"In the last decade or so, the tendency at Marvel has been intensely conservative; comics like the X-MEN have gone from freewheeling, overdriven pop to cautious, dodgy retro. What was dynamic becomes static - dead characters always return, nothing that happens really matters ultimately. The stage is never cleared for new creations to develop and grow. The comic has turned inwards and gone septic like a toenail. The only people reading are fanboys who don't count. The X-MEN, for all it was Marvel's bestseller, had become a watchword for undiluted geekery before the movie gave us another electroshock jolt. And in the last decade, sales fell from millions to hundreds of thousands."

- Grant Morrison,
from "Morrison Manifesto,"
reprinted in New X-Men Vol. 1
(Marvel Comics, 2001)

The close of the 20th century found Marvel Comics -- and by extension, the retail network of comics shops known collectively as the Direct Market -- deep in the doldrums. It was a disastrous decade. The early 1990s had been a time of robust growth, with a number of competing distributors selling to what The Comics Journal once estimated to be a 1993 peak of 9300 retailer accounts across the United States. The increased public awareness of graphic novels, brought about in the late 1980s by talented creators working at the top of their game and press coverage of works as diverse as Maus and Watchmen, made the immediate future look bright. Then came the storm clouds.

Several factors worked in combination to bring the anticipated funnybook utopia to a crashing halt. The rise of Image Comics and the collector's mentality created a speculator's bubble, wherein frenzied sales of first issues with multiple covers led an increasing number of consumers to believe that the comics they were buying, bagging and storing away would increase exponentially in value. Comics became seen as investments rather than as entertainment, and suckers eager to cash in were buying up print runs that ran to the hundreds of thousands of copies in the insane belief that they would somehow become rare, and therefor valuable. Writing in the May 1993 issue of Capital City Distribution's monthly retailers' newsletter Internal Correspondence, Milton Griepp tried to warn store-owners of what lay ahead: "Those stores that stress the enjoyment of comics and use the new interest in the medium to build their reader base will be the most successful. Encouraging speculation, bulk purchases, and touting investment value will inevitably lead to long-term trouble for those retailers that use those practices." The warning largely fell on deaf ears, however, and as the market came to be flooded with so-called "collectible" comics, buyers eventually began to get wise to the fly-by-night nature of the whole pyramid scheme, and stopped buying.

Over at Marvel Comics, meanwhile, owner Ron Perelman had decided that distributors had been taking too big a slice of the pie for long enough. In 1994 Marvel purchased Heroes World Distribution and announced that henceforth all Marvel products would be available exclusively through the company's in-house distribution arm. The other distributors, fearful of the loss of marketshare and desperate to remain competitive with Heroes World's captive audience of retailers, quickly found themselves in a bidding war to sign exclusivity deals with other major publishers. Three years later, it had all ended in tears, with Marvel in bankruptcy court and Diamond Comic Distributors remaining as the sole surviving Direct Market distributor. By the time the collectability bubble had burst and the struggle among distributors had ended, a little less than half the Direct Market was still standing, with roughly 4,500 retail accounts still in operation nationwide.

For Marvel, the clouds finally began to part in 1996 when Toy Biz purchased the company and the business partners Isaac Perlmutter and Avi Arad replaced Perelman. Faced with what had to look like an irredeemable mess, Marvel's new owners turned to Hollywood adaptations and product licensing to generate the necessary revenues needed to pull the company from the deep economic pit in which they found it.

On the publishing side, things lagged for a while. Towards the end of the '90s, then Editor in Chief Bob Harras' sole significant innovation was to license Joe Quesada's Event Comics to create a line for Marvel, dubbed "Marvel Knights," which emphasized more sophisticated storytelling than that found in the company's main line. To do this, Quesada hired the best writers and artists he could find -- the roster of writers Quesada brought to his comics alone included Kevin Smith, Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar -- upending Marvel's standard operating philosophy ("The character is more important than the creator.") in the process. Marvel Knights quickly developed a reputation for excellence, but was always kept at arm's distance from the rest of the Marvel line.

The turnaround finally began in February of 2000, when the company hired Bill Jemas to the position of President of Publishing & New Media. The official press release announcing the move quoted Marvel CEO Peter Cuneo as stating, "During the course of his professional career, Bill has repeatedly proven himself to be an innovative executive who has brought success to every venture with which he has been associated. His proven track record in building brands, combined with his knowledge of Marvel, will be instrumental in helping the company continue its leadership position in the comic book industry and expand its reach through the Internet." In August, Jemas fired Harras and installed Event Comics' Quesada as the new Editor in Chief. During the next three tumultuous years, Jemas and Quesada attempted to deliver on the mandate handed to them by Cuneo.

"To make the X-MEN feel fresh once more, we need to take a closer, harsher look at what's not working in this book and the comics field in general. The recent X-MEN stuff has been written in an old-fashioned, overdense style for one, and we need to update, streamline and demystify the storytelling techniques considerably to appeal to modern sensibilities."

- Grant Morrison,
from "Morrison Manifesto"

Jemas and Quesada wasted no time in transforming Marvel's publishing philosophy from a conservative, formulaic reliance on established superhero tropes to a more adventurous, whatever-sticks-to-the-walls approach, but from the beginning their experiments were conducted in the shadow of ironclad market reality. Both men made clear in interviews that they clearly understood that growth in Marvel's publishing division meant walking a fine line between two seemingly incompatible constituencies -- on the one hand, the company needed to maintain its existing base of lifelong superhero fans, while on the other, it also needed to experiment with new genres and storytelling techniques, in order to appeal to potential readers who might not be interested in what the existing fanbase craved. To his credit, Jemas' solution to this dilemma was to focus like a laser upon storytelling as a means of attracting new readers. Asked in 2003 by readers of the online webzine X-Fan why sales had gone down so drastically in the previous decade, Jemas started out with the same answer he'd always given to the question: because the comics sucked. "My explanation is attached to an actionable and practical solution," Jemas continued. "Start to write the kinds of stories that those millions of people used to like to read. When we get our mojo working, people will beat a path to our door."

Jemas had very definite ideas about what made for a good story. He wanted to see some of the comics' reliance on sweeping cosmic epics reined in, preferring to emphasize characterization and human conflict over Kirby-esque spectacle, and was adamant that the Marvel's longstanding practice of killing and resurrecting characters be brought to an end -- once killed, characters would henceforth stay dead, an edict that rankled longterm fans once they realized that Colossus wasn't going to be returning after all. Complicating matters, the major theater of operations for Marvel's attempt at a creative rennaissance remained the Direct Market, where superhero fans held sway, meaning that initiatives had to either appeal on some level to the existing fanbase or be released with the implicit understanding by management that initial low sales would simply have to be endured for the sake of developing a title that could sell beyond the confines of the true believers. Every effort was made to ensure that longtime readers were stroked, of course, the most notorious example being the "Bad Girls For Fanboys" initiative, which Jemas defended to the female-centric webzine Sequential Tart by stating, "We have quite a few male readers who live in the basement of their parents' house in Queens. For them, an evening with Elektra is as good as it gets."

To bring new readers to the Marvel's traditional superhero comics, the Marvel Knights imprint continued to receive support and promotion, as did attempts to find new superhero fans, such as the short-lived magazine Heroes, which repackaged tales from the company's comics line for casual newsstand readers. The most economically successful such initiative was undoubtedly the company's "Ultimate" line, which attempted to make Marvel's vast stock of characters more accessible by eliminating their 30-plus years of continuity and starting fresh from the beginning, with stories meant to appeal to a new generation of readers. The line's flagship title, The Ultimates (a rebooted version of The Avengers), quickly settled in as one of Marvel's top-selling titles, propelled by its creative team, writer Mark Millar and artist Bryan Hitch -- it also became the first title to abandon the mandate for accessibility by including mature-readers content, such as an infamous scene in which The Wasp halted a rampaging Hulk in his tracks by baring her breasts at him.

Meanwhile, Marvel also attempted to expand the notion of what a Marvel comic could contain. with such miniseries as The Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather, in which an old Western gunfighter series was reimagined as a thinly-veiled homosexual send-up, and Truth: Red, White and Black, which posited that the super-soldier formula responsible for the creation of Captain America had first been tested upon African-American soldiers in secret, Tuskegee-style experiments. To bring attention to such books, Marvel tried aggressive promotings to the national media, such as Quesada's public appearance on ABC's Good Morning America to discuss the company's post-9/11 firefighter comic, The Call of Duty: The Brotherhood.

Quesada was also instrumental in expanding the company's creative pool to include some of the most talented writers and artists the company could lay its hands on: in the next three years, the company would publish work by Brian Michael Bendis, Garth Ennis, Neil Gaiman, Kevin Smith, Paul Pope, Michael Allred, David Mack, James Sturm, Scott Morse, Kyle Baker, Peter Bagge, R. Sikoryak -- the company even reprinted a color version of James Kochalka's infamous "Hulk vs. the rain" story from Coober Skeeber. For the first time in almost twenty years, one genuinely didn't know quite what to expect when picking up a new Marvel comic. Fans began to refer to the company as "NuMarvel," and it was as apt a label as you were likely to find. To be sure, the fanboy traditionalists grumbled about the way cherished, old-school tropes were being trimmed back, but as anyone watching the comics industry could've told you, these complaints were unavoidable if Marvel was to successfully retool its products to appeal to the world outside the Direct Market's protective fanboy cocoon.

"The movie wisely went sci-fi instead of trying to appease the super-hero crowd and I think we must do the same. The X-MEN is not a story about super heroes but a story about the ongoing evolutionary struggle between good/new and old/bad. The X-MEN are every rebel teenager wanting to change the world and make it better. Humanity is every adult, clinging to the past, trying to destroy the future even as he places all his hopes there. The super-hero aspect should be seen as only a small element in the vast potential of this franchise."

- Grant Morrison,
from "Morrison Manifesto"

The most pointed manifestation of this willingness to experiment can be found in Marvel's retooling of its X-Men franchise, and most especially in the decision to give the flagship X-title to cult-favorite comics author Grant Morrison. The X-Men had long been the crown jewel in Marvel's publishing portfolio. While other titles' sales figures rose and fell based upon the appeal of their content and the cachet of their creators from book to book, the X-Men's adventures in various books were almost always guaranteed to sell well, although over the years Marvel had managed to abuse even this phenomenon to the point of diminishing returns (Kitty Pryde, Agent of SHIELD, anyone?). Because of its cash-cow status, the X-Men franchise had become one of the most conservative family of titles on the shelves, governed by a slavish devotion to the formula first established by Chris Claremont over twenty years ago.

While longtime readers of this magazine have heard Morrison's name on any number of occasions, it's worth noting that the renowned writer was anything but a surefire guarantor of increased sales prior to his run on New X-Men. Morrison's career as a comics writer began in the late 1970s, writing for U.K. publishing houses such as DC Thompson, Fleetway and Marvel UK. His work first appeared on American shores in DC Comics' Vertigo imprint, and titles like Animal Man and Doom Patrol made Morrison a writer to watch among more sophisticated readers -- his seemingly boundless imagination and playful sense of experimentation were unique even among the British wave of writers who made up Vertigo's core stable, and though he was perfectly capable of sliding into an almost unbearable pretentiousness at times (see Arkham Asylum and The Mystery Play for examples), Morrison's good qualities as a writer were all the justification necessary for overlooking such missteps, to those in search of a creative, well-written comic book. For all that, he was mainly regarded as a cult writer, and with few exceptions his reputation among readers had seldom translated into higher sales. Indeed, it was only after he became the point-man on Marvel's X-Men revamp that DC bothered to bring his fondly-remembered Vertigo works fully into print in softcover. In hindsight, the move looks more calculated, but assigning Grant Morrison to craft what would turn out to be the heart and soul of a revamp of Marvel's most cherished cultural institution was a considerable gamble on the company's part.

Morrison's New X-Men read like an evolutionary quantum leap for the series, which is an especially neat trick when you consider how true he stayed to the spirit of the classic Claremont/Byrne run. De-emphasizing the accumulated superhero clichés congealed around the series, Morrison emphasised the more sci-fi elements of the series, even going so far as to abandon the gaudy costumes in favor of more utilitarian uniforms that wouldn't have looked out of place on a city street. (As he put it in his manifesto for the series, "Why does Wolverine wear a helmet in the same shape as his hair anyway? It just looks fucking stupid now.") He built a credible mutant subculture from the ground up, complete with its own vocabulary, customs, websites and even inner-city ghettos -- superhero names become "mutant names," mutant fashion designers create the finest in clothing for people with extra limbs, bands like Juggernaut and Sentinel Bait perform to crowds of genetically-altered party kids in the clubs of New York's Mutant Town district, and "Magneto Was Right" T-shirts dot the landscape as fashion statements for rebellious mutant youth. Morrison outed the X-Men as the staff of Xavier's Institute for Gifted Youngsters, transforming them from mere superheroes to explicit spokespeople for a burgeoning civil-rights movement, and turning the school into an actual, 200-plus-student school.

It was like Claremont's Uncanny X-Men, but without all the stupid bits. The writing was crisp, intelligent and grabbed your attention from the first page. Morrison banned both thought balloons and captions from the series, letting the pictures and dialogue carry the action and giving the book a polished, almost cinematic feel. Even the New X-Men logo on the cover, a visual palindrome which looked the same when turned upside-down, announced both Morrison's intentions for the series and his creative potential with a flair and confidence one would never have previously expected from Marvel Comics. All the basic building bricks from the series of old were still present -- the danger room, the Shiar Empire, Sentinels, and the like -- but the accumulated deadwood of 30 years of superheroics had been replaced with a new emphasis on sci-fi soap opera that felt right for escapist reading in the 21st century.

To be sure, some of Morrison's changes to the comics series were doubtlessly in keeping with management's expressed desire to appeal to fans of director Bryan Singer's newly-minted movie franchise, which had shown unexpected success at the box office. Singer had likewise downplayed the superhero tropes and played up the Xavier Institute as an actual school. Still, it's telling that Marvel's other X-flavored initiative -- Ultimate X-Men -- maintained the smaller "student body" of the Lee-built, Claremont-extrapolated original series, eschewing only the uniforms in its bid to appeal to movie fans.

You could see similar initiatives taking place throughout Marvel's publishing line-up. Crime comics writer Brian Michael Bendis and film director Kevin Smith were turned loose on Daredevil, which had been spinning its wheels for years. Elsewhere, Peter Milligan and Michael Allred were using superheroes to spoof publicity and stardom in X-Force, Christopher Priest was exploring the politics of an African kingdom in Black Panther, Dan Jurgens was taking the "superhero as god" concept to its logical conclusion in Thor, Garth Ennis took both his love of fictionalized violence and his hatred of superheroes out on the Marvel universe in Punisher, and television writer J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5) was hired to breathe new life into The Amazing Spider-Man. Even X-Men fans who prefered the old stories had an oasis of stability in Chris Claremont's X-Treme X-Men, which stubbornly avoided the new agenda in favor of the same kinds of stories Claremont had, for better and for worse, been telling since Uncanny X-Men #94. To the extent that anyone could plan out a marketing strategy that might bring Marvel Comics' core titles back into the public consciousness while still maintaining the company's existing fanbase, Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada's plan of action seemed as airtight as possible under the circumstances. NuMarvel was primed and ready to bring a new generation of readers into the comics shops by reaching into the greater public bazaar, and a simultaneous push for new readers in the bookstore market was about to begin. For a while, you couldn't escape the newspaper headlines celebrating the two men for dragging the company back from the brink of disaster and returning it to its former pristine glory.

It's 2004, now, and the picture is startlingly different. Bill Jemas is gone, as are both Grant Morrison and the innovations he brought to Marvel's flagship series. Far from continuing its initiatives to lure in new readers, Marvel has abandoned previous experiments in favor of a slavish devotion to fanboy nostalgia -- and a disturbing return to the very marketing strategies that almost destroyed the comics shops back in the mid-1990s. So what the hell went wrong? Next issue, we'll look to the difficulties Marvel faced in the bookstore market, how the bottom line prevented it from fully taking advantage of its many opportunities, and why the Direct Market is starting to looks like it's retreating into the last decade, rather than preparing for the next one. Fair warning: It's all downhill from here.

(Click here to read part two of this essay.)

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