The national economy plunged into the late 1980s in full expansion mode. Tales of high prices in collectibles followed the trend. This is a usual phenomenon. When times are bad, people have no resources for hobbies. When wallets are flush, some speculate in the stock market, some go to the ponies, and some decide to pick up that Amazing Spider-Man #14 they’ve been tracking.
Panel art literature had long before moved into the conglomerate phase. It was the best of times for everyone. The major publishers threw money at talent, allowing for mainstream experimentation. However, the expansion of the specialty store market, along with tech breakthroughs in graphics and printing, allowed for a new, less obscene underground. The Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles were avant garde in this niche.
Distribution changed. The corner store market virtually vanished. The publishers went for margin over market. Quality sold; therefore, the services of big name artists and writers commanded premium rates. From the late 1970s a continuous inflation in comics prices reflected this. It was far more profitable to produce 25,000 issues of a quality item which retailed for $2.50 and a 90% sales rate than to produce 100,000 copies of a one dollar item with a 50% sales rate, once distribution costs were subtracted.
The market grew at 20% a year from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. The big boys expanded with their safe items. Mutant titles bloomed. Several different ways of presenting Spider-Man, Batman, Superman and various teams came out. Gimmicks pushed up prices: metallic covers, card series, crossover series, special editions.
The little publisher plunged back into the market. Image, Malibu, Impact, and Continuity were only a few of the new superhero ventures. Other markets made a comeback. Harvey started several new lines. Jack Chick and his controversial Christian Crusaders publications rolled out several new issues.
Everyone was looking for a wedge to make their pile. Marvel promoted a civil rights theme in its mutant titles - directly linking the condition of the fictional mutant race to that of images of the holocaust and slavery. DC launched a diversity/melting pot theme with its Mosaic Green Lantern run.
Hype was having a field day. “Collectible” was the code word. A feeding frenzy was on to convince the average shmoe that this new character or that new event would multiple value by multiples within a few years. Then DC hit upon the biggest hype con job in the history of panel art.
They were going to kill off Superman. Sure they were.
I have always been astonished when I see a “collectible” feeding frenzy going on, especially for a commodity which is not scarce. Beanie Babies were a good example of this. Supposedly, rare editions would greatly appreciate. However, how hard would it be for the manufacturers, if they saw a certain item going well, to simple produce more of the same? I saw the same hype when Darryl Strawberry was signing 3000 autographed balls a month. Dealers swore, as they sold them for $3 each ten years ago, that they’d be worth $30 in five years. Two questions - if the dealers really believed that, why didn’t they just hold on to the merchandise for five years and get a 1000% profit, and, why would an overstocked market for a B+ ballplayer appreciate? BTW, the current price for a Darryl Strawberry autographed ball is now somewhere south of $2.
So why, with DC producing eight million of the Death of Superman issue, would anyone think it was a collectible? Superman was supporting four titles. He had been around 50 years. Would any person with a brain really believe DC was going to do away with the character? Yet, I ran into it a dozen times, people telling me “they’re killing him off!”. I would patiently explain to them that comic book characters weren’t really alive, and that the Clark Kent Superman would be home by Christmas. Yet, people kept buying.
BTW, the issue has appreciated slightly. Hardly a rare item. The entire frenzy was typical of the expansion which roared into the early 1990s. It was a gimmick designed to get attention in an increasingly competitive market. New publishers appeared all over the map. Malibu, Image, and Impact leaped into the superhero fray. Jim Shooter tried to make a belated comeback with Defiant Comics. By the early 1990s the market faced a glut.
It was a classic bubble. The conventions craze and the superstars it built (Byrne, Simonson, Miller, et al), the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their spinoffs, Harvey leaping back in with preteen magnets like Head of the Class and New Kids on the Block, as well as new lines for the kiddies such as Little Dracula, and the anime craze flying over from Japan fed a creators’ boom with every small publisher thinking it could carve its own niche and cash in on the spiraling prices.
Political correctness also moved in. Marvel suddenly introduced (in Contest of Champions) a host of new heroes from foreign countries. DC had the special Heroes Against Hunger with Lex Luthor as a surprise fighter against colonialism and environmental waste.
Some of this new trend took bizarre turns. Spider-Man suddenly discovered something unseen by urban sociologists throughout history: interracial gangs. One of the truisms of inner city gangs is their racial uniformity. While all ethnic groups are capable of forming violent subcultures displaying themselves in criminal gangs, it is exceedingly rare that such groupings ever extend beyond racial and ethnic unity. There are and have been black gangs, Irish gangs, Italian gangs, Puerto Rican gangs, etc. Sometimes, at the highest levels, the leadership of these mobs have entered into agreements. Organized crime in the 1930s and 1940s had leadership from segments of Irish, Jewish, Italian and other mobs, but the lines were distinct between these groups. Today, Bloods, Latin Kings, Aryan Nation, and the remaining elements of the Mafia keep the tradition alive. In Spider-Man and in some other Marvel titles, however, it was seen as politically incorrect to display this reality. Spider-Man was the player who most often banged with street thugs. To show these criminals as all black would revive memories of the early 1950s racist Captain America crusades. To show them as all white would revive the late 1950s to early 1960s bleaching of race in comics. All hispanic or all asiatic gangs were sometimes shown, but only within the context of an individual story line.
To avoid any question of bias, Spider-Man found himself fighting a host of three or four member street gangs, each with a mandatory jive talking African-American, a tattooed white guy (often with mohawk or skinhead cut), and some revolving representatives of a latin or oriental stereotype. Affirmative action had hit New York City street crime, at least at Marvel.
One stereotype at Marvel came under fire in the early 1990s when, for the umpteenth time, an oriental minor side character suddenly displayed eastern martial arts abilities. Several fans, many of asiatic descent themselves, mentioned that martial arts ability among orientals is actually no more frequent than in any other racial group, and that they were tired of every single oriental civilian side character displaying high level fighting skills. Also, it was pointed out that the writers frequently misassigned cultural disciplines (such as giving a Chinese ethnic ability in karate, a Japanese form). Properly chastised, Marvel scaled back the stereotypes.
Scaling back of a lot of trends were soon made necessary by the inevitable bursting of the corporate bubble by the late 1990s. The supply had simply overexpanded. While there was lots of quality, secondary lines and publishers found themselves squeezed by the excess. Buyers were no longer willing to buy one of everything in the hopes that every new publisher might produce a Ninja Turtles or that every new character might become a Wolverine. Plus, the spiraling costs made many more sophisticated in the art of buying. The expanding storefront market brought in sales competition within current titles. Buyers started wondering why they should pay $2.25 or more for a new issue of Superman when the local collector store had 10 year old used issues on sale, complete with cover, for 75 cents.
As it turns out, comic books are like cars in that respect. If you buy a new car, it loses over a quarter of its value the second you drive it off the lot. For the next fifteen years, even if it’s a solid model which you maintain, it will continue to lose value at some rate. However, somewhere after the twenty year mark, a working auto starts to take on the attributes of an antique. After that, if it is kept up, it will begin to gain value. This is mostly due to rarity. Almost all models of a given year are off the road twenty years later. It will continue to appreciate after that, although the cost of maintenance may also increase exponentially.
Comics are similar. Buyers rarely toss out their new purchases immediately. However, as mothers clean out closets or a change of residence causes “old magazines” to be left behind, most of any issue run are discarded. Also, there is the question of condition. Paper is fragile. Keeping it maintained in very fine condition more than ten years often involves purchasing acid-free bags for each issue. Heat. light, and dampness also harm paper, as does frequent handling and bending.
Over the short term, value will decrease anyway. Dealers rarely pay more than thirty per cent of official book value (Overstreet's annual Guide being the standard). Therefore, the immaculate new issue you just purchased for $3 (plus tax) would fetch no more than $1 from your neighborhood collector if you wished to sell it to him in a coupe months. To even maintain that worth, you would have to take all the above mentioned precautions and wait at least 15 years before the average issue would reacquire original cover price.
Therefore, the established lines found themselves competing with themselves, as collectors went to the old market stores to stock up on missed previous issues rather than pay top dollar for new. The new publishers collapsed, partially for this same reason. Why pay over $2 for the latest exploit of the Savage Dragon when you could get a perfectly usable 1987 Action Comics for less?
Like the late 1950s and the early 1970s, the mid 1990s brought a contraction. Of the newer producers only Image barely hung on, and that was because of the success of Spawn. That single character has led a greatly reduced publishing line to continue to limp along.
Contractions bring opportunities, however. Although the market shrunk, so did competition. Marvel and DC found themselves once again with huge market share. They both decided to take steps to maintain their bases.
One way was the usual cross-media marketing. Cartoons and movies made for new ventures. Both companies retreated from the trading card game. Collecting cards remains much a sports fan niche, and the superhero market never did successfully penetrate. The action figure market has stayed small but steady, but it is still more of a preteen sideline.
The two major players decided on a major retrofitting of their stars. this takes us back to the first point I made in the first posting of this series: the problems of comfort levels and continuity pileup. It is pointless to try to maintain a strict continuity over decades unless one is prepared to have Lois Lane become an old lady and to have the average human non-super hero retire about the age of forty. Copyright protection and the functional utility of even marginal side players promote the tendency to reinvent familiar players to new roles rather than creating new ones. Even underused villains provide usefulness in that vein. Frank Miller took a minor gangster from the Spider-Man line, the Kingpin, and turned him into the massive and ingenious lord of crime in the Daredevil series. When fads hit a careful writer can transform a stick figure into one with a fuller identity. One of the products of the new pro-homosexual agenda in comic books was the transformation of old Flash enemy Pied Piper. From mediocre Rogues’ Gallery side player, he became, transformed by therapy, a good guy. Retired from crime, he now realizes his antisocial acts were fueled by his self-loathing which came from his natural homosexual instincts.
One caveat for that though. The two major lines have to be careful. Back in the 1970s, they discovered that general support for characters of African ancestry was limited. It sort of went along the lines of what movie makers have learned regarding summer releases: girls will go to see “boy movies”, but boys won’t go to see “girl movies” (not to be confused with girlIE movies). While new, black characters in established lines (like Robbie Robertson in Spider-Man) can increase minority sales without hurting the white market, various attempts to put the minority player in the spotlight (from Black Lightning through Power Man) failed. While Shang-Chi in Master of Kung-Fu did have an impressive run, that publication mainly featured the intrigues of a British intelligence group of whom the star was merely the first among equivalents. When the martial arts fad faded, so did the publication. Power man survived by a brilliant joining of his fading line with that of the Iron Fist line. Marvel turned two losers into a winner by joining them, deactivating the cultural backgrounds, and spicing up the writing with a semi-comedic format.
However, by and large, minority players have to fit into the general soup. If Marvel or DC tries to go superPC and bring in a super GayMan comic line, I am sure that effort will be a miserable failure.
So, here we are in the present. At the moment, DC has done a finer job of retrofitting its line into coherence. Although they have been massively rewritten, the DC line makes sense. The motives and histories of the players are known, and their interaction with each other makes sense, for now.
Not so with Marvel. I have no idea how Spider-Girl fits in with that universe. Even the rereleased versions of the new heroes is stunningly ambivalent. Although they restarted every major hero’s line (some more than once), they equivocate about why. Even on the covers they have double numbering. That is, they have one number (say “45”) to describe the current run. However, they also have a smaller font under that number giving what the issue would be if the original run were still going on (say, “526”). Make up your mind, guys!
Bongo seems to be the major new player the last ten years with its Simpsons’ spinoffs. There is presently a large market with hard cover and volume sized reprints and new adventures. The producers seem to be thinking these big ticket items will be seen as a better investment, easier o maintain, than expensive single issue runs.
So, here we are. Disney is still a player with some new Donald spinoffs, although they have mostly retreated into their theme park and movie staples. Harvey has some kids. Specialty stuff is hot right now. The market has changed again. Newest stuff is cheap e-ditions, that is, downladable copies of rare comics at a tiny fraction of what even reprints would cost. How long before e-ditions become the norm, and original heroes appear as continuing players on the internet? Remember, original comics were reprints of the previous form, newspapers. Stay tuned. And keep visiting RumorMill.com!
