by Sean Howe
Not everyone was sold on the industry’s new phenom. John Byrne and Peter David devoted numerous editorial columns to their problems with Image’s product and attitudes, while the Comics Journal’s Gary Groth was apoplectic that Todd McFarlane and his friends had become the new poster boys for artistic autonomy. “The founding creators have managed to dumb down and vulgarize an idiom not known for its application of intelligence or sensitivity,” Groth wrote, “and have consistently displayed an arrogant contempt for the medium and an unbridled ignorance of its history, coupled with a moral obtuseness rivaled only by the corporations to whom they owe their success.”
But Image’s comics sold, and Marvel’s comics sold. “Everyone had expense accounts,” remembered Tom Brevoort. “Christmas parties became decadent affairs—the hotel in Grand Central Station, big ice sculptures of Spider-Man, crazy DJs in a control room like Professor X. It was an insane spectacle of excess.”
Jim Lee framed the formation of Image as a kind of karmic imperative. “We have to take our shot now,” he told an interviewer, “as opposed to 15 years from now when we’re bitter, older men.” Even as Marvel’s quarterly reports boasted of continued growth, much of its talent was departing for greener pastures. In an unprecedented deal, DC signed a group of black comic creators—many of whom had worked for Marvel—to produce, off-site, a number of new series for the publisher, under the name Milestone; two of the principals had met while working on Marvel’s Deathlok—and raised their start-up capital with the checks they earned on that title. Meanwhile, Jim Shooter, who with Marvel alumni Bob Layton and Barry Windsor-Smith had carefully built a success with the slowly growing Valiant Comics, accepted an award for Independent Publisher of the Year in June. (Shooter would be removed from the company by the end of the month, after a power struggle with his cofounders; he’d soon dust himself off and begin yet another comic-book start-up, called Defiant.)
There were, for the first time in memory, a great number of viable alternatives to Marvel and DC, but the financial risks involved in creator-owned properties remained.
John Byrne’s Next Men #1 had gone into a second printing by the time that McFarlane, Lee, and Liefeld left Marvel, but the buzz was short-lived: John Byrne doing projects outside of Marvel was no longer big news. He’d already taken his big shot, at the peak of his popularity, with the Superman relaunch. “I had my turn,” Byrne admitted. “I was exactly where Todd and Jim and the other Image guys are ten years ago, when there were no royalties and no creator ownership. When I was number-one dog, I didn’t make a billion dollars. Todd happened to happen when he did make a billion dollars.”
Chris Claremont’s proposed Image project with Whilce Portacio never saw fruition. When Portacio put The Huntsman on the back burner, Claremont cast about for a collaborator, but found that creator-owned projects didn’t work so well if one couldn’t draw—if one had to hire an artist to execute the vision. The rest of the Image team could subsidize their start-up costs with trading cards and licensing deals, but what was he going to do, sell T-shirts with script pages on them? Instead he poured his energies into sci-fi novels, a comics adaptation of a licensed property—Predator vs. Alien—for Dark Horse, and taking shots at his former employer. “There’s nothing to differentiate, on a individual basis, one Marvel book from another,” he complained. “It all blurs together into one giant, amorphous, primal shout.” Noting that the “short-term staccato bursts” of the event-driven story lines were designed to satisfy quarterly financial reports, he lamented what had become of the X-Men. “I look at that and I think, this is my entire working life, up until two years ago, and it’s taken them 18 months to gut it like a fish, to trash the characters, to kill off a tremendous amount of the context and cast, and to turn it into, to me, a parody of what it was.”
Other disgruntled Marvel creators began working for Malibu, which, fearful of putting all its eggs in the Image basket, was putting together plans for a shared universe—an “Ultraverse”—of its own characters. At a Scottsdale, Arizona, resort hotel, seven creators—including Steve Gerber and Steve Englehart—brainstormed in conference rooms, by tennis courts, and next to the swimming pool. They wouldn’t own the characters they created for Malibu, but they’d get a bigger share of profits than they would from Marvel. Even more important, they could follow their imaginations to the limit, creating comics about, say, a superhero who needed alcohol to manifest his powers, or a corrupt cop who was reincarnated as a sentient mass of sewage. Gerber and Englehart had grown frustrated with the thirty years of backstory baggage involved in writing Marvel characters, with having to ask editors for permission every time they wrote a line of dialogue. Walking around the complex at the end of the weekend, Gerber turned to Englehart. “This is what Marvel used to be like.”
The most notable assortment of former Marvelites, however, was gathered at Topps Comics. The leader of the sputtering sports card industry had hired Todd McFarlane’s former Spider-Man editor, Jim Salicrup, to help it move into the comic-book racket. Salicrup promptly flew out to California and cut a deal with Jack Kirby to purchase leftover animation concepts from the 1980s. It was exactly what Kirby had wanted to do twenty years earlier—get paid for being an idea man, and let others do the follow-up work. Salicrup turned around and hired a murderer’s row of onetime Marvel faithfuls: Steve Ditko, Dick Ayers, Don Heck, John Severin, Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway, and Gary Friedrich. It was Stan Lee’s All-Star Team, circa 1958–65, with a few latter-day ringers thrown in. Only now, when the comics came out, they were poly-bagged with trading cards.
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“Paying creators a respectable wage, and letting us share in the profits, led to a golden age—but that golden age carried with it the seeds of its own destruction,” former Marvel editor Jo Duffy said of the boom years of the early 1990s. “Suddenly people were making enough to buy houses and cars, and cars for their friends, and hiring professional sports-team cheerleaders to be their girlfriends. It became a sickness. The more some of these people made, the more they wanted to make. Being able to have your own apartment without a roommate, or maybe buy a little condo wasn’t enough. Suddenly they were thinking in terms of rock-star and movie-star money.” Stories circulated about young artists hooking up with the Image team and diving into a world of Ferraris and swimming pools and six-figure starting salaries.
But there was a problem: Image’s comics weren’t coming out on time. With great frequency, comic shops that had put all their chips on a heavily hyped number-one issue from Image (or, occasionally, from some tiny start-up) would see the publication date come and go, causing serious cash-flow troubles and, eventually, as the books finally trickled out, lower-than-expected sales. An intercompany crossover between Valiant and Image was reportedly only finished when the Valiant editor in chief flew out to California, planted himself in Rob Liefeld’s studio, and refused to leave.
Meanwhile, Marvel’s mid-selling titles were getting crushed by all the extra competition, and DC was putting its energy into big-event issues of its own. In November 1992—as Image announced that it was freeing itself from Malibu, to act as its own publisher—“The Death of Superman” racked up heavy media coverage and four million in sales, as average Joes everywhere read in their daily newspaper that Pow! Zap! Blam!: The Man of Steel is Dying—and oh, by the way, here are the breathtaking prices of important comics from the past. Superman #75 sold out quickly, and went into reprintings, as everyone scrambled to hoard what would surely, one day, pay for college tuitions.
Nothing about the market was consistent anymore. In February 1993, Marvel and DC titles were shut out of the top-five sales list completely. Two months later, Marvel had only one comic in the Top 20, but DC was on its way back to the top. Superman, inevitably, returned from his much-touted demise, and stores who’d been caught by surprise by “Death of Superman” sales figures the previous November now bet the farm on DC’s $2.50 and $2.95 editions. For the first time since 1987, DC Comics was the best-selling publisher o
f comics.
Unfortunately, the larger public had lost interest in Superman’s comings and goings. “The news media realized they’d been scammed,” said Tom DeFalco. “Nobody covered it, but all the retailers ordered it like they wished they’d ordered ‘The Death of Superman.’ ” After initial brisk sales, backroom storage spaces became overcrowded with unsold copies of Adventures of Superman #500. It had been the most popular comic book since the X-Men relaunch, but it also marked the end of an era. That month, of the thirteen comics Image had solicited, only two were shipped; the nonreturnable product agreement meant that stores were stuck with whatever happened to dribble in from the UPS truck that week.
The speculating tourists who’d gobbled up cases of comics had now departed, and it turned out that somewhere along the way, many of the actual comic-book readers, fed up with paying jacked-up prices for hologram covers, had left, too. When the comics went on the racks, no one was there to buy them. Within six months, thousands of stores would be out of business.
The glut of new launches continued through 1993—even Dark Horse had a whole new superhero universe to promote—and by summer, two new creator-owned ventures found themselves making naïvely hopeful announcements to an industry that was approaching panic. Dark Horse introduced an imprint called Legend, which would feature the work of Frank Miller, John Byrne, Art Adams, and a handful of others. Jim Starlin, who’d helped to get Marvel’s Epic Comics off the ground a decade before, and had lately been turning out a series of mega-hyped Marvel crossovers with titles like Infinity Gauntlet and Infinity War and Infinity Crusade, had his lawyer hammer out a deal with Malibu to do a creator-owned project for a new line called Bravura. “Quite frankly,” Starlin said, “Marvel is not paying rates or royalties that are competitive with what Malibu and Dark Horse are offering.” But the timing could hardly have been worse for artists and writers looking to strike out on their own, and the Bravura line, which also included work by Marv Wolfman, Walt Simonson, and Howard Chaykin, soon ran into trouble, as Malibu’s finances dried up.
The industry at least made the pretense of reacting to fissures in the market. Wizard magazine, accused by suspicious retailers of artificially inflating the numbers in its industry-standard price guides, hired a new editor to manage the figures. Image cut loose several of the creators behind its late-appearing titles. And Marvel Comics promised a new, “back-to-basics” approach—even as its fourteen-part “Maximum Carnage” crossover ran through five different Spider-Man series, “Fatal Attractions” ran through six different X-Men titles, and X-Force members Cable and Deadpool began starring in spin-off titles.
The allegedly permanent demises of Jean Grey and Elektra had once prompted death threats to Chris Claremont and Frank Miller. But even the grim reaper, it seemed, could not grant characters immunity from cash-cow special events. A deluxe issue of X-Men featured the wedding of Scott Summers and Jean Grey, shortly after an issue of Cable revealed that Cable was, in fact, their transported-from-the-future son. In the pages of Daredevil, Elektra returned after nearly a decade, much to the consternation of Miller, who’d been promised that the character would not be used without his involvement. “It stings like hell,” Miller told an interviewer. “But I can’t bellyache too long and hard, because a generation of Kirby and Ditko didn’t have the ground rules spelled out the way I did, and they got ripped off a lot worse than I did. So Marvel can drag that corpse around the block all they want.”
At Marvel, the best one could hope for was to deliver a well-crafted variation on what had come before. “I was constantly butting heads with the people upstairs, trying to do different types of products,” said Tom DeFalco. “If it didn’t have webs on it, or a big ‘X’ on it, they were afraid to do it.” Marvel did ax some titles that year, but the cancellations only served to clear the way for new product.
Todd McFarlane lashed out at Marvel for churning out product to please shareholders. Although Image’s trouble in meeting deadlines had cost him some industry goodwill, McFarlane could rightfully claim having avoided enhanced covers and bagged trading cards. “I don’t give a crap that you’ve got 12 Wolverines out there if my mom and dog are drawing them,” he said. “Why don’t you put your energies into Captain America instead of getting out six number-ones. . . . You’re forgetting that what made Marvel Marvel was that they had the best quality products. Now, as the years go by, they’re gonna have the most products. Not the best—the most.”
Even Marvel’s own letters pages began to reflect fatigue. A blurb announcing a glow-in-the-dark Daredevil cover read, “If you’re one of the die-hard comics fans who loathes special covers, then don’t despair—we’re also printing a regular $1.25 edition! In this day and age of sales gimmicks and overpriced incentives, we’d like to think we still publish great ideas!”
Gone were the days when a low-selling title was grounds for experimentation with form or content. After Scott Lobdell wrote an issue of Alpha Flight in which a character declared his homosexuality, Marvel’s PR department issued a string of no comments to CNN and newspapers while reports circulated that Ron Perelman had gone ballistic. Rob Tokar, the Marvel editor who’d inherited Alpha Flight shortly after the story was approved, was summoned into Terry Stewart’s office for an explanation. Tokar’s assistant extended his hand and, assuming the worst, bid him farewell.
On the twelfth floor, Tokar ranted to Stewart, Tom DeFalco, and a displeased Marvel publicist about Marvel’s poor handling of the uproar and how distancing itself from homosexuality flew in the face of its historical progressiveness. “Every time I said the word gay,” Tokar recalled, “I saw them flinch, so I found myself saying it more, to the point where I was leaning over Terry’s desk, pointing my finger in his face. Finally I ran out of steam, and Tom told me to have a seat.” A phone call for Stewart interrupted the meeting, but Tokar’s point was taken to heart—he never heard about the matter again. “I think Terry and Tom shielded me from higher up,” he said. “They could have easily thrown me under the bus.”*
Alpha Flight wasn’t the only title to act as a lightning rod for controversy. In the pages of Nomad, Fabian Nicieza had transformed the title character into a paragon of Gerber-level absurdity: a shotgun-wielding vigilante who carried around an adopted infant in his backpack. Nicieza saw the book as his creative outlet, a venue to take chances on stories about transvestites and class warfare that he’d never be able to work into the X-Men titles he wrote for Harras. “I wanted to make Nomad HIV positive,” said Nicieza. “The stigma around the disease was just colossal, but I wanted to make that part of his ongoing story. I’d already done an L.A. riots issue that we got on Entertainment Tonight for, I understood that there were certain buttons I could push that would not only make it stronger creatively but would generate publicity in ways that other titles couldn’t.” With the support of Tom DeFalco, Mike Hobson, and Terry Stewart, the idea was sent up to the top for approval.
The answer was relayed back to Nicieza: This isn’t the kind of thing we should be doing with one of our major characters. Nicieza sent a response back up the chain of command, through DeFalco and Stewart and uptown to Bill Bevins: But this isn’t one of Marvel’s major characters! This is exactly the kind of thing we should be doing with this character. Eventually, another response filtered down: Bill Bevins—whose avoidance of the Marvel corridors meant that many employees had never seen him—would meet with them to explain his thinking.
In Terry Stewart’s office, Bevins drew a bell curve that demonstrated that all titles in the Marvel Universe were off-limits to such experimentation. The Marvel Universe titles were the core of their sales. “No, that’s not it!” Nicieza protested. “Within the Marvel Universe publishing line, you have to differentiate the importance of the characters you have, so you understand what you can or can’t do with certain characters. I write X-Men—I write your number-one-selling title right now. I also write Nomad, one of your lower-selling titles. I’m not saying I want to do this with X-Men . . .”
“Thank you very much for your time,” Bevins replied tersely. “No.”
When the door had shut behind them, Nicieza turned to DeFalco and Stewart.
“They have a fundamental lack of understanding of what Marvel is,” he said. “If Bill Bevins was around in 1966, when Stan Lee wanted to do the Black Panther, Bill Bevins would have said ‘No.’ ”
Marvel’s publishing department, which only five years earlier had accounted for 90 percent of its sales, now represented a mere one-third of its business. While Bevins continued to scan for acquisitions to expand the Marvel kingdom, DeFalco pushed for a broader spectrum of published product, including science-fiction magazines and novels. “They said, ‘Oh, we should buy a company!’ ” he recalled. “I said, ‘We don’t have to buy a company. We already are a publishing company! We already have distribution to the newsstands.’ But they weren’t interested in that, because they wanted to buy things that would instantly add to the value of the company.”
“They wanted to make us a merchandising empire,” said John Romita. “They were going to sell clothing and costumes and other products, and they got to the point where they told us to our face that ‘comic-book production is the minor part of this company’s future.’ They told us we were worth ten percent of their time.”