Marvel's biggest mistakes

[TMC1982]

http://www.looper.com/14944/marvels-biggest-mistakes/

I'm assuming this is strictly focused on the business side of things and not the creative side.

Atlas distribution disaster

Marvel initially launched as Timely Comics before changing their name to Atlas Comics in 1951. That's when their problems really started. Publisher Martin Goodman distributed his own company's comics to newsstands until 1956, when he decided to outsource distribution to American News Company. Unfortunately for Atlas, American News Company completely collapsed soon after, the result of a lawsuit accusing the company of monopolizing the market.

Atlas' only choice was to distribute through their direct competitors' network, National Periodical Publications, who owned DC Comics. NPP was none too friendly to Atlas, and limited them to only eight comics a month—a huge drop from the 60 or so titles Atlas had previously published.
Atlas creator layoffs

Martin Goodman's distribution switch was a debacle on two levels. Not only did profits plunge, but because of the bottleneck imposed by National Periodical, Atlas had to fire almost all of their artists and writers. There was simply nothing for them to do.

At the time, Stan Lee was a gatekeeper for Atlas, approving and paying for any publishable comic pages, but Lee himself admitted much later in an interview with Comic Book Artist that he was a poor judge of quality. If he saw something he didn't like, he just assumed that he didn't understand it and paid for it anyway. As a result, the Atlas offices had a closet full of unused artwork that slowly chipped away at their budget. It was thanks to Lee's lack of judgment that Atlas had at least six months worth of comics to publish during their downtime—even if they might have been a little below the company's usual standard.

Tossing pages

Before comics were seen as collectible items for collectors to preserve under UV-safe plastic, original comic art was a means to an end. It was photographed, colored, printed…and then the originals were discarded. "We had no room for them. We gave everything away," Lee told Playboy. "Some kid would come up to deliver sandwiches form the drugstore and we'd say, 'Hey, kid, on your way out, take these pages and throw them somewhere.' If one of those guys had brains enough to save some stuff, he'd be a very lucky man right now."

While thousands of original, important pages have been preserved by collectors, early Marvel simply chucked countless others, not unlike the way the BBC tossed dozens of early Doctor Who episodes to make room. Today, finding any missing comic page is a victory for both collectors and comics historians.

Creator mistreatment

From the beginning, comics artists have generally operated under "work for hire" contracts with their publishers, and Marvel is no different. What this essentially means is that anything created for and bought by Marvel belongs to Marvel forever. Under these contracts, Marvel can do whatever they want with someone's work without further compensating or crediting the creator for the concept.

One of the worst examples of Marvel's questionable treatment of their creators is the case of Gary Friedrich, the co-creator of flame-skulled, motorcycle-riding anti-hero Ghost Rider. Friedrich took Marvel to court for compensation related to the merchandising of his famous character, but in 2010, he lost the lawsuit. As if that weren't painful enough, Marvel countersued Friedrich for $17,000, and forced him to stop selling anything Ghost Rider-related at conventions. Later, in 2013, a judge overturned the decision based on the questionable language of the old Marvel contracts, and both parties settled out of court.

The No-Prize

In 1964, Marvel comics began asking questions of their readers, who would then respond and fill the letters pages of their favorite comics. Of course, such work couldn't go unrewarded, so Stan Lee started offering a luxurious "No-Prize," which was unfortunately a little too confusing for comic readers…because it was literally no prize but acknowledgement.

Lee upped the ante by inviting readers to spot continuity errors within Marvel's comics. Winners would be sent the No-Prize of an empty envelope. Still, this confused readers even more, who were disappointed upon opening empty envelopes from Marvel, and continued to demand actual prizes. Readers picked apart each panel of every comic in search of errors, the number of letters tripled, and ultimately, the practice was canceled in 1989 by then-Marvel owner Ron Perelman (although it has persisted, off and on, in some form over the ensuing years). But it was too late; nerds had been trained to nitpick comics into oblivion, ruining them forever for everyone who just wanted to have a good time.

Royal Roy

For a period, Marvel Comics also published Star Comics, a label almost exclusively dedicated to animated series tie-ins like ThunderCats and Fraggle Rock. This effectively kept Doctor Doom's malevolent magic away from the delicate minds of children. This was also the line that published the first issues of Peter Porker, Spectacular Spider-Ham, but that's best left forgotten.

Part of Star's modus operandi was to copy the success of Harvey Comics, both in their distinctive style and also in story. Star wandered a bit too close to Harvey's property, however, why they began publication of Royal Roy. The young millionaire was basically a copy of Harvey's Richie Rich, or a very lazy parody thereof. Complicating matters was the fact that an ex-employee of Harvey had created the character for Star. Harvey sued Marvel for infringing on their property, and Royal Roy was canceled after a handful of issues.

Ron Perelman

In January of 1989, Perelman bought Marvel for just over $82 million. Soon after that, he took the company public and increased comic prices, reasoning that real fans would follow along. Many did, but numerous Friends of Ol' Marvel thought their favorite books slowly lost their lustre. With a decrease in quality and an increase in price, Marvel was part of—and, possibly, a major contributing cause of—the great comic collapse in the '90s.

Perelman also used Marvel to purchase other trading card, comic, magazine, and sticker companies, sending the company $700 million into debt. The financial details get murky, but they're detailed in Comic Wars by Dan Raviv, in which Perelman is presented as a primary villain. Marvel ended this period on its last legs, and in the eyes of many fans, Perelman was largely to blame.

Film Rights

In the early '90s, Marvel didn't have any big plans to make movies for themselves, so they didn't really see a problem with licensing out their characters to a wide array of different studios. It was basically free money just for letting a studio leverage a well-known character, after all. Among the characters licensed out were the X-Men, Spider-Man, Black Panther, the Hulk, Black Widow, Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man—essentially splitting the Avengers into a half dozen different cinematic universes, years before the term had even been coined.

By 2005, Marvel had gained better financial footing and started buying back the rights to their characters—just in time for the rise of the superhero film genre. Over the next decade (and with the assistance of Disney's mighty four-fingered fist), Marvel reclaimed all of its properties except those stuck with 20th Century Fox: the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and Deadpool. Spider-Man remained with Sony, but Marvel wrangled a special deal allowing the character to appear in Captain America: Civil War.

Captain America & The Fantastic Four

It makes sense that Marvel may not have seen the value of getting into theaters in the '90s. Every Marvel film prior to 1998's Blade was a failure, including (but not limited to) Howard the Duck, the terrible 1994 The Fantastic Four, and the unfortunate 1992 version of Captain America.

The first Fantastic Four was allegedly produced just so a small movie studio could legally retain the rights to the characters. When Marvel executive Avi Arad caught wind that it was actually headed for release, he quickly bought the film, reimbursed the production company for its costs, and buried it in a vault. It cost Marvel a few million dollars—on rights that were purchased for a quarter of that price—to try and save their brand from being cheapened by a low-budget flop.

This fiasco occurred only four years after the production of Captain America, which was stuck in development hell for eight years before finally being released direct-to-video. Made with a $10 million budget, the first Cap reported profits of just over $10,000. From these humble beginnings, Marvel's risen into one of Hollywood's biggest and most dependable moneymakers: the only Marvel-derived flop since 2000 is Punisher: War Zone (2008), which lost about $25 million at the box office.
Marvel Defiant

While most of Marvel's actions are arguably defensible, there are times when the company has been kind of a jerk. This is probably most evident in the case of Jim Shooter and Defiant Comics.

Shooter was hired by Marvel in 1976, and by the time he was fired in 1987, he had risen through the ranks to become the company's editor-in-chief. During his tenure, he was credited with revitalizing Marvel and implementing better treatment for creators, but at the same time, he insisted on strict deadlines and complete editorial control. This attitude alienated many top artists, who left to work for DC, contributing to Shooter's ultimate undoing. Marvel's ultimate revenge on Shooter occurred when his new company, Defiant Comics, announced an ongoing series called Plasm. Marvel's UK branch had ownership of a never-used character named Plasmer, and because the two names were somewhat similar, Marvel sued the life out of Defiant, costing the company $300,000 in legal fees and driving them completely out of business.

Marvel's Image

Creative ownership issues continued to plague Marvel even after Shooter's renovations, and tensions came to a head around 1992. Eight of Marvel's top creators went to Editor-In-Chief Terry Stewart and asked for a better deal: more money per page, more royalties for characters they created, and a fairer portion of what Marvel was raking in for their work. Stewart declined, and the artists left to form their own interconnected system of studios, all publishing together under the Image Comics banner.

When the news broke, Marvel's stock dropped, and the fallout was big enough to be featured on a 1992 episode of Moneyline. Image exploded and revolutionized how the comic industry valued creators, and while Marvel survived, they could have stayed ahead of the game—and saved themselves a lot of trouble—just by playing fair.

Guiding Light

In 2006, Marvel's EIC Joe Quesada thought it would be a great idea to partner with, of all companies, Procter & Gamble, mostly known for selling Pringles, bowel-loosening Olestra, and the soap opera Guiding Light. Because Wolverine couldn't be seen in diapers and Spider-Man has a known allergy to Pringles, that only left the soap opera.

To that end, Guiding Light aired an episode in which a long-running character was shocked by some Halloween decorations and briefly gained superpowers. Marvel wrote their own version of the story as a six-page mini-crossover, and though the hope was that the cross-promotion would encourage soap viewers and comics fans to walk on the other side, not many did, and Guiding Light only lasted a few more years before it was canceled.

Marvel's failed cross-promotions go back even further. In 1980, Casablanca Records came to Marvel and asked them to come up with a superhero comic which could tie into an as-yet-unnamed singer. The creation, called Dazzler, was given wicked disco clothes and the power to turn sound into energy. While Marvel produced the comics, Casablanca never actually secured a singer to perform as Dazzler on their label, leaving the publisher with a terrible disco-themed hero, just as disco was dying out. Marvel re-edited the premiere issue, which sold in huge numbers due to an unprecedented number of superhero cameos as part of Casablanca's demands. Today, Dazzler shows up mostly in X-Men comics, but is generally a pretty good reminder of how the comic world fares best when it doesn't try to create heroes on the whims of Underoos, Bombay Gin, or International Cardboard Manufacturers.