The Four Color Media Monitor

A writer at IGN wrote some history about the time 3 decades ago when the speculator market turned the whole industry into a farce, also giving some mention to notable creators in the piece:

Huge issues and events like X-Men #1 and The Death of Superman made comic books into cultural milestones, but those very same big issues — alongside a growing speculation market — eventually sparked a market crash that almost killed comics along the way.

Over the last few years, we sat down with some of the key players of the '90s boom and crash to relive one of the most successful and volatile eras in comic book history, while also trying to learn if the lessons of the past could help stop history from repeating itself. Their recollections are published here for the first time.

And what's so special about the latter, and come to think of it, the former? Even if DC was going to reverse Superman's fate, it's still disgraceful how they were selling audiences on the whole idea of coffin-filling, with Cat Grant's son Adam becoming a standout victim of the whole idea, and Green Lantern's Emerald Twilight coming soon after. And nobody working for these news outlets taking an objective view of the speculator market issue in hindsight anymore than they did the whole death-by-event gimmick. Yet they do allude to the harm this direction caused, and one of the interviewees here was artist/writer Bob Layton, who admits the 1990s was an early period where audiences were becoming disillusioned with the Big Two, courtesy of their gimmicks:

To the man who defined Iron Man for over a decade, it felt like times were changing and fans were beginning to reject what the Big Two were offering. "Good writing had taken a backseat to flashy, gimmicky packaging," Layton explained. Shooter brought the cartoonist over from Marvel in order for Layton to "co-create the new Valiant line of characters and act as Production Manager for the art and editorial on the Gold Key line of superheroes: Magnus, Solar, and Turok."

So why would a high-profile creator like Layton leave one of the biggest comic book publishers in the world at the peak of an industry swell to join a new company? "It was an opportunity to avoid becoming a 'wage slave' to the comic industry," Layton told us. "I left Iron Man, at the height of its popularity, on the promise of owning a piece of what I created. There is no retirement program or union for comic creators. You simply do the same job, day-in and day-out, until your body fails or you get fed up with the low pay and long hours. Dick Giordano, my beloved mentor, taught me the business of comics as well as the creative aspects. We both saw Valiant as a chance for me to make a difference for the whole industry and for my career in particular."

It was only when he took on the job that Layton realized something was amiss. "The decision had been made to sit on those [Gold Key] properties and pursue Nintendo and WWF licenses instead." The decision was a major miscalculation, with Layton stating that "millions of dollars were lost to those ill-conceived projects." It was then that the company decided to commit to the Gold Key characters which, according to Layton, "became a last-ditch effort to save the company from insolvency." He recalled the unstable atmosphere as staff lived under threat of closure at a moment's notice. That would soon change, however, with the release of Valiant's superhero line. "I believe that the real turnaround happened when I convinced my best friend and co-collaborator at Marvel, Barry Windsor-Smith, to lend his considerable talents to Valiant. I know for a fact that it was Barry that gave the new superhero line a true credibility in the direct market."

So we can understand why the original Valiant lasted only several years, and in 1994, they were sold to Acclaim Entertainment, a video game builder that's since gone out of business themselves, before Dinesh Shamdasani bought them in the mid-2000s for new takes. (And years later, they suffered their own share of PC missteps.) Of course, no mention made so far how artistic quality and freedom's been demolished in comicdom, which is arguably worse than the market sales themselves. Or how resolute adherence to the monthly pamphlet format is similarly killing the industry, and nobody takes issue with that either. Nor does anybody discuss the real story behind sans-adjective X-Men #1:

In 1991 Marvel broke records with X-Men #1, which to this day remains the biggest-selling comic of all time at over 8 million copies. Penned by Chris Claremont — who had headed up the team over 17 years through their most successful period — and drawn by comics' biggest young star, Jim Lee, it was a smash hit that featured five different covers and outsold every other comic in the marketplace by literally millions of copies. It was also a landmark moment as it presented a changing of the guard for the title and the company, as just two issues later Claremont would leave the book. Adjectiveless X-Men — as it's called by fans — was an unmitigated success and should have put Marvel in the driving seat of the comic book boom. But behind the scenes, a rebellion was brewing that would see a new player enter the game and change the face of comics forever.

To understand what happened next you need to understand something that is integral to Big Two comics: work-for-hire contracts. In layman's terms, it means that no matter what you create under the banner of Marvel or DC — and some smaller publishers — it will always belong to the publisher, and unless you sell sizable amounts of the book, you'll likely never see much in royalties. Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, and Jim Lee were definitely earning royalties. As Spider-Man #1, X-Force #1, and X-Men #1 proved, their work had a huge impact on the audience and was reinvigorating comic book sales.

Most intriguing Liefeld, despite his slapdash, derivative style, was getting royalties. Though it's still nothing compared to how so many gullible fools would buy his work despite the poor quality of his art. And predictably, nobody wants to mention how much of those 8 million floppies gathered dust in delivery boxes at specialty stores. Record breaking, indeed, ditto unmitigated smash hit. They should be ashamed of themselves for obscuring the bigger picture.

So along with a few friends, they came up with a plan... if they were selling the books, why not start their own company? In a now notorious duo of meetings, the group sat down with the execs at Marvel and told them they would be leaving, then headed straight over to the head honchos at DC to let them know they wouldn't be joining. And so Image Comics was born. The creator-owned company would become the first of its kind and its books would soon be at the top of the charts.

But look where they are now, along with countless other publishers - way down in sales figures well below 100,000 copies apiece. Which is comedy gold for anybody who knows much music tapes and movies sell at.

IGN also interviewed Louise Simonson, who was one of the co-writers for the Death & Return of Superman (it's noted she and others weren't immediately aware what DC's editors planned at the time), and the following is told:

It was a split-second decision that would lead to the creation of one of DC's most iconic books. "It wasn't deliberate; we didn't know it would be so successful," Simonson told IGN. "I knew — I'm sure everybody who works in comics knew — that death sells."

Even so, the Man of Steel writer wasn't counting on it dominating the sales charts. "Maybe some of us were, but I personally hadn't been thinking of it in that context," she said. "For one thing, we kill characters all the time. You know characters are going to be back because it's comic books. I never ever kill a character that I don't know how I'm going to bring back."

Despite all of that, a chance news pickup changed everything, making the choice to kill Superman an international headline. Even though, as Simonson pointed out, Superman was a vastly popular and profitable character who was never going to realistically be killed off in any kind of definitive way, that didn't seem to matter to fans and the media. "In the end, it was so very successful partly because it was Superman, of course, but partly because it was a slow news day. For some reason CNN decided to make a big announcement out of it, 'Superman dies,' and all of a sudden it was a really big deal. I had friends in France who were American and were berated by a fellow driving a cab because the Americans had killed Superman: 'How dare they?'"

If death sells, that's exactly the problem. I don't think Superman and Lois Lane's wedding ever sold as whopping big as that, nor did Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson's. And you wonder how Identity Crisis, Avengers: Disassembled, House of M, Infinite Crisis and other such repellent events came about? Mainly because no one was willing to ask any moral questions concerning any of this stuff. If memory serves, Simonson wasn't against killing Cypher in New Mutants (and she and other contributors spoke of this fictional character illogically as though he were a real person too), and while he may have been later resurrected, it doesn't excuse the illogic they went by to start with. I get the feeling it might not be such a coincidence CNN made it a whole headline; both them and DC were under Time Warner ownership around that era, and the higher echelons probably arranged something for publicity's sake.

Layton was also having worries as Valiant attempted to chase the success and numbers of their publishing counterparts. "I recall sitting in a meeting, early into our success … where we mutually agreed, as the company's management and minority stockholders, to never print over 500,000 copies of any of our titles. I hammered on the fact that the numbers that Marvel was selling on their number one title, X-Men, were not reflective of the number of actual readers in the comics market. Our own marketing polls indicated that Valiant had approximately 300,000 regular readers. Printing more than 500,000 copies of any book would eventually come back to bite us in the ass."

That company-wide print ceiling remained for a while but with rising numbers came huge pre-orders streaming in from Diamond and the other distributors. The numbers Layton shared were impressive and overwhelming, with titles like Rai and the Future Force #1 hitting 900,000 copies, X-O Manowar #0 matching it, and the unbelievable feat of Turok #1 reaching 1,750,000 copies. "Of course, greed… is a bitch," he said. "Eventually, the temptation became simply too great to resist and my partners began printing to speculator demands. That decision proved to have huge negative repercussions for us, and the entire industry, down the road."

Seriously, those premiere issues sold that much? But, such brief successes have become even rarer, and if those copies gathered dust in crates as much as X-Men #1 did originally, then what's all the fuss about?

Anything that goes up must come down, and while the rest of the industry saw the suddenly slumping numbers as nothing more than a phase, Layton and Valiant's VP of Manufacturing Fred Pierce had already realized that something was wrong. Unfortunately, they were alone in their worries and some of their superiors at the publisher had their own ideas about how to turn it all around. "As the sales figures started tumbling down, Massarsky pushed the ill-fated and ill-conceived Deathmate project on us. Mostly, it was conjured up because Massarsky and Jim Lee were best buddies at the time and had privately arranged the crossover without consulting anyone else in editorial or management," Layton stated. "The project was literally jammed down our throats but we did our best to comply, even though most of the Valiant creators thought it was a really bad idea. It was an obvious 'money grab,' designed to bolster our sagging numbers. On top of that, the creators at Image Comics couldn't make a publishing deadline with a gun to their head."

If memory serves, Liefeld certainly didn't meet the timelines needed when he was publishing Youngblood, in example. So, what was the big deal about his particular contributions to Image? Or even Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon? Practically nothing. As for whether history could repeat itself, Layton thankfully gives a perceptive argument:

Comics sales have never again reached the height of the '90s. Though the speculation trend has waned, it's still a part of the business. Despite certain comics like young readers and original graphic novels selling better than ever, Diamond comic book sales to shops rarely hit close to the lofty heights of the boom. Layton has strong words about the possibility of another crash. "Sorry to say, it was not a singular moment," he said. "Companies need to start thinking outside the box and explore creating entertainment accessible in price and content to a mass market and in a format that doesn't have to be encased in plastic just to survive handling."

Now we're getting somewhere! And that format has to be paperbacks and hardcovers. How is that so difficult to comprehend? So long as company managements refuse to consider such a format, and cut out the obsession with line-wide crossovers as much as pamphlets themselves, which are getting monumentally expensive, they can't be surprised if their efforts will fail. And if they continue the sales gimmicks for brief boosts, that'll only compound the perception they're uninterested in quality, but rather, in profiteering. That's only what today's Big 2 care about, along with the political correctness and social justice propaganda the writers of this article and interviews predictably wouldn't ask if it's just as much a culprit as the speculator mentality.

Labels: dc comics, golden calf of death, good artists, history, indie publishers, marvel comics, msm propaganda, sales