Spidey and the Mouse

Alas for Spidey, there are no good web-swingin' skyscrapers in either Anaheim or Orlando.

I saw a post on Arsen's LaMarotte blog (Where Even Spider-Man Fails) that got me thinking about this acquisition and what it means for the future of comic books. After poking around a few news stories, I came across a quote in a Newsarama.com story on this acquisition (What Marvel/Disney Merger Means to Comic Book Shops) that I thought got to the heart of the deal:

"Comics are a small part of Marvel. This deal is for the riches in licensing and spin-offs to other media, notably video games and movies," (said Joe Field, owner of Flying Colors Comics in Concord, Calif., and president of the ComicsPRO retailing organization.)

In truth, I can't help but feel that the story of Marvel is a fascinating case-study in corporate killing of the goose that laid the golden egg, and vast profits despite the mismanagement.

Back in the 90s Marvel nearly single-handedly destroyed the established comic-book distribution network whose reach had greatly benefited the entire comics industry. (It's a long story involving the desire to jack up profits by creating a distribution monopoly.) As a result, greatly reduced distribution reach and sales numbers have forced them to jack up the price of individual comic books, so that the comic-book business could maintain its profit margins. So they have since instituted a series of price hikes.

Until the early 1990s an average book would have cost 75 cents to a buck in today's money. Now it retails for $3.99 to a much smaller general audience. This price jump has naturally led to ever-declining sales numbers for individual titles, especially in sales to kids, i.e. "future customers." DC has generally joined in with the price-hiking, since their distribution outreach was just as wrecked, and since their comic-book business is also under a large corporation and subject to the same pressures. And the lack of a widespread distribution system has made it a practical impossibility for the smaller publishers (Dark Horse, Dynamite, Top Cow, Image, etc.) to bust out of the comic-book-shop ghetto.

Here's a recipe for an industry death-spiral if ever there was one. The only thing equally dumb that I can think of is Major League Baseball's decision to schedule the World Series so that nearly all of their championship games end after midnight Eastern Time.

"Holy eating-your-seed-corn, Batman!"

But at the same time that Marvel has been merrily looting their core comic-book business, the media spinoffs (film, video games, toys, licensing and endorsement deals, etc.) from those comic-book characters have proven to be enormously profitable. The troublesome part for both Marvel and DC, however, is that almost all of their popular "properties" (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Iron Man, Hulk, etc. for Marvel, and Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, etc. for DC) were created 40 to 75 years ago.

The financial growth of these companies is now driven by the extension of these characters into new markets, not through the creation of new characters. And, in fact, it's going to be well nigh unto impossible to create new characters with the same sort of popularity because their core character-creation business -- comic books -- no longer has the sort of reach that can create character popularity (i.e. "brand recognition") on the cheap.

To me, the really interesting thing is that comic-book creation itself is one of the cheapest forms of media creation. For a company worth $4 billion, an investment of 1% of that total -- $40 million, which is certainly less than the advertising budget of the Spider-Man 3 movie -- could finance the creation of an entirely new generation of comic-book characters with real potential outreach. Sure, the majority of them would disappear into obscurity, as have the vast majority of all comic-book characters. But somewhere out there is the next Spider-Man or Wolverine.

For Marvel this would be equivalent of a research and development arm, but instead they put the vast majority of their resources into re-hashing the same characters that Stan Lee dreamed up in the 1960s because that's where the proven profits lie. How many companies require their core R&D department to turn a fat quarterly profit? Especially when that R&D department is essentially a publishing business that has historically only produced small profit margins?

As for whether the sale of Marvel to Disney is good or bad for the long-term future of comic books, I'm kind of agnostic. Exchanging one set of corporate overseers for a different set seems to me to be a lateral move at best, and this deal is really more about movie, multimedia, and licensing than it is about comic books.

My guess is that comic books are quickly headed the way of pulp adventure magazines. The narrative adventure heroes of the future are being created right now on the web by individuals in web comics and blogs. Like the comic-book heroes of the past, most of them will only find obscurity. But somewhere out there is the next great fictional hero to inspire future generations of kids.

And who knows? The most recent "great new hero" to emerge was Harry Potter, who came from dead-tree books of all things. Maybe the real lesson is that characters and storytelling are what really matters, not distribution networks, corporate managment, and licensing deals.