Marvel Strikes Again

I've been a comics fan and collector for most of my life. I've always preferred Marvel to DC. Even when DC is actually cranking out better books - a not uncommon occurrence - the Marvel Universe simply feels more like home to me, like an old, comfy chair that's permanently settled into the shape of my butt. Probably this is due to the fact that I started reading comics waaaay back in the late 1970s; then, and for a while after, the House of Ideas still radiated with a hip, modern sensibility left over from the glory days of the previous decade. (DC, conversely, was still stuck in the pre-Crisis rut, tangled up in a convoluted mythology that had been carelessly improvised over the course of 40 years with no particular concern for consistency or even sense. While there were certainly some interesting comics being published by DC back then, the whole enterprise felt very square and staid: there was no reason that even their best stuff (the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans, Keith Giffen's Legion of Superheroes) couldn't have been published in the 1950s.)

No matter how great their comics are, however, I never fail to be amazed by the Marvel's business acumen, which can charitably be described as astoundingly stupid. I strongly suggest picking up the latest issue of The Comics Journal, which has a pair of fantastic articles detailing how the company's perpetual muddle-headedness inadvertantly created and nearly destroyed the direct market. This is just the tip of the iceberg - seemingly every mention of Marvel in the business press that I've seen is a breathless report on some new and innovative way they've come up with to waste money or squander goodwill. Despite their considerable success over the years, Marvel remains a lovable loser; it is oddly comforting, as a fan, to know that any measure of success they stumble upon will soon curdle into some manner of near-catastrophic embarrassment.

The latest example of this comes from Virginia Postrel, who's latest piece in The Atlantic is an examination of superhero movies. The mag's art director thought, reasonably enough, that some bit of comic art would make a good illustration. Since the latest X-Men movies is still fresh in everyone's mind, they decided to go with a recent example of that series's cover art. Sounds perfect, right? The Atlantic gets a nifty graphic, Marvel gets to advertise for free - everyone wins, right?

"But Marvel dragged out the permission process until the day before the issue was supposed to go to the printer. As a condition of permission, the company's lawyer then insisted that the article treat the word superhero as a Marvel/DC trademark, spelling it Super Hero. Fortunately for me, The Atlantic declined and went with Superman.

"As is so often the case, aggressive IP lawyers trumped smart business strategy--good fodder for a future Forbes column. Marvel is supposed to be promoting second-line characters, including Storm, and The Atlantic is clearly not trying to publish a superhero comic in competition with the trademark holders."

Keep up the good work, boys!