as a tangle of factors—the inevitable consequence of a decade of cumulative decisions, most of which were massively profitable at the time. But in almost every case Image Comics served as an effective microcosm of the whole.

Perhaps the best place to start is simply the absurd amounts of money in play. The $100,000 payday that Moore netted on Spawn #8 was, notably, around the same figure that had caused Karen Berger to phone Grant Morrison four years earlier to inform them that they were rich. But Morrison’s success had been for a full length graphic novel; Moore was getting paid the same amount for a single issue that he wrote in an evening. And though his rates declined, he remained Image’s top paid writer, cashing in paydays in the tens of thousands of dollars. This simply was not a reasonable amount of money to pay for Violator vs. Badrock.

But at least on those early issues the sales largely justified it. Moore and Gaiman’s issues of Spawn moved upwards of a million copies—Gaiman noted that he agreed to the $100,000 figure because it was “the kind of royalty that you would have got from any publisher on those kind of sales.” But those kinds of sales—and the ones on things like Spider-Man #1 and X-Men #1 that had spurred the Image founders to strike out on their own—were largely artificial. Spawn #8 may have moved over a million copies, but it didn’t have anything close to a million readers. For one thing, that sales figure represents sales to comic book shops—it is, in effect, a record of how many copies retailers thought they could sell. But more to the point, in the early 1990s a significant number of people buying comics weren’t actually buying them to read them.

It’s instructive to look back at McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1—the 2.5 million seller that began the wave of massive-selling Marvel comics that eventually led to the founding of Image. McFarlane’s cover—Spider-Man perched within a knotted and ragged web as spiders crawl over it and him—was striking and iconic, yes. But in some ways the most revealing part of the cover is the red banner at the top reading “1st all-new collector’s item issue.” The point is emphasized even further in the two variant editions that shipped in sealed plastic bags with two giant circular seals reading “Issue #1: Collector’s Item,” the bag being intended to remain sealed so as to demonstrate that the issue had never been read, and thus that it was still valuable.

This treatment of comics not as a medium for telling stories but as a commodity was widespread in the early 1990s, spurred on by a deluge of media hype. This ranged from national publications like the New York Times running articles with headlines like “Collectors Read the Bottom Lines of Vintage Comic Books,” a strange hybrid of a piece that opened by covering the publication of a bunch of coffee table books about comics history before moving on to covering a Sotheby’s auction of vintage comic books, making much of eye-watering figures like the $28-38k expected sale price of Action Comics #1, with quotes from comic book retailers about how “when we opened our store in 1974, an average copy of Action 1 would have gone for about 400,” but “today a good copy is $6,000 to 7,000,” to pieces in local papers like the Rockland Journal-News, which breathlessly declared that “like fine art, stocks or bonds, comic books have become worthy investment opportunities,” focusing both on the huge prices of major vintage comics and on newer things, like Image’s then six-month old Gen-13, which they note “was released with a cover price of $1.95 per issue” but “was under-ordered and now copies go for $40 each,” or The Paducah Sun’s “Not a funny paper investment,” which talked about how Superman #75, featuring the famous “Death of Superman” stunt, was worth double its cover price literally the day it came out, ending with a story about a local fan who bought every issue published by Jim Shooter’s Valiant Comics, calling it “by far the best investment I ever made. I have probably close to a dozen different titles now and some of the first ones are worth over $100.” (This latter piece was printed besides one about the billion dollar baseball card industry, a page of financial advice so staggeringly bad that it is plausibly capable of explaining every economic misfortune to befall Paducah, Kentucky since.)

This tone was mirrored in the comics industry press such as Wizard, a comic magazine that launched in 1991 and dedicated more than a third of every issue to a price guide, augmented by columns like the Tip Sheet, with a listing of books that “had not experienced price changes, but were selling briskly. These books are picking up steam!”, the Top 10, offering the ten best-selling books on the secondary market that month, a list of the month’s first issues (“Number one and zero issues have been known to appreciate considerably when a series becomes popular”), Comics Watch, offering a selection of books investors might want to target because of their anticipated increases in value. All of which fueled the conditions in which Spawn #8 could shift a million copies and Alan Moore could get paid enough for writing it to buy three copies of Action Comics #1 at auction if he wanted to. The only problem was that all of this was extremely stupid.

Yes, Action Comics #1 fetched tens of thousands of dollars. But its print run in 1938 was 200,000 copies, and because it was not seen as anything other than a disposable piece of mass entertainment, only about a hundred copies are thought to survive. That’s a very different situation from a comic that sold 2.5 million copies, large numbers of which were bought specifically as investments and left immaculate in their sealed polybags. More to the point, the comics that fetched top prices weren’t just first issues, they were debuts of major characters. Amazing Spider-Man #1 was, in 1994, estimated by the Overstreet Price Guide (because the market was so overheated that there were in fact multiple price guides being published) to sell for $13,500 in near mint condition. But this was already much lower than Amazing Fantasy #15, the character’s actual debut, which was estimated at $20,000. The first issue of Spectacular Spider-Man, meanwhile—the character’s secondary series, which began thirteen years later in 1976—fetched a mere $44, a fact that ought have given pause to anyone scooping up one of the 2.5 million copies of his fourth series, which by 1994 was only fetching $4.75 even if it was still in its bag.

There were still comics—even recent ones—that appreciated in value. Those who got in on the ground floor and picked up Saga of the Swamp Thing #20—a group that consisted almost entirely of people who had just slogged through nineteen issues of Martin Pasko that were mostly worth less than their cover price—could be rewarded by a $19 sale if they’d kept it in good condition, and most of Moore’s run appreciated at least some. Sandman #1 was all the way up at $55. These mostly even continued to appreciate in value—even after Gaiman’s reputation went down in flames, copies of Sandman #1 were selling hundreds of dollars. But these aren’t numbers that were making anybody rich.

More to the point, the reason these comics were valuable was, at the end of the day, that they were good and people wanted to read them, just as the value of Action Comics #1 or Amazing Fantasy #15 was that they had introduced iconic characters that immediately became massively popular. This simply was not the case with the overwhelming majority of comics coming out in the early 90s. Moore’s judgment of mainstream superhero comics is always on the harsh side after Watchmen, but it’s genuinely hard to argue with his assessment of writing for Image that “the bulk of the audience really wanted things that had almost no story, just lots of big, full-page pin-up sort of pieces of artwork.” This aesthetic proved as ephemeral as the speculator boom, however—with a handful of exceptions, of which Spawn is by far the most notable, none of the characters Image launched with had any sort of long-term cultural legacy.

Part of this was that Image was often struggling to actually put the books out. The 1963 Annual is of course particularly flagrant example, given that it never came out at all, but Image was rightly infamous for the chronic lateness of their books. In 1993—their second year of publishing—less than a third of their comics actually made their announced release dates. Jim Lee’s WildC.A.T.S saw two month gaps between its first three issues, followed by three for its fourth before it went on an eight month hiatus, Youngblood started with three month gaps, which grew to a five month gap between issues 4 and 5 (the latter of which wasn’t even drawn by Liefeld), and a full year between it and issue 6, and Spawn managed to have its production schedule grow so convoluted that issues 21-24 came out before issues 19 and 20, which released in October 1994 on either side of issue 25. Whilce Portacio’s Wetworks, meanwhile, simply didn’t come out at all until two years after it was first solicited. One of the most infamous problems came with a crossover between Image and Valiant Comics called Deathmate, a four issue series in which Valiant’s two issues came out in the summer of 1994, while Jim Lee’s issue lingered until October and Liefeld’s all the way in December, coming out after the nominal final issue of the event, causing orders on it to crash from an initial half million down to 180,000, large quantities of which failed to sell once they got into retailers’ hands.

But while other publishers lacked these sorts of embarrassing scheduling issues, but the larger issues of quality were industry-wide. DC—which Moore savaged at the time as “the work of the devil. It’s gratuitous sadism. I fondly believed that shock could be used as an implement with which you could actually affect people. You could cut through their dulled sensibilities and actually say something. And I like to believe that I used shock responsibility. But of course you have to be responsible for all the people who come after you as well. And there’s an awful lot of DC comics in which—‘Ah… dunno—it’s getting a bit dull… let’s chop off a two-year-old’s finger.’ It’s nasty. There’s something depressing about it.” Moore exaggerates for comedic effect, but it’s true that DC’s output was inordinately fond of violent stunts. The best known of these is, of course, the Death of Superman arc, which responded to the character’s declining sales in the face of the Image aesthetic by having him get beaten to death by a newly created muscular brute villain called Doomsday and temporarily replaced with a new, more violent version, although of course the original was brought back within the year. Shortly thereafter a similar arc unfolded in the Batman books called Knightfall, in which Bruce Wayne has his back broken by a newly created muscular brute villain called Bane, allowing him to be temporarily replaced by a new, more violent version, although of course the original was brought back within the year. Similar arcs unfolded for other characters—Wonder Woman was temporarily usurped by another psychotic new version, Green Arrow was killed off and replaced with a not actually all that psychotic version, and Green Lantern went insane and became a villain after his home city was destroyed. Even Aquaman got his hand eaten off by piranhas and replaced it with a harpoon, although in comparison that’s getting off easy.

If anything, the situation was even worse at Marvel. It did its own share of darker, more violent versions of existing characters—a crossover in which Thor goes mad and becomes a villain, another where the Avengers get involved in a cosmic genocide, and a series of Spider-Man stories featuring the villain Carnage, a character that took Venom, the character made so popular by Todd McFarlane, and offered a new “violent serial killer” version of him. But it was a different Spider-Man event that best captured the company’s problems. In August of 1994, Marvel began a story across all four Spider-Man books generally known as the Clone Saga. This story returned to a plot point from twenty years earlier in which Peter Parker was confronted with a clone of himself, who apparently died at the end of the story. This new arc revealed that he had not died and was instead living under the name ben Reilly, however, and brought him back to feud with Peter Parker, and then, in a dramatic escalation of stakes, revealed that in fact the character readers had been following since 1975 was the clone, and that Ben Reilly was the original.

This would merely have been a foolish sort of storyline were it not for the fact that a few months into it Marvel announced a reorganization under the impressively stupid “Marvelution” banner in which editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco was removed and his position replaced with five separate editors-in-chief each overseeing a different group of books. This caused chaos across the company, but especially in the Spider-Man books, where DeFalco was also one of the writers, who suddenly went from helping plan the arc and giving the final sign-off on plot points to working under the newly installed Spider-Man editor Bob Budiansky, who’d had nothing to do with the arc’s conception, and who was himself replaced a year later when the Marvelution was abandoned and Bob Harras was named editor-in-chief of the whole line. The result of this was that the story was unfolding with no real plan as to where it was going. With the standard operating procedure for the arc being that stories ran through multiple titles (so as to force people to buy all four Spider-Man books each month instead of just following a single one), this meant that every aspect of the story was subject to far too many cooks with far too little oversight. On top of which, Marvel’s increasingly vocal marketing department repeatedly pushed for storylines to be extended and additional miniseries crammed in. The result was a two year boondoggle of a high profile story that never had any coherence or direction, eventually becoming such a hot mess that Marvel published a comic called 101 Ways to End the Clone Saga parodying its own internal chaos.

As the level of corporate upheaval suggested, Marvel’s troubles extended well beyond the Spider-Man office. The 1994 implosion of comic shops inevitably hit the bottom line hard. The five editors-in-chief were all ordered to raise sales on their respective lines at the exact point where the number of shops that could make those sales was cut in half. The editors quickly realized that in a contracting market their primary competition was each other, leading to a year of cutthroat backbiting as editors attempted to poach talent from each other while siloing their popular characters—one staffer is quoted as saying that ‘it would have been easier to have Spider-Man team up with superman than to have Spider-Man team up with the X-Men” Ironically the only one to succeed in the face of these astonishingly inhospitable conditions was Bob Budiansky, as the early days of the Clone Saga generated interest in the books before the wheels came off. And the timing of this industry-wide decline could scarcely have been worse. In 1991, Marvel Entertainment Group went public on the stock market, and used the money to enter a period of rapid expansion, buying up Malibu Comics, the trading card companies Fleer and Skybox, the Italian sticker company Panini, and a 46% share of ToyBiz. All of this was predicated on the idea that the massive sales of the early 90s were going to continue, and when they didn’t it quickly became a crisis for the company.

The most significant acquisition of the period, however, came in December 1994 when Marvel acquired Heroes World Distribution. Heroes World was one of several comics distributors operating in the direct market—companies who did the work of actually taking orders and shipping books to stores. At the time it was the third largest of them, behind Steve Geppi’s Diamond Comics and Wisconsin-based Capital City. Marvel’s plan was to make Heroes World their exclusive distributor—a move that sent shockwaves through the industry, as the direct market was based on volume discounts and retailers now had to split their orders between two distributors, getting lower discounts on each. Diamond responded by quickly locking up exclusive distribution deals with DC and Image, effectively killing Capital City, who they acquired in 1996. Marvel’s plan to use Heroes World, meanwhile, was an abject disaster—Heroes World was in no way prepared to handle the volume of orders involved, and delays and billing errors abounded. The endeavor collapsed in 1997, and Marvel slunk back to Diamond, who now had a monopoly on the direct market, which they’d maintain for the next quarter century. By this point things had gone badly enough for Marvel that they entered bankruptcy and a lengthy battle for control between corporate raider Carl Icahn and ToyBiz CEO Ike Perlmutter—a saga that stretched out into 1998.

Within all this chaos, Marvel and Image saw their fates briefly and ignobly entwine again. One of the rotating door of Marvel executives during its drain-circling era was Jerry Calabrese, a marketing guy who didn’t even read comics. Calabrese’s straightforward assessment of the company’s dire straits was that they should probably go get some of the creators who had been working on their books the last time they were popular. And so Calabrese went to Image with an unexpected offer: would any of them like to come reboot some of Marvel’s characters? This proved divisive within Image—McFarlane was particularly appalled, asking “why do you want to work for your competitor?” as if he’d not done a Spawn/Batman crossover just two years prior. But Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee were interested, especially when the financial terms—a minimum $2 million payday for each of them in exchange for producing two twelve issue runs apiece—were offered.

In order to justify the reboot and redesign of the characters Marvel staged a big crossover in which its entire slate of characters banded together to fight Onslaught, a malevolent version of the X-Men’s Charles Xavier. The characters slated to be part of the Lee/Liefeld redesign—the Avengers and Fantastic Four—seemingly sacrificed their lives to defeat him, but were in fact pulled into a pocket universe where they could live out their rebooted lives with new issue 1s.

As with much of the comics industry in this period, the wheels quickly started to come off after the initial big splash. Part of this was behind the scenes turmoil—Calabrese was forced out a month before the first Heroes Reborn issues actually shipped, and the next batch of executives did the usual thing of marginalizing their predecessors’ pet projects in favor of their own. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, there was considerably more chaos, especially from Liefeld’s camp, where things started awkwardly when writer Chuck Dixon acrimoniously departed the Captain America book. Reports differ on exactly what happened—Liefeld claims that he disliked Dixon’s approach, while Dixon claims that he quit after Liefeld departed from his plots. Given that the dispute centered on part on the fact that Dixon—who would eventually publish comics with a neonazi press—objected to Liefeld wanting to do a storyline about racism, this might be viewed as a blessing in disguise, but the disguise was still one of shambolic management. And this was hardly the only problem Liefeld annoyed Marvel with his practice of sending a courier with the disk containing the art files with instructions not to turn it over until he received Liefeld’s check—a story that makes Jim Valentino’s complaints of late payment from Liefeld something of an irony.

But aside from the drama, the idea also just failed to pay off. Things started well, with the relaunched titles being the four biggest sellers in September of 1996, but the dropoff was sharp. By the second issue they were all getting outsold by Spawn, validating McFarlane’s skepticism of the project. Even still, the books stayed relatively successful, in that they were top ten books, but by 1996 that meant selling a hundred thousand copies, which was nowhere near enough to justify the astronomical fees being paid. Liefeld’s two titles were seen as particularly disappointing, and he was removed from both books at the halfway point, with Jim Lee’s Wildstorm Studios taking over the whole experiment, which was abandoned after a year, with each title getting a 13th issue just to do the inevitable Image crossover before the characters were transported out of their pocket universe and into yet another new issue #1. These new new series quickly leveled out to only slightly lower sales than the Heroes Reborn fiasco.