Facetious Fortunes

Like a rubber neck slowing down to a crawl as he passes a four-car pile up, pissing off everyone behind him who’s actually trying to get somewhere, just so he can get a serious look at the twisted, shattered bodies, I logged on to facebook last week to see what everyone was saying. There was a message from a friend of mine in Michigan.

“Did you hear which member of the Fantastic Four got killed off for good?”

“I didn’t,” I wrote back. “Who kicked the bucket?”

“The Human Torch,” came the swift reply, “saving Reed Sue and Ben from being trapped in the Negative zone...it comes polybagged!”

It’s hard to imagine people getting worked up in any way by yet another shameless ploy to generate sales – especially anyone over the age of 17 – but what the hell. I haven’t collected super hero comics for twenty years, so no biggie.

A couple of days ago I saw the article online: “Spider-Man Replacing Human Torch on new ‘FF’ Team.” In this new story arc, that’ll probably last about a year before even longtime fans can no longer bear the stupidity of it all, they’re no longer the Fantastic Four, they’re the “Future Foundation.” Whatever the fuck that is. They no longer wear cool costumes, they wear all white. And Spider-Man replaces the Human Torch.

In all white.

I feel sorry for writers at Marvel and DC nowadays. I really do. By the mid-1990s, comic book sales shrank to a trickle of what they were in the glory years of the 40s (and even the 80s), and since then, writers for the two industry giants have been tasked with dreaming up ever more outlandish, inane storylines in a desperate attempt to shift some units. That their gut instinct with this dilemma is always to kill off one iconic character or another is testimony to how few creative minds are at work here. We need higher sales. Ok – who do we kill? Aunt May…? Yeah, that may turn some heads… How about we kill the Phoenix? Kill Captain America? Kill Superman? Reveal that Spider-Man was a clone these last 20 years?

The floodgates to this kind of foolishness opened in 1992 when Superman “died” in DC’s “Death of Superman” storyline at the hands of the evil Doomsday, a cynical, absurd marketing drive that leaves me cold to this day. It laid the groundwork for subsequent “death” story arcs, all of which followed the same template as the Superman story: generate press – and sales – by announcing to the world you’re killing off a major character. Keep an inane “post-death” storyline running for a year, then bring back dead major character in a miraculous re-birth story.

The notion that DC would “kill” their franchise player, the most famous superhero of all time, the face of their company, the superhero whose debut comic was – and still is – the most valuable comic book of all time, was patently ridiculous. Yet, there it was, in 1992: The Death of Superman, a story arc that wound through all four Superman comics, climaxing in Superman (vol. 2) #75, where the Man of Steel “dies.” While thousands of thousands of people who weren’t even comic book collectors snatched up Superman comics and drove up sales, veterans of comic book fandom slowly shook their heads at the spectacle of it.

It worked. At least in the short run; DC’s coffers overflowed with greenbacks as Superman #75 sold out all around the world. It was a good time to be on the ol' DC payroll.

And then, a year later, Superman was back. He hadn’t died at all, of course, because DC needs to keep their doors open. The thing is, everyone with an IQ over 80 knew that DC had no intention of Superman “dying.” He had to come back, probably sooner than later, because he’s the most popular, famous, recognizable super hero in the world, and who gives a flying flip about the Reign of the Supermen anyway? So Superman was really alive and well.

But the damage his “death” and resurrection did to the industry lingers today. Many insiders – including Mile High Comics’ excellent Chuck Rozanski – have since pointed out that the industry tanked after Superman #75, in part because the hoopla surrounding Superman’s “death” drew in scores of non-comic book collectors who drove sales up for one month, thinking that if they bought one, two, even three copies of Superman #75, bagged & boarded it, and kept it in a vault for five months, they could then sell it for thousands of dollars. “…It became,” Rosanski wrote, “a common delusion for a while that you could make a fortune investing in comics. Greed, more than any other factor, is what inspired so many consumers from outside of the traditional comics worlds to chase after Superman #75.”

Bloody geniuses – that’s what happens with comic books, right? Isn’t it just like playing the stock market? Wasn’t Action #1 worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000 in 1992?

And indeed it was, going by Overstreet estimates. There were, however, two factors these geniuses hadn’t taken into consideration: 1) Action #1 was 54 years old at that point, and 2) only a handful of copies existed.

Kind of different from Superman #75 in 1992. The problem with trying to sell your 10.0 copy of Superman #75 in 1993, less than a year after it was printed, was that there were 1,000,000 other 10.0 copies floating around out there, making it worth roughly its cover price. Which is to say, not much at all.

And so the greedy creeps who jacked up sales for one glorious month in 1992 went back to their lives, betrayed by the funny book industry, abandoning their grandiose get-rich-quick schemes of buying important comic books and then selling them a year later for obscene sums of money and retiring to the Bahamas. And those of us who’d been collecting comic books for years, even decades – the ones who did so out of love of comic books, love of our favorite artists and writers, love of the characters, a love that had seized us by the lapels as little boys, as we excitedly flipped though Spider-Man and Superman comics at the drug store, overwhelmed by the colors and characters – watched as the industry we’d loved for so long morphed into something that much more cynical and desperate, one where the bottom line was the only thing Marvel and DC cared about, and were willing to do anything to improve.

And no, I’m not that naïve. I’m well aware that the bottom line has always been everyone’s concern, from the days of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and Martin Goodman to Victor Fox and Bill Gaines, all the way to the present. But the “Future Foundation?” White costumes? How utterly clueless can you be about what attracted everyone to these characters in the first place? Spider-Man’s red and blue costume was a source of wonderment for me as a child. Now he’s wearing white? In the Future Foundation??

In a year’s time, when the Human Torch is resurrected and the original, way cooler costumes are back, I’m sure the folks at Marvel will be happy to tell us how many more books they sold, and how much more money they made than if they’d tried to think of a genuinely interesting story arc. Or maybe not. How much more of this shit can everyone take?