babyhueypnewton posted:

cars do you know anything about the 90s comic book crash? i find the phenomenon of small, self-contained economies mirroring the growth-speculation-bubble-crash cycle of capitalism fascinating. I wonder if you could look at the economics of something like the comic book market or bitcoin and find some immutable tendencies towards centralization, falling profit, lower wages, etc.

it's an interesting question and one that i haven't investigated in detail.

you put your finger on it that there was a massive bubble in the 1990s, driven by speculation through the popularization of the collector market through Blue Book-type magazines like Wizard & news stories about people making insane bank off auctioning old comics they found in grandpa's attic (Action Comics #1 being one of them). This led to a mass proliferation not just of new series, to achieve new #1s that collectors would buy and bag to preserve in case one of them ended up worth hundreds of thousands of dollars decades later, but all sorts of other crap that included multiple different editions of #1 books with different covers and varying print runs, and also a bunch of new comics to produce new #1s. But of course, millions of issues printed for a lot of these or even the intentionally limited supply of "special" edition #1s would almost certainly never be worth as much, because now you had self-aware producers selling to semi-aware collectors so every one of those issues pretty much has tons of copies bagged, boarded and locked away, while in 1938, almost everyone who read a comic book was a kid and threw it away.

Really, mass print runs, quality paper, and the growing adult/collector market had undermined this well beforehand. You can get a lot of "important" 1970s comics, high-graded copies of the first appearance of Darkseid (likely to show up as the villain in the Justice League movie) or what have you, for pretty cheap. Comic book speculation just turned into a much larger phenomenon in the 1990s due to press and attracted a lot of people who didn't know or care really, just bought #1s and sealed them away every time one appeared. This fed back into itself by creating a sudden jump in the non-comics press about comics events, so that stuff like "Death of Superman" sold huge amounts of copies to speculators and readers alike (thus guaranteeing its future worthlessness to the former).

That's the part usually cited and it was a big deal, but there were a lot of other factors too that all fed back into each other. There were a couple successful kids' cartoon series in the 1990s that coincided with the new series/#1 boom and amplified its effects, for instance, for Spider-Man, X-Men and Batman. When Super Friends was big on TV you could go buy a comic book about it, but when those 1990s cartoons were on you could go buy like five or six, sometimes more, of the titles for each character.

There wasn't anything like Wikipedia or Amazon are today back then, and most series had "ongoing" stories dating from the 1960s for Marvel and the 1970s/1980s for DC, so if you wanted to know what the hell was going on you had to either go digging for reprints in bookstores or order back issues from catalogs, either that or pick up the subscription and and start reading month to month until you kind of figured things out.

The new series boom also led to the new company boom. In a lot of ways it was a little like the Internet bubble where investors didn't really understand the market and many of them had too much money to care. Like, things that were total amateur garbage like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would suddenly take off and the old issues would become gigantic collector's items and the people who thought them up would suddenly be swimming in money, because they weren't working for Marvel or DC. Then those people would go out, talk to investors and end up with a comics company, many of which folded or got sold at the end of the decade. Sometimes people would start companies without knowing a thing about comics or having any artists or writers just to scam money or out of pure delusion, again like the Internet bubble.

Artists at the big companies would see this and say, fuck that, and strike out on their own, people like Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee who sold a lot of books, and they usually had a lot more success doing that even if their books from the time are nowadays considered to be quite bad. Like, Rob Liefeld is independently wealthy and Jim Lee shares the EiC role at DC. Todd McFarlane did Spawn, which ended up with a decent-performing movie and millions in sales.

That confidence was bolstered by a real movement toward better treatment of artists and writers that offered rock bottom benefits and partial ownership of material at both DC and Marvel, following decades of brutal exploitation along the lines of my endnote on the article plus a wave of outright war waged against creators who fought for better treatment in the 1960s, ones that included Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky, the two guys who did Justice League of America as it blew up and worked like machines. A lot of bad press came up about how Shuster and Siegel were living in poverty and DC eventually gave them official recognition for the characters they created and some minimal income that of course fell well short of the money Superman was making the company in licensing each year.

It's funny to see how this fed into stuff like Jeet Heer and Noah Berlatsky working for the New Republic and Atlantic respectively, since they were part of the academic/highbrow scene that surrounded the one serious journal about comics, The Comics Journal, which was this big fat snooty thing that was separated from most of its topics by a gulf a mile wide (unless they were published by the same publisher that printed the Journal). One of the few reasons Frank Miller is taken seriously is because he was an ardent crusader for creators' rights in the 1980s with an obvious dog in the race himself, which got him good press from all those folks and a ton of interviews.

There's another whole angle on this too which is kind of interesting: Marvel's current movie boom, and its recent sale to Disney, is an eventual result of some things that have not a lot to do with the 1990s sales boom and much more to do with the capitalists who were speculating on the company. There's a book on this topic called "Comic Wars" with an excerpt online that goes over this in detail but I haven't done the footwork to fact check it. The short story is that Marvel belonged to New World Entertainment, who tried to make it big with adaptations and failed, so they sold it to a guy in 1989 who was big into the junk bond market and connected to Michael Milken. He used Marvel to set up shell companies to play one of the big games back then, where operating losses didn't show up on the books until later, which you could use to push around money and make yourself look like you were getting way better returns than you were.

When that all fell apart, Marvel got sold to some big-time toymakers, and it was those guys who eventually managed to push Marvel out into the feature film business over twenty years later, and fairly surprisingly because the comics market continued to decline as mentioned in the article as kids just stopped buying comics and switched over to every other possible way of getting their superhero fix, TV, movies, video games, etc. This was really killing Marvel in front of the money because they were only making money off licensing things to Fox and so on, and the top-selling properties of the 1990s were the X-Men and Spider-Man, the first of which Fox owned most of the rights to in non-comics media, the second of which was passed around like a football between studios as part of trades to acquire other properties.

The success of superhero movies (besides unofficial American mascots Superman and Batman) took off because of major improvements in special effects technology, resulting in Blade, Spider-Man and the X-Men, which seems obvious but I haven't read a lot about it. A lot of the histories are all based around crafty Wall Streeters and maneuvering by shareholders and so on and reflect that part. But anyway the toy people at Marvel eventually managed to turn their studio into something that could work with Paramount to make Iron Man with a decently listed cast and Jon Favreau to corral them, then their success with properties that were considered unsaleable like Thor, led Disney to pick them up because it was clear that all the properties they had left over could actually be made into movies, not just Spider-Man and the X-Men. And then of course you had the Nolan Batman movies which were critically acclaimed for being something other than goofy, which was unexpected, and "The Dark Knight" making a billion dollars in 2010 and so on.

So anyway this goes very deep. There's a good, very recent corporate history of Marvel by Sean Howe that mainly focuses on the comics end, and I don't think there's really an equivalent for DC, in part because Time Warner bought them a while back to get at Superman & Batman and they're pretty good at making former employees clam up. Howe benefited from how a lot of former Marvel people hate the company for how they were treated when it was small-time, which it was for a long, long while even under various absentee-landlord owners, and they will never be hired to do movie-related shit or comics again so they'll spill their guts, while some of Marvel's big names became rich outside of the company during the creator-owned company boom and will happily badmouth their former employer as competition. So I'd check out that and "Comics Wars" for more of that end of things.

Really this is a blast out of sources and threads to pick up because I haven't done it systematically. I might but I'm planning on writing something next that has nothing whatsoever to do with comics because while I have the knowledge I really do agree with what I have to say about them, if they're still alive it's nbd and I don't keep up with any of them anymore, not indie or any of the rest of that shit. It was just something I had to work through and I thought I would focus on this one aspect that you always see in all these articles that probably millions and millions of people read now, "oh yeah Superman was a champion of the people kind of funny huh" but they never focus on what that means, how the whole commercial boom right now is based on populist politics and the appeal of building this new demigod who could enact them by sheer force of will, and then how that was undermined and how that was likely inherent to the problem of their success under capitalism.

Edited by cars (April 27, 2016 22:58:17)

babyhueypnewton posted:

cars do you know anything about the 90s comic book crash? i find the phenomenon of small, self-contained economies mirroring the growth-speculation-bubble-crash cycle of capitalism fascinating. I wonder if you could look at the economics of something like the comic book market or bitcoin and find some immutable tendencies towards centralization, falling profit, lower wages, etc.

I know a bunch about this but basically it was a speculative bubble same as like 2000 dot com or housing market.

drwhat posted:

congratulations! on the #1 rhizzone article of april

(more traffic info here:
http://www.rhizzone.net/forum/topic/12192/?page=2#post-310632 )

NoGIXvWPGDc

this is also where you see that many people focus on superman being incredibly strong, when the real fantasy is in his invulnerability; it's not that he can hurt people, it's that people can't hurt *him*, and thus, he can put his body in the way of those who would harm others

— Colin Spacetwinks (@spacetwinks) August 12, 2019

golden age superman comics kick ass pic.twitter.com/rmqxBddhWZ

— Colin Spacetwinks (@spacetwinks) August 12, 2019

cars posted:

bring colin spacetwinks to justice