When Marvel Nearly Died

In 1991 Marvel published the best-selling comic book in history. Five years later the company filed for bankruptcy.

Those two facts are not a coincidence and they are not really a paradox either. The thing that produced the record sale is the same thing that produced the bankruptcy, and you can follow the whole arc through the books themselves. Here is how a company sold more comics than anyone ever had and nearly died doing it.

Chris Claremont and Jim Lee's X-Men #1 shipped in five variant covers, four regular and a gatefold, so that a completist needed all of them. It sold somewhere around eight million copies and holds the record for the best-selling single comic book of all time.

Read that sales figure carefully, because it is the beginning of the problem. Eight million copies did not mean eight million readers. It meant a large number of people buying multiple copies of the same comic as an investment, which is a different business with different physics.

X-Men #1 on eBay ›

By 1990 a comic could be sold twice: once to someone who wanted to read it, and once to someone who had read a newspaper article about Action Comics #1 and concluded that new comics appreciated. Marvel obliged with Spider-Man #1 in 1990, Todd McFarlane's launch, printed in multiple cover treatments including a polybagged edition.

The logic was self-reinforcing and briefly true. Print runs grew because orders grew, orders grew because retailers believed the books would appreciate, and the books appeared to appreciate because everyone was buying. Nobody was reading fast enough to matter.

In late 1991 seven of Marvel's best-selling artists left to found Image Comics, having concluded that if their names were moving these numbers, they should own what they drew. Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld, whose X-Force #1 had shipped with trading cards sealed in a polybag, were among them.

Marvel lost its top draw talent in a single season, at exactly the moment its business depended on hit launches. The company replaced them and kept publishing, but the books that had been the engine were now being made by the competition.

The high-water mark was not even Marvel's. DC's Death of Superman, on sale 19 November 1992, was covered on network news and sold in numbers that pulled civilians into comic shops for the first time.

It is included here because it marks the moment the whole industry believed the speculation was real. People who had never bought a comic bought several, sealed them, and waited. Within two years most of them discovered that a comic printed in millions is not rare, and they stopped coming.

In 1994 Marvel acquired Heroes World, a regional distributor, and announced it would distribute its own comics exclusively. Every other publisher was forced to pick a distributor in response, Diamond took most of them, and the multi-distributor system that had served the direct market collapsed into a near-monopoly within about a year.

Heroes World could not handle the volume. Shipments were late and wrong, retailers lost sales, and stores closed. Marvel had broken the pipeline its own products travelled through, and the damage outlasted the experiment.

The strange part of this period is how much of the work was excellent. Marvels, by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, retold the Marvel universe from street level with painted art and became one of the most admired books of the decade. Generation X and Astonishing X-Men were doing real work inside the X-line.

None of it mattered to the balance sheet. The company's problem was never a shortage of good comics.

Spider-Man spent 1994 to 1996 in a storyline that concluded Peter Parker might be a clone and the real Peter had been elsewhere for twenty years. It ran far past its planned length because sales spiked whenever the mystery was extended, and it ended by reversing nearly everything it had established.

In the middle of it, Amazing Spider-Man #400 killed Aunt May in one of the best-regarded issues of the decade, and the same storyline later revealed the death was a hoax. This is the period's whole method in one arc: any event could be staged, and any staging could be reversed if the numbers justified it.

Marvel Entertainment Group filed for Chapter 11. The company that had published the best-selling comic in history five years earlier could not service the debt taken on during its expansion, and the ownership fight that followed, between Ronald Perelman and Carl Icahn, was conducted in courtrooms and the financial press rather than anywhere near a comic book.

Industry-wide, sales had fallen by something on the order of two-thirds from the peak. Thousands of comic shops closed. The speculators had left and taken the inflated orders with them.

Marvel's response was to hand its founding characters to the people who had left. In 1996 the Fantastic Four, Avengers, Captain America and Iron Man were cancelled and relaunched as new number ones produced by Jim Lee's and Rob Liefeld's studios.

Fantastic Four #1 went on sale 4 September 1996, Captain America #1 the following week, and Iron Man #1 the week after that. A bankrupt publisher had subcontracted its own mythology to its former employees, who were now its competitors.

It lasted a year.

The way out was not another event. In 2000 Marvel launched Ultimate Spider-Man, restarting the character for readers with no continuity to catch up on, followed by The Ultimates in 2002.

The Ultimate line was designed to be bought by people who did not already collect comics, in bookstores as much as comic shops, in collected editions as much as monthlies. That is the opposite of the 1991 model in every respect, and it worked.

Ultimate Spider-Man on eBay ›

In 2001 Grant Morrison relaunched the X-Men with New X-Men #114, keeping the original numbering, dropping the costumes for black leather, and writing mutants as a culture rather than a superhero team.

Between that and the Ultimate line, Marvel spent the early 2000s making comics for readers again. The film deals that eventually made the company valuable came later and were signed from a much weaker position than people remember, which is its own story.

It is tempting to blame the variant covers, and they deserve some of it. But the mechanism was simpler: for about four years, the number of comics ordered was set by what retailers believed collectors would pay later, not by how many people wanted to read them. When that belief broke, the orders did not decline gradually. They fell off a cliff, because they had never been attached to readership in the first place.

Everything else followed. The distribution gamble made the fall harder. The endless events and reversals taught readers that nothing in the story would stick, which cost the audience that remained. And the eight million copies of X-Men #1 are still out there, which is why one of the best-selling comics ever printed is also one of the least valuable.

A note on sources. This is comics history rather than database output, so the business figures above are the commonly reported ones and the article says "around" where it means around. On-sale dates come from the records on this site. Every issue referenced has been checked against the files here, and corrections are welcome at the address in the footer.