The Weekly Standard on The Comic Crash of 1993
Jonathan V. Last at The Weekly Standard has written a surprisingly lucid piece of history on the so-called speculator boom, and subsequent spectacular crash, in the comics market from the late 1980s through 1997:
By the time the bubble’s soapy residue washed away, nine out of ten comic book shops in America had closed their doors. Publisher sales of new comics dropped by 70 percent. On December 27, 1996, Marvel, the General Motors of comics, filed for bankruptcy. The market for used comics was flooded with the cadaverous inventories of out-of-business stores… the contours of the industry have changed almost beyond recognition. In 1950, Marvel and DC together sold roughly 13 million comic books a month. In 1968, they put out 16 million a month. Since 1993 the overall sales trend has been inexorably downward. For January 2010, all American publishers combined sold a total of 5.63 million comics.
In the shadow of the crash, Last draws the same conclusion others have about the true value of modern comic franchises like Spider-Man and Batman:
This might sound like an industry marching toward oblivion, yet in 2009, Disney paid $4 billion to acquire Marvel (DC was already owned by Time-Warner). The reason for this gaudy valuation is that the comic books themselves are no longer important to the comic-book industry. They’re loss leaders. The real money is in the comic-book properties, which power toy and merchandise sales, theme parks, and above all else movie franchises. Since 1997, 26 comic book adaptations have gone on to gross more than $100 million at the box office. Twelve of these grossed more than $200 million. More — many more — are coming soon to a theater near you.
As a financial concern, comic book publishers are no longer in the publishing business: They’re curators of, and incubators for, extremely valuable intellectual property.
In the midst of it all, Last draws parallels to the comics crash to help explain the collapse of the U.S. housing market. Never seen that done before. Check out the complete article here.
The bit about how two new distribution companies allowed anyone with $300 to set themselves up as retailers is fascinating. I know a woman who tells the story of how her comic book addiction drove her to do as many addicts do: start dealing to support her own habit. She ran a comic book retail business out of her Princeton dorm room, and was the campus’s main supplier.
Frikkin fascinating.
Hi Sarah,
Quite a story. When I lived in Ottawa in the late 80s, comic shops were popping up everywhere. The one thing they had in common: they were all owned by young entrepreneurs. I often wonder what happened to all those hopeful young businessmen half a decade later, when the market collapsed.
Hi C.S.E. – I told you doing business deals was as fascinating as storytelling. :_)
Ahh…
The great Comic Book Bubble, it nearly wiped out a couple of my friends. They had trunks, if not rooms, full of the things they collected…all individually bagged and tagged. They would buy and trade them all the time…and brag about how much their “insert name of comic here” had doubled or tripled (or whatever) in value in the time they had owned it.
After hearing about the bottom dropping out of the market, it made me glad I went with guns instead of comics.
Luckily my friends had kept their normal jobs and had never opened the shop they talked about, or they would have really been in a pickle.
TW
Hi TW,
I think everyone who collected comics in the 80s was guilty of a little bit of that. I had a friend who purchased the six-issue Ronin series by Frank Miller in 1984, bagged it, and then stopped comics, saying that those issues alone were going to pay for his children’s education.
All in all, I think it was a relatively inexpensive economics lesson for the vast majority of us. I’ve been through several bubbles since — the Internet stock bubble in the late 90s, when my stock options in an internet start-up grew to a ridiculous valuation, and the housing bubble of last decade, when the same happened to my house. In both cases, the comic bubble helped me see what a lot of my friends couldn’t – that these fast-rising valuations were almost certainly temporary.