A Few, Brief Objections to George Khoury’s Article on 1990s Turmoil

To launch a new column at CBR, the writer George Khoury has posted an essay culled from a book he wrote about Image Comics. That short essay describes in summary fashion the trauma, much of it self-inflicted, that beset the American comic book industry in the 1990s. One of its aims seems to have been to mitigate against the primacy of Image's role in causing the industry's decline in the second half of the 1990s and into the early 2000s, which isn't surprising considering how the piece was first used in a book about the company. As a portion of Image history, it may read differently than it does as the general industry history it becomes in this new context. It's certainly the best recent thing on the subject of comics' last bout with ugliness that I've read on-line, at least that I can recall this morning. That understood, based on my initial reading I have some objections to the history as presented in Khoury's piece.

1. Some of the general history feels less than authoritative, particularly in terms of tracking cause and effect.
I'm sympathetic to anyone having to make strong decisions in order to create readable comics history, but in this case it seems like too many things are left out that may have made some arguments untenable or may have provided alternative to some of the causative links. For example, both Marvel and DC engineered events before Image Comics came on the scene; it's just as easy to argue the most severe examples of that publishing phenomenon as the culmination of a cycle that began back when Todd McFarlane was drawing fan art for The Comics Journal as it is to suggest it as something that happened in order for the companies to better compete with Image. Ditto various publishing stunts and line expansions. I'd argue that while the success of Batman material had a big effect on the shape and size of the DM experiment, so did things like the outcome of the black and white implosion, the growing consolidation of retail distribution, the growth of publishing across the board in terms of number of offering, the fall of first generation indy publishers and the nature of how the big companies partnered with their comic shop outlets. These are all missing. Some of the arguments that are presented work at cross-purposes: mid-'90s Marvel is accused of both not having any stars and not promoting their stars. I think the general historical through-line could have been more sophisticated than Seuling-Batman-Collapse, and made for better history.

2. A flimsy case is built against Marvel as 1990s Big Bad.
I can't believe I'm in a position where I have to defend 1990s Marvel, or any of the magnificently stupid decisions they made that helped put them into bankruptcy, but I disagree with a few of Khoury's characterizations. For one, Marvel bought Fleer in 1992, before the decline that Khoury argues drove them to start buying card companies. Khoury asserts that the aim in Marvel's acquisition period was to combine and corner the hype. Now, I'm not even sure what that means, but the general thinking of the time was that it was just as much straight-up overpayment, a failure of those individual markets, and Marvel's overestimation of a non-movie-driven Marvel brand that screwed Marvel, not the collapse of some combined PR enterprise I'm not aware of happening. For another, "desperation" hardly drove Marvel to buy Heroes World, at least not according to what I could see covering the industry at the time; they were still overpaying for companies at that point and planning restaurants and crowing about their industry dominance. It seemed more like arrogance than desperation. Desperation would come later, for sure. I'd need to hear more evidence that Marvel was scrambling at this point despite their public stances and outward behavior for me to find it credible. Khoury doesn't go so far as some pundits who foist the horrors of that entire period on Marvel's bankruptcy and Marvel's bankruptcy alone, for which I'm glad. But a better case needed to be made that Marvel was first among many indictable souls than Chuck Rozanski's awesomely laugh-out-loud, damning characterization of Marvel's men in suits.

3. Some of the quotes are weird.
Technically, Marvel's distribution arm wasn't just carrying itself; it also carried Bongo, for instance, so I have no idea why Steve Geppi says Heroes World was only carrying Marvel. That's a quibble, though; in the sense of companies that matter, you can say it was an all-Marvel deal. More confusingly, I don't have any idea what Geppi is talking about when he says that Marvel didn't have enough volume to justify nationwide distribution. Distribution was only a few years removed from viable companies that carried much less volume than mid-1990s Marvel. The issue discussed at the time wasn't volume but certainty of coverage: every comic shop in America would conceivably want Marvel comics, so they were covered there. In fact, it wasn't until the last every-shop, must-have comic left the table -- Spawn -- that most folks thought any of the other distributors couldn't make a long-term go of it. Heroes World was certainly a terrible choice, and there's some great stuff in Khoury's essay describing just how bad a choice it turned out to be. But if there were volume issues, it seems more logical it was that Heroes World couldn't handle the volume of material presented to it, not that Marvel didn't have enough books. That really seems like a self-serving quote given Diamond's relative size, and doesn't seem like it should be presented as reliable testimony. I'm equally baffled by a quote from Chuck Rozanski that suggests, if I'm understanding it correctly, an approximately 80 percent drop in comics sales during the year 1993, when the most severe reports I've read suggest a still-astounding 50 percent drop between 1993 and 1998.

4. Why the Other Companies Had to React Is Fudged Over
Like Paul Levitz's recent comments on the matter where he painted DC's sweetheart deal with Diamond as the last stand against Comics Armageddon without caring to explain why, Khoury's essay, despite a killer quote from Jim Hanley that calls out DC for making a cowardly move by starting the run to Diamond, still seems to want to rightfully bury Marvel's ridiculous decision to self-distribute through Heroes World but also continue to lift it up as some sort of industry bogeyman that somehow forced the other companies to all climb into bed with Diamond or face guaranteed total destruction. This makes no sense, and given Hanley's view it's something that maybe should have been worked through in a more authoritative way. I contend that the evidence suggests DC used this opportunity not to stave off destruction but to press an advantage, whether driven by fear or opportunity or both, and that the other companies followed suit by thinking in terms that to varying degrees mixed self-interest and short-sightedness. Unless someone can present compelling, specific reasons why these companies had to do what they had to do, starting with DC, there's no reason to allow them to assert an imminent threat years later. Besides, if these companies were only acting to stave off industry destruction, now that we're in the clear I can hardly wait for these companies to give back all those negotiated advantages.

5. On No Planet Was "Everyone to Blame" for Things That Happened in the 1990s
While the other points are disagreements, this one is more of a strong objection. While there's indeed plenty of blame to go around for the degree and nature of the industry's slow period in the late '90s and into the 2000s, to even suggest that somehow "everyone" was to blame is such even-handed for the sake of being even-handed nonsense it makes me suspect that Marvel and Ron Perelman were punked on more than DC and Image simply because they're not around anymore to get upset about being singled out. Let me suggest that some people were way more to blame than others, some of them are still around, and many of them profited handsomely for doing so at the same time their direct actions contributed to lots of people losing livelihoods and businesses. Let me further suggest that some people were totally without blame for what happened in the 1990s, and that a few people hoisted on their own petards doesn't change that many more were simply knocked to the floor. Heck, some people might even deserve credit for fighting against the greed and madness of those few brief, unpleasant years and hanging on for dear life while doing so -- not just against people who were actively screwing them but in the face of many more who made a big point of shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Hey, what are you going to do?" As appealing as it must be, I tend to distrust any history without victims, especially when I remember so many by name. Khoury ends his essay by pointing out that things are better now despite a few obvious bugaboos of the past raising their heads. Me, I'm not sure if we can't come to grips with what happened during a time when exploitation was open and celebrated that we're going to be able to deal with all the ways the industry can be fundamentally unfair -- if more benignly so on the surface of things -- today. I'd suggest that it's one thing to remember history, and another thing altogether to understand it. We need to do both.
 
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