by Sean Howe
Sitting next to each other, two employees who’d been at Marvel since the 1970s watched in disbelief as someone took the microphone and hurried through more slides about reorganization. “Don’t worry,” said the voice onstage, “it’ll all be over in a few minutes, and then we can drink afterward.”
“We looked at each other at the same time,” recalled one of the veteran staffers, “and we just said, ‘This is the end. We’re fucked.’ This was such a half-baked idea. We were being sold a bill of goods.”
They weren’t the only ones who weren’t on board. After the presentation, one naïve assistant editor made the mistake of congratulating DeFalco on his promotion. The response was a hollow chuckle. “Well, you won’t have DeFalco to kick around anymore,” the former editor in chief said.
The confused assistant editor stammered. “But . . . they just announced it!”
“I’m gone, kid, I didn’t take it,” shrugged DeFalco, who walked away.
There were other shake-ups, other reflections of power shifts within the company. In the same conference call with distributors that announced the five-editors-in-chief structure, Marvel also named Richard Rogers—the chief proponent of variant covers and double-sized issues—as the executive vice president of sales and marketing. Although the EICs reported to Terry Stewart, they were overseen on a day-to-day basis by former newsstand sales director Jim “Ski” Sokolowski, who took the title of “Editorial Coordinator”—and who himself reported to Rogers. To further grease the relationship between departments, a marketing rep was assigned to each editor in chief.
Rogers’s hard-charging philosophy filtered through loud and clear. “This organization wants you to sell $160 million worth of comics,” he told his charges. “Editorial can complain all they want, sales can complain all they want—you can try to be obstinate, and say you’re not going to do it—but if it’s not you, it’ll be the next guy. So maybe a better use of your time is to try to figure out how to get there in the best possible way.”
Access to Stewart became increasingly difficult. “We were supposed to meet with him weekly,” said Carl Potts. “Anything we couldn’t solve amongst ourselves, or anything for which we needed extra resources or input, was supposed to be discussed in these meetings. Most of the time when a decision needed to be made, Terry would defer and say, ‘I’ll get back to you next week.’ Bobbie Chase and I kept lists of stuff that needed to be followed up on, and would bring these up, but they never got resolved. Eventually, Terry’s solution was to stop having these meetings. I know he was probably under tremendous pressure from Bevins and whoever else he was dealing with up there, but I found it beyond comprehension that you would set up this system that relied on you to be the final arbiter, and then bail on that responsibility.”
“What Marvelution did,” recalled one former editor, “was split us apart. Aside from the occasional crossovers, we didn’t really interact with Bobbie Chase that much; we didn’t really interact with Bob Harras that much. We were no longer a cohesive editorial staff.” Now each of the five “families” had sales marks to meet. Creative talent, already disproportionately in demand thanks to the glut of comic-book product, was now the target of competing editors. Even the characters themselves moved into their own corners, each now flush with supporting casts huge enough to support their insularity from the greater Marvel Universe. “It would have been easier,” said the staffer, “to have Spider-Man team up with Superman than to have Spider-Man team up with the X-Men.”
This division came at a time when the Marvel Universe was more confusing than ever. Marvel spun off facsimiles of its biggest characters, including Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America (the hammer-wielding Thunderstrike; the iron-armored War Machine; the star-spangled crime-fighter USAgent); alternate-reality variations of several characters hopped around as well. In Fantastic Force, the child of the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards and Sue Storm switched places with his other-dimensional adult counterpart and led a superhero group.
Meanwhile, in the pages of the Spider-Man titles, a proposed twelve-issue crossover was supposedly heading toward resolution. When “The Clone Saga” had been set in motion, Peter Parker was married to Mary Jane Watson, and they were expecting their first child. Obviously, this domesticity was going to cramp the Spider-Man mythos. The writers and editors conspired to bring back the supposed Spider-Man clone—introduced and discarded by Gerry Conway twenty years earlier*—and reveal that, in fact, he was the original Peter Parker, that there had been a mix-up, and that readers had been following the adventures of a gene-spliced imposter since 1975. Now calling himself Ben Reilly, the original item got back into costume as The Scarlet Spider. When his identity was revealed, Peter Parker (the clone) would go off into the sunset with Mary Jane and their child, and the original Peter Parker (formerly known as Ben Reilly) would swing freely once again. “As the writers grew older and got married and had kids and got mortgages, we sort of wrote Spider-Man that way, and wrote him away from our audience,” said Terry Kavanagh, who’d first pitched the story. “This was a way to get him back to his essence organically—without divorcing him, which would just give him more baggage.” Unfortunately, a combination of marketing department pressure and editorial indecision delayed the story’s ending. As the Clone Saga stretched out over months, readers would point to its excessive complications as a sign of all that was wrong with what Marvel Comics had become.
But at first, it was a sensation. “Bob Harras heard about this,” recalled Kavanagh, “and said, ‘Oh my God, the Spider-Man books are going to rocket past the X-Men books. We have to do an event of our own.’ ” In the sprawling “Age of Apocalypse” crossover, Professor X’s son traveled back in time to kill Magneto and set in motion a dystopian version of our world. At the behest of the sales and marketing departments, “Age of Apocalypse” kicked off with chromium covers and $3.95 cover prices before moving into eight new monthly X-titles that temporarily replaced the old ones.
“Once you’re on the ride, you can’t get off until it’s over,” said Tom Brevoort. “If the owner of the company is saying, ‘We need you to exceed your budget this year,’ that’s your job. You have one of two options: either you accomplish that or you don’t and face the consequences.”
As the editorial staff struggled to handle internal demands for more product, Marvel continued its buying spree. Over the summer, it had purchased the European sticker and magazine company Panini for $158 million. In the fall, it bought the Welsh Publishing Group, which produced children’s magazines. Then, as it continued its talks to purchase a distributor, word came that Malibu, the onetime publisher of the Image imprint, had been entertaining offers from DC Comics. Word went up the chain, from Terry Stewart to Bill Bevins to Ron Perelman, and came back down: do not let that happen. If DC purchased Malibu, Marvel would be displaced from its position as the market share leader. Perelman went out to California and met with Malibu owner Scott Rosenberg. Rosenberg asked Perelman if he had read Malibu’s product.
“I don’t read comics,” said Perelman.
Eager to show off Malibu’s digital color process, Rosenberg put a stack of comics in front of him. Just open them up, Rosenberg said.
Perelman looked down. “I don’t have to read them?”
After a rash of covert meetings, Marvel announced in November that it had acquired Malibu, citing its in-house coloring system, its West Coast presence, and its pending Hollywood deals as strategic advances, but making no mention of the market-share protection that drove the decision. Steve Gerber, who’d been writing for Malibu’s Ultraverse line, was taken by surprise. “If I were really paranoid,” he said, “it almost seems like Marvel keeps following me around, buying up whatever I create.”
Marvel, meanwhile, was suffering, the costs of the company’s spending spree on full display. The comic industry might have taken the bubble burst of the baseball card market as a warning—a flood of “limited edition” product, metallic foil and holograms, and a Major League
Baseball strike in August converged to kill that market. Marvel’s investment in Fleer was hemorrhaging money. The comic company seemed to be hurtling toward the same fate.
Immediately after Marvel’s latest extravagant Christmas party had been thrown, the company laid off the woman who’d planned the festivities, along with a few dozen other employees, including several editors, and canceled more than twenty titles. It was the first time Marvel had instituted layoffs since 1957, but it wouldn’t be the last.
On December 28, Marvel announced the acquisition of the New Jersey distribution business Heroes World. The two companies had a deep history. When former Marvel president Al Landau had been fired in 1975, Landau’s number two, Ivan Snyder, had been given inventory of licensed product as his severance package. Over the next two decades, Snyder had turned that inventory into a series of New Jersey comic stores, and eventually into a distributor that claimed an 8 percent share of the market. Heroes World was primarily a regional business, serving the tri-state area, but the Marvel team scouting for distributors decided that paired with a new troop of sales reps, it would serve Marvel’s purposes. The top-level executives at the Townhouse never consulted the architects of the original plan. “Had I known that all we were going to have was a telemarketing staff and a warehouse,” said a member of the sales team, “I would have stuck with the old plan, and let the chips fall where they may. The whole reason for Heroes World was to get people into the field. No amount of telemarketing could do that. To me, that was a fatal flaw.”
Unfortunately, Marvel soon dragged the entire industry into its clumsy business strategies. On March 1, 1995, a leaked memo divulged Marvel’s plan to make Heroes World its exclusive distributor, meaning that any comic store desiring access to the publisher that held 40 percent of the industry market share was forced to open an account. All other distributors, meanwhile, were left out in the cold. By the time of Marvel’s official announcement on March 3, Capital City, the number-two distributor, had filed suit against Marvel for unfair termination of its distribution contract; an undisclosed settlement was reached within days. DC Comics and Image Comics also reacted quickly, announcing that they had signed an exclusive arrangement with Diamond, the number-one distributor. Capital City brought a similar lawsuit against DC Comics and then signed exclusive deals with several smaller comic publishers. Retailers panicked. Smaller distributors, suddenly denied access to the majority of their product, folded.
A week later, Marvel announced that it had purchased the trading card company Skybox—competitor to Marvel’s own money-losing Fleer, and a license holder for cards featuring DC Comics and Image Comics characters—for $150 million. The reaction was one of disbelief. Marvel Comics, which had just suffered layoffs for the first time in nearly forty years, was siphoning money into the imploding card industry?
At the end of the month, a group of Marvel employees, including Terry Stewart and Richard Rogers, hit the road on a nineteen-city Marvelution PR tour, meeting with concerned distributors and retailers. “The first presentation was a disaster,” recalled one staffer. “People wanted us to talk to them about what was happening, not receive a thirty-minute editorial presentation. People wanted to find out where their comics were coming from—they didn’t care what was happening in X-Men.” The presentation modified as the tour wore on, and soon Marvel was peddling a “Covenant of Partnership” with the rest of the industry and spouting contradictory logic that convinced nobody: on one hand, the contraction of the industry was caused by a “lack of available product”; on the other hand, smaller publishers were filling the racks with “clutter” that distracted customers from “reliable Marvel product.” The question-and-answer sessions that followed were tense. Asked for reassurance that Marvel wouldn’t squeeze out retailers the way it had squeezed out distributors, Stewart steamrolled along through his talking points.
“Does that answer your question?” he asked, winding up.
“No, not really,” said the retailer.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Stewart.
On April 2, in the midst of the tour, Terry Stewart announced that he was being promoted to a vice chairman position* and that Jerry Calabrese, a Marvel marketing executive with a magazine publishing background, would be the new president. The retail community knew Calabrese’s name, and didn’t like it: he had been the one behind Marvel Mart, a campaign to sell the company’s product directly to readers through mail order.
The environment at Marvel itself became increasingly chaotic, with the skeleton-crew editorial staff taking on a multiplied workload, and freelancers feeling jerked around. John Romita Jr. briefly returned to draw X-Men, and then found that a popular young artist was getting his assignments. Fabian Nicieza, who along with Scott Lobdell had become a major architect of the mutant titles in the post-Claremont era, saw his relationships with Bob Harras and Lobdell deteriorate as increasingly improvisatory changes in story direction replaced Nicieza’s long-term story planning. Last-minute dialogue changes, in which characters’ conversations turned from light banter to grim lectures, began to chafe. Nicieza resigned from X-Men in June, declaring publicly that his sizable paychecks weren’t worth “the lack of creative satisfaction and perpetuation of mediocrity.” Lobdell, though now a superstar making eighty-five grand a month, wasn’t immune to the micromanaging and second-guessing; his next issue of Uncanny X-Men had to be rewritten from scratch, four times, before everyone could agree on a story.
In the meantime, the Clone Saga continued to play out in the Spider-Man titles, but the initial mood-lightening objective had been foiled. At what was supposed to be the story’s climax, Peter Parker’s Aunt May finally died, having been on her deathbed countless times in the previous decades. (Stan Lee first gave his blessing to the turn of events, and then, just as he had with Gwen Stacy’s death, denied knowledge of the plan.) Then, when Peter Parker learned that he was a clone, he smacked Mary Jane in a fit of rage. Readers were appalled, but sales were good, and Marvel milked the cash cow with one-shot tie-ins that cost $4.95 a pop. A “Maximum Clonage” series that further extended the story featured a third Spider-Man clone, named Spider-Cide, and then, finally, an entire army of clones.
Spider-Man writer Dan Jurgens, who’d been hired away from DC at great cost, gave an ultimatum: unless Peter Parker was restored as the one and only original Spider-Man, he was quitting. Of course, if Peter Parker was remaining Spider-Man, the editors realized, something had to be done about Mary Jane and her pregnancy—you couldn’t have a superhero with a kid. Amid all-day conference calls and flurries of memos, the writers and editors of the Spider-Man books argued over who had to be responsible for giving Mary Jane Watson a miscarriage.
Jerry Calabrese quickly found, to his dismay, that Heroes World didn’t have the infrastructure in place to support its business. There were billing errors, unfulfilled orders, and long wait times on the customer service line that ended with handwritten messages for someone who knew what to do. Calabrese told Matt Ragone to pack his bags for New Jersey and clean up what he could.
But much of the damage caused by the distributor wars was irreparable. Retailers who wanted a variety of publications were now forced to deal with at least two or three different distributors. “If you were a comic book specialty shop,” explained Tom Brevoort, “the way your finances worked is that you’d get a discount based on total sales volume. So if your order at the distributor was $100, that qualified you for x percentage off; if it was $200 you’d qualify for a higher percentage. Now your total order was the same, but your Marvel/Heroes World order by itself wouldn’t necessarily qualify you for the same discount, and your DC/Diamond order wouldn’t qualify you for the same discount. So suddenly the same product at the same volume was costing a lot more, and eked into a profit margin that made it untenable. A few bad choices on titles that didn’t move or didn’t show up at all—there was a lot of egregiously late shipping, particularly among Image titles—and you were tying up money. That put tons of sto
res out of business.” The number of comic shops, which had already fallen from 9,400 to 6,400 in just two years, soon dropped to 4,500.
Unlike Terry Stewart, Jerry Calabrese did not read comic books—he was a “pure businessman,” in the words of one Marvel colleague. Still, he only needed a calculator to pine for the good old days of the early 1990s, the days of X-Force #1 and X-Men #1, the days when it seemed like Hollywood might come knocking. In San Diego, Calabrese approached Chris Claremont and asked him if he’d like to return. Claremont, who’d been writing for Dark Horse, DC, and even—along with Len Wein and Dave Cockrum—Jim Shooter’s Defiant, declined the offer. But Calabrese had more luck when he met with Larry Marder, the executive director of Image Comics, and asked if any of the ex-Marvel superstars at Image would like to take a shot at revising the origins of some of the company’s biggest characters. “Marvel knew that their core flagship properties were ill,” said Marder. “The properties that they had, had just failed over and over again to sell to Hollywood. Think about it, you go in, and you make a pitch that the world’s smartest man built a rocket ship and then went up with his family, and the world’s smartest man forgot to shield the rocket ship against cosmic rays. It’s laughable. The idea that Captain America was frozen in ice for 50 years was laughable in Hollywood . . . asking the Talmudic continuity scholars in Marvel editorial to throw away the holy litany of Stan and Jack to satisfy Hollywood was having no effect at all, they just weren’t getting anywhere.”