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1997: THE YEAR IN COMICS
by
John Jackson Miller
(based on selections made by the CBG editorial staff)
[CBG ran its Top 10 Comics News Events for 1997 in #1262, cover-dated Jan. 23, 1998. Once again the editorial staff waited until the actual end of the year to make its selections -- and once again were rewarded, as the top-selling comic book of the year shipped on Dec. 31. The article was illustrated by John Drury, who marvelously managed to work in most of the below concepts and more in his illustration for this issue's cover. A discussion thread for this feature is here.]
Let’s see. How would this opening go if it were on, say, Babylon 5? OK, let’s give it a try…
It was the year the comics industry went to court. Some settled and walked away. Others are still there and show no sign of resolving their disputes this side of the millennium.
It was the year when many had high hopes for a recovery of the comic-book industry, after three straight years of recession. It didn’t happen, although signs of distress were less prevalent. While all the data aren’t in, CBG estimates from early figures that the total revenues at retail for comic books will be in the range of $400 million to $425 million, off from $450 million in 1996, and just half of the 1993 peak of $850 million. It’s the mildest drop yet, dollarwise, in this recession, and while a decline of 10% in a single year may be nothing to get excited about, industry revenues in 1997 were still higher than they were through the entire decade of the 1980s.
It was the year when — finally — a Marvel feature film outgrossed a DC film. But it was more like a technical knockout, since the film was Marvel by a technicality trivial enough to elude even many hardcore comics fans.
It was a year when some comic books came out, too. One in four of them was from DC. As one industry figure after another preached the righteous final extermination of the comic-book speculator mentality, the top-selling comic book of the year based on retailers’ orders was Image’s Darkness #11, shipped on Dec. 31. It had 11 separate covers.
But back to the courtroom and this thing about Marvel. Perhaps you heard something about it?
1) The Marvel Saga: Just Imagine What Chapter 12 Will Be Like!
There’s no contest. Actually, quite a lot is being contested, although you need to be an MBA to keep track of it all.
Take a breath.
At the end of 1996, Marvel Entertainment Group, battered by losses in the sportscard and comics markets and burdened by enormous debt piled up during the stewardship of CEO Ronald Perelman, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In 1997, corporate raider Carl Icahn, who had bought Marvel debt on the cheap, led other debtors in a legal battle to claim Marvel’s collateral stock. One hearing after another ensued before Icahn successfully ousted Perelman’s board, installed his own, and set to work trying to wrest control of Marvel’s spinoff Toy Biz company. With the legitimacy of everyone’s control at issue, with restructuring plans coming from every direction, and with a bankruptcy court judge opting to retire before spending any more time in this morass, a federal trustee was appointed to oversee the company last week. As the first anniversary of Marvel’s Chapter 11 protection passed, the U.S. government is on the job making sure nothing else happens to Marvel while its ownership and future are settled. Its stock: now 50¢ a share, only a hundredth of its loftiest peak.
Hope that was a deep breath.
At times, 1997 has seemed something like “Old Home Week” for Marvel. Former Marvel exec Joseph Calamari was brought back by Icahn to serve as president of Marvel Comics. Various editorial changes have involved the return of creators including Mark Waid and, more recently, the appointment of Chris Claremont to the post of Vice President – Editorial Director of Marvel Comics. An even longer-term exile, former Marvel Editor in Chief Jim Shooter, teamed with Mile High Comics Owner Chuck Rozanski to seek backing in order to advance their own plan for Marvel, although some wondered whether anybody currently in the comics industry could round up the necessary financing.
It is, in fact, the sheer scale of the numbers involved which has, at times, made the Marvel story seem remote, a battle of financial giants whose interest in the comics medium is strictly a sporting one. Marvel’s debt is more than the entire comics industry’s sales in 1997 combined. Before expenses. Move the decimal point on Marvel’s debt to Chase Manhattan one notch to the right and you’ve got Korea’s debt to Chase Manhattan. Perhaps it’s an understanding of this perspective that led the writers of a surprising number of the Marvel stories in the mainstream press to recognize a fact comics readers already knew — that comic books, alone, aren’t the sole cause of Marvel’s financial woes.
Indeed, the people working at 387 Park Ave. South continued to release a full slate of comic books in 1997, although with some difficulty and ever-mindful of the ownership tribulations. Shirrel Rhoades, executive vice president of publishing, put his best spin on it: “The good news is that people are fighting over who gets to put money into Marvel and grow Marvel, and make it a much stronger business. It’s like a custody fight where both parents love the child and want to nurture it.”
Most people who care about comics hope the state chooses a good home, and soon. For while it’s certainly true that, as stated above, Marvel’s stock price isn’t necessarily a referendum on comics as an art form, it has very much to say about the viability of comics as an entertainment medium in the short term. There is simply no telling how much damage would be done to the livelihoods of retailers, creators, distributors, and fellow publishers should Marvel stop shipping, for even a month, the comics that yet represent a third of the industry’s revenue.
Last year’s parlor game of figuring out what Marvel character to bid on at the auction (as if such properties would ever be divided) could seem gauche by comparison.
2) The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time: Planet Cops a Plea
Arguably, no censorship case in the 1990s has had a greater impact on the comics industry than the Planet Comics case. Artist Michael Diana, convicted this year of obscenity charges, was outside the mainstream of the comics community, and thankfully few retail stores suffered prosecution on the scale of the 1986 Friendly Frank’s case.
That is, until Planet Comics in Oklahoma City, Okla., was raided by police Sept. 6, 1995, on a tip from a local group affiliated with the Christian Coalition. Thousands of dollars in merchandise were seized, and owners Michael Kennedy and John Hunter were indicted on eight obscenity counts simply for stocking — not selling to minors — material prosecultors said was obscene by local standards. Comic Book Legal Defense Fund lawyers interceded, and, while some of the more egregious counts were thrown out (such as the charge of child pornography for stocking Frank Thorne’s Eros title Devil’s Angel), both prosecution and defense were readying themselves for a September showdown in court.
And then, on Sept. 5 — just as CBG’s correspondent was packing to head to Oklahoma City — it was over. Faced with potential jail terms, Hunter and Kennedy chose to bargain rather than take their chances. They pled guilty to two felony obscenity charges and each received three-year deferred sentences and $1,500 fines. No impact on Planet Comics, however; the business had been one of several early casualties of the ordeal.
The industry reeled at the news. Retailers who might not have thought twice about certain racking decisions were given pause, and some wondered if the demoralizing outcome may have accelerated internal changes at the CBLDF.
Some small amount of criticism of the defendants’ decision was forthcoming from creators. Others acknowledged it might have been too much to expect two of the soldiers on the “front lines” to risk decades in prison in Oklahoma City where, understandably, prosecutors and judges would be expected to run on their conviction records for years to come.
Especially when those soldiers had already lost everything else.
3) Maybe Just Holding His Breath: Good-Time Clarkie’s Got the Blues
There’s little doubt it was the top editorial story in comics in 1997. The issue where it happened became the top-selling comic book of 1997 to retailers and would’ve kept the title except for the Dec. 31 release of Darkness #11. The honeymoon over, DC turned Superman into an energy being and painted Big Blue electric blue. (Killing or cloning him were out of the question, one suposes.)
The change got modest news play in the mainstream press, and while most comics fans are in the habit of dismissing any supposedly permanent changes, DC resolutely kept the storyline going through the rest of 1997, taking time to pay tribute to the old “Superman Red/Superman Blue” tale.
(Which, in particular, has led some commentators to wonder: Where is some of today’s nostalgia coming from? As Don Thompson wondered when he first told the CBG staff of the 1994 Spider-Clone storyline, the original arc wasn’t particularly fondly embraced when it came out. Does ridicule ferment into favor?)
DC has definitely succeeded in getting fans talking about the character, although, increasingly, as the storyline enters its second year, some have grown impatient for the return of the original look (as if it were absent from every other non-comics incarnation available for consumption). So how long, O Kal-El? Well, the 60th Anniversary of Superman is in 1998, and DC will be announcing soon the month it’ll be celebrating the event. It’s doubtful you’ll see the “electric” blue smile grace the cover of Time… unless they spring for Chromium!
4) Teamsters Won, Comics Zero: UPS Strikes Retailers
As if retailers didn’t have enough to worry about — comics aren’t an automatic sell when they do show up — in August their businesses were trapped in a fight they never made.
Comics distributors used to one-up each other opening satellite warehouses and running truck routes to retailers’ doors. The recession in comics ended that practice a while ago, shifting the vast majority of the flow of comics from distributors to retailers onto one vendor: the United Parcel Service.
When the little brown trucks stopped running due to a labor dispute between the Teamsters and the UPS — unexpectedly, since negotiations had seemed to be turning favorably as early as 48 hours before — distributors scrambled for alternative methods. Unlike many of its smaller competitors, who already had accounts with other carriers, by maximizing its volume business Diamond found itself with all its comics in the UPS basket.
Quickly, Diamond set up remote pick-up sites for retailers in nearly two dozen major metropolitan areas across the country. Extremely remote, said some retailers, more than 10% of whom — by Diamond’s own estimates — were more than 150 miles away from a pick-up site. Other shipping options were used, with some retailers receiving shipments by Greyhound bus and a very few waiting to get their shipments until the strike ended. Some retailers, like the San Francisco group To Expand Retail Markets, banded together and hired their own truck to make site deliveries.
When the strike did end, 15 days later, it took a while for things to get back up to speed again. The second-guessing, however, was off and running. Diamond’s strategy cost the company $40,000 a week, the firm said, and the Postal Service had slapped limits on how much its non-regular customers could send. Some shop owners begged to differ on that last part (although our own company’s experience demonstrated that mixed messages were flying all over the place), and it must have seemed to Diamond as if it was hearing 4,500 different shipping suggestions from its customer retailers. That comics shipped at all was remarkable in its own right: Diamond owner Steve Geppi later observed, “In a multiple distributor situation, there wouldn’t have been any cost economy for any one distributor to take the steps we did to ensure that comics continued to reach retailers.”
Did customers notice anything different? It varied by location and the reaction of the individual retailer. (Some of those reactions were, well, stronger than others. One shop owner reportedly posted a large sign in his window telling fans to blame the Teamsters for any comics they were missing. We’ve heard no information regarding the current condition of the window.) In any event, it’s a fair bet that your local shop owner’s average blood pressure in August was higher than for the rest of the year.
Not to be forgotten, the Canadian retailers got their own turn when the Canadian Postal Service went on strike in November. Hopefully, their blood pressures are heading back to normal even now.
5) Fade to Black: Spawn, Steel, and the Odd Schumachery
CBG revived its regular media news column this year, absent since The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom days, acknowledging the continuing influence comics have on Hollywood. In one of the biggest stories of 1997, however, things worked the other direction, as Lucasfilm renewed its licensing agreement with Dark Horse Comics through the next batch of films — and protected the company’s backbone from several competing publishers. Dark Horse’s first quarter was dominated by titles supporting the Star Wars rereleases.
It was a good summer to have a film out about strange visitors from other worlds. A silly bug-eyed monster romp, Men in Black, became the top-grossing film of the year, possibly assisted by a fortuitous confluence of pop and real science headlines. After all, the film came out in a week in which NASA landed a bubble-wrapped roller skate on Mars and revelers observed the 50th anniversary of the Roswell marketing ploy.
It was, also, a comic-book movie — and, more, a Marvel comic-book movie — if only parenthetically. At first glance, few hardcore comics fans probably remembered that Aircel did two Men in Black series in 1990-91, which came to be associated with Marvel by virtue of Aircel parent Malibu’s subsequent sale in 1994. To “civilians” — most of whom still don’t know Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was ever a comic book — that lineage was more obscure, perhaps explaining why Marvel’s efforts to capitalize on the attention in the comics shops didn’t extend to a monthly series.
Either way, the Men in Black did chase a couple of earlier arrivals off thousands of screens: Batman and Robin, the fourth installment in the Warner movie series kicked off in 1989 by Tim Burton. Director Joel Schumacher’s second batflick opened strong but faded quickly, as word of mouth and competition conspired against it. The definite un-summer blockbuster My Best Friend’s Wedding was competitive with B&R by the time Men in Black came out, and the final domestic tally came in as the lowest of the four-film series.
While most critics were united in disinterest, the film revealed a definite rift in the comics community. Basically, how comics fans felt about Batman and Robin depended on how they liked their Batman: screwed up or screwball. Viewers who felt Tim Burton’s first film redeemed the character in the popular culture from his 1960s TV incarnation found badness dripping from every inch of the celluloid. Those who felt The Dark Knight had gotten too dark rejoiced in Adam-Westworld with Schumacher, as the Caped Crusader played hockey with goons, rode a rocket surfboard, and vogued in full costume at a charity benefit.
Meanwhile, Todd McFarlane made his bid to become a household name with a Spawn animated series on HBO and a feature film. While some reviews were less than kind, the film’s visual mastery caught theatergoers’ attention, and box office returns were promising for a new franchise. McFarlane appeared on CNN’s Sunday magazine Impact, in a story marveling at his $75 million empire and complete with a concerned mother tut-tutting about the influence of his toys. The attention provided a needed kick to Spawn comics sales in late summer.
Less successful was Steel, starring Shaquille O’Neal as the title super-hero. Crushed between goliath releases and unenthusiastically received by a critical community that hadn’t really cared for the Los Angeles Laker’s film work since essentially playing himself in Blue Chips, Steel never spent more than a week in many theaters. Video will probably provide most comics fans’ first look at the film. The same goes for Kull, which faced some of the same problems.
Amid all this super-hero fare, perhaps the most important comic-book movie of the year was Chasing Amy, Kevin Smith’s acclaimed relationship picture told against a comics-industry backdrop. It’s a good bet that a fair number of its customers would pay $7.50 just to watch costar Joey Lauren Adams doing her taxes, but no matter. Anything which portrays comics as a pursuit of typical (well, sort of) adults is bound to help comics in the long run. As it stands, the most recognizable comics professional regularly portrayed in the media in 1997 remained the owner of The Android’s Dungeon on The Simpsons.
What’s his name, again?
6) Liefeld Agonistes: A Rough Road, but Going His Own Way
It may not have been an annus horribilis for former McFarlane co-Imageer Rob Liefeld, but it was no feature film and show on HBO, either. 1997 began with Liefeld and his former Image partners at legal loggerheads. Meanwhile, he was shouldering the burden of the additional expenses of running Extreme apart from Image. His tax problems with the State of California became public knowledge. On top of that, Marvel, which had contracted with his studio for two of the “Heroes Reborn” titles — Captain America and Avengers — wanted out of the agreement, sales on those titles up but not even a tenth of that of X-Force #1 back during Liefeld’s Marvel glory-days. In all, not the best of times.
Liefeld settled with Image early in the year, and reached a resolution with Marvel concluding their business. He found a willing investor in former Malibu owner Scott Rosenberg, and set up shop with the former Extreme and Maximum titles under the Awesome banner. The company has settled into the middle tier of publishers, smaller than Dark Horse but always among the Top 10 publishers.
The time since hasn’t been quiet for Liefeld — a well-publicized tussle with Marvel over the similarities between his Agent America (later, Fighting American) and Captain America had to be decided by a judge. But a return to the routine of just publishing comics would more than likely be a welcome change at the moment for this ever-colorful industry personality.
7) Facet by Facet: Justice Department Eyes Diamond
Remember CBG’s top comics industry news story of 1996? Diamond Comic Distributors bought Capital City Distribution, bringing an end to the “exclusivity wars” touched off when Marvel bought Heroes World Distribution in late 1994. Diamond and Capital had scrambled to sign other publishers to exclusive agreements in order to make up for the loss of Marvel. Diamond locked up DC, Image, Dark Horse, and others, contributing to Capital’s capitulation in July 1996.
Diamond further consolidated its position in early 1997, when Marvel, unwilling to continue its costly and trouble-plagued distribution experiment, closed Heroes World and turned over all direct-market distribution rights to Diamond. Where earlier in the decade the field was being contested by two large and several medium-sized regional distributors, in late 1997 more than 90% of comic-book distribution to comics shops is being handled by Diamond.
Fair trade and competition issues are definitely not a new subject for debate among comics professionals — some retailers were raising antitrust issues in letters to Comics Retailer magazine long before Marvel purchased Heroes World. Diamond’s dominance in its field along with the fact that that dominance was, in part, achieved and is, in part, maintained through exclusive agreements with suppliers have caused some commentators, including some of its smaller start-up competitors, to call for government inquiry.
Apparently, someone caught somebody’s attention, since Diamond acknowledged in October that investigators of the U.S. Justice Department were looking into comics distribution. Diamond representatives said the investigation was a routine look at a service category in search of any structural trade restraints. Most of the agreements it has with suppliers can be terminated with short notice, Diamond said.
While Justice officials will not discuss the case, CBG has heard from several retailers and competing distributors who have been interviewed by investigators. One interviewee described the official he spoke with as “very well informed” about very technical topics about comics distribution, with discussion running the gamut of Diamond’s distribution and publishing interests.
The fact that comic-book distribution is such an expensive, low-margin business to get into today would seem to support Diamond’s position. The fact that the field has changed so much in such a short period, however, may be what led the government to consider an investigation prudent at this time. No ruling is expected until well into 1998 — if any ruling is made at all. Given how much things changed the last time the government seriously took a look at the comic-book industry, however, even the smallest chance of action would be enough to make this story worth keeping an eye on in 1998.
8) What a World, What a World: Chicago Con Sells Out
Nothing really bad happened at any of the major conventions this year. Considering that 1996 sunk the Dallas Fantasy Fair and the New York Comic Book Spectacular, that’s saying something.
No, the action was behind the scenes this year. Not long after Chicago and San Diego resolved the issue of the rights to the trade name Comic-Con, Chicago owners shocked the industry community by selling the Chicago convention to Wizard magazine owner Gareb Shamus. The sale represented the last in a series of major comics divestitures by Gary Colabuono. (He’ll never part with his collection, we assume.)
Despite a bumpy start (missing all preview publicity deadlines at CBG) and a public dispute with former show employees, the first convention under the new ownership went off remarkably well. Some attendees — particularly small press creators and Golden Age fans — lamented the shift of focus of a convention traditionally dominated by comic books to a multimedia show, a trend likely to continue, given the newly redubbed Wizard Entertainment’s removal of “Comic” from the convention’s name. However, fans of the wider spectrum offered should continue to enjoy “Wizard World: Chicago,” just as Dragon-Con, Heroes Con, MegaCon, Mid-Ohio-Con, Motor City, WonderCon, and others will enjoy vying for the title of the #2 comic-book convention in the land.
9) Eleventh-hour Save: Stoking the Fire in the Kitchen
For a nervous while, it looked as though, for the first time since 1969, this would be a comics industry with everything but Kitchen Sink.
Sales at the Sink sank along with everybody else’s when the fortunes of the comics industry turned sour a few years back, but a few aggravating factors were all its own. Backing from Ocean Capital, which came on the scene around the time of the successful film based on Kitchen Sink’s Crow property, evaporated in 1997. Kitchen’s bold 1995 decision to back Capital in its struggle for survival, applauded in some quarters, limited the number of retailers hearing about its products, and Kitchen’s return to Diamond following Capital’s closure made for an uncomfortable return to the status quo ante. Chain bookstore distribution of Crow and other Kitchen titles became more expensive than it was worth, when that industry encountered its own hard times, and the lackluster performance of the 1996 sequel film Crow: City of Angels added to the turmoil.
After layoffs of editors, designers, and other employees earlier in 1997, matters reached a breaking point in the summer. CEO and Founder Denis Kitchen’s search for new backing had gone unsuccessful until, in August, a deal was struck with Disappearing Inc., a group of private investors led by TV Producer Fred Seibert. The group purchased the publisher from the previous holding company in a foreclosure sale.
Kitchen was confirmed as president, publisher, and CEO of the reconstituted company, continuing his record as the publisher with the longest tenure in the industry.
10) Try Anything: Enhancements, Events Back Again
“Cross-overs are kaput.” “Enhancements are evil.” “Gimmicks are gone.” “Only content counts.”
We’ve all heard it. Many of us have said it. Not everyone is buying it.
In 1997, the concepts of the enhancement and the multiple-cover release slowly crept back into polite society as value-added benefits to purchasers, often at no extra remuneration to the publisher itself. When DC offered Superman #123 in enhanced “Collector’s” and regular newsstand editions at the same price, the enhanced edition outsold the other four to one. Darkness #11, with 11 separate covers — 10 at the same cover price — became, by retailer pre-orders, the top-selling comic book in 1997. Marvel sought extra mileage from its “value-added” contribution by giving readers explanatory gatefold covers on comic books for just an additional four cents.
One project, “Faces of the DC Universe,” involved no alternate covers but subtly encouraged completists by placing just the faces of characters on every DC cover in October, with logos reduced to a uniform style. The effect worked best for retailers who rack by publisher and whose racks offered, well, full-face exposure: Their customers were confronted with an effective wall of faces. Those retailers who rack comics by genre (in accordance, ironically, with the pleas of many publishers) or alphabetically saw the effect much diluted, and shops where the racks occlude each other wound up with walls of Kilroy-style peeping heroes.
Even the cross-overs of old were increasingly separated from continuity titles and given distinct “looks” as projects to rise and fall on their own merit. DC’s “skip weeks” of old, which inhabited five-week months, became laboratories for experimentation. In addition to “Amalgam II” with Marvel (which, with less mass promotion, was a little more than half as successful as “Amalgam I”), DC took opportunities in September and December to offer integrated subsets of titles: “Tangent” and “New Year’s Evil,” respectively. “Tangent” separated some DC names from their institutions (we got the first new issue of Sea Devils in 30 years) and offered a unique cyber-pub cover motif.
Consumer reception of the “skip week” strategy naturally seems to depend heavily on the project being promoted. Marvel found out the hard way with “Flashback Month” in May that when it comes to buyers supporting a special event, publishers are required to provide a much greater burden of proof. Retailer feedback has become more critical than ever: Advance retailer response to “New Year’s Evil” led DC to ship the project a week early in order to allow shops to maximize its sales potential. And, while some of Comics Retailer’s readers report that their customers are increasingly approaching these projects as take-it-or-leave-it chances to save some money, at least consumer resentment over having to buy issues of unwanted titles to follow a story in a wanted title is gone from the equation.
That’s 10, a round number and a good place to stop. As ever, no list can capture everything that happened in a community in a given year, and ours is submitted as a basis for further discussion.
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SIDEBAR: Passages: 1997
Losses in the comics community included the following in 1997.
Dan Barry, artist, Johnny Quick, Vigilante, Flash Gordon, late January.
Kim Yale, CBG columnist, comic-book writer and DC editor, March 7.
Stan Drake, creator of Juliet Jones and artist of Blondie, March 10.
Tom French, San Diego Comic-Con dealers’ room organizer, March 16.
Lou Stathis, Vertigo editor, May 4.
Ruth Atkinson Ford, artist on Patsy Walker and Millie, June 1.
Manny Stallman, Golden and Silver Age artist, June 6.
Clay Geerdes, Comix World creator, July 8.
Mark Wallace, Vixen’s Keep creator, Sept. 12.
Roy Lichtenstein, pop artist, Sept. 29.
Don Messick, voice artist, Oct. 24.
Samm Schwartz, Archie artist, Nov. 13.
Roz Kirby, wife of Jack Kirby, Dec. 22.
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SIDEBAR: Gaming's #1 story in 1997:
Don’t Cry For Me, Lake Geneva: TSR Leaves Town, Joins Wizards of the Coast
Over there in our neighboring gaming industry — which, again, contributed to the continued solvency of thousands of comics shops — everything went blooey in 1997.
Remember some of the new publishers that appeared back during the boom? Consider any of them — of any size — owning Marvel today and you’ll know how strange things have gotten in gaming. Four years ago, Wizards of the Coast was one of dozens of small-press game publishers and was reportedly teetering on the brink. One hot product later, Magic, and it’s the biggest name in gaming and buying TSR, the 20-year sales champ. It was a necessary rescue, however, since Advanced Dungeons & Dragons producer TSR’s hard financial times prevented the shipment of any new AD&D product for the first half of 1997.
With 20 years of TSR backstock and plenty of alternative games to sell, few retailers selling games suffered much. The parallels to the comics industry situation are disturbing, however, especially in that the dynamics that kept retailers solvent during a TSR drought might not be at work if Marvel’s Wall Street woes force it off the market.
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