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I started looking up sales figures and was kind of shocked that even for a moment Marz/Kyle Green Lantern was DC's de facto #2 book. I just started looking at Februarys since it is February: FEBRUARY 1992 (Green Lantern #23: 56th overall) 1. Batman Gotham Knights 2. Justice League Spectacular 3. Legends of the Dark Knight 4. Armageddon: Inferno 5. Justice League of America 6. Detective Comics 7. Deathstroke the Terminator 8. Sandman 9. Green Lantern 10. Superman: Man of Steel Like RS said, not near cancellation, slotted pretty near the top of the non-JL/Batman ranking. FEBRUARY 1993 (Green Lantern 35 - Not in Top 100) 1. Hardware 2. Blood Syndicate 3. Legionnaires 4. Death: The High Cost of Living 5. Supergirl/Team Luthor Special 6. Sandman Mystery Theatre 7. Sandman 8. Legends of the Dark Knight 9. Superman Gallery 10. Batman "Dropping out of the Top 100" looks bad here, but this was the height of the speculation #1/gimmick cover/etc. boom. DC was a little late to the party, and their top two selling books (licensed polybagged Milestone #1s) only rated #24 and #25 overall. The only DC books in the top 50 were Legionnaires #1 and the sole Super* book solicited in the post-Doomsday hiatus. FEBRUARY 1994 (Green Lantern #51 - 1st full Kyle Rayner issue: 37th overall) 1. Superman 2. Adventures of Superman 3. Superman: Man of Steel 4. Action Comics 5. Batman 6. Detective Comics 7. Batman: Shadow of the Bat 8. Superboy 9. Supergirl 10. Legends of the Dark Knight 11. Steel 12. Green Lantern Green Lantern definitely got a Emerald Twilight/New Guy sales bump, but Batman and Superman were still riding high off of their own death/rebirth arcs, and were huge moneymakers for DC. FEBRUARY 1995 (Green Lantern #61 - 45th overall) 1. Batman 2. Superman 3. Adventures of Superman 4. Action Comics 5. Detective Comics 6. Azrael 7. Shadow of the Bat 8. Legends of the Dark Knight 9. Flash 10. Robin 11. Sandman 12. Catwoman 13. Green Lantern A year into Kyle, still a solid book but overshadowed by a plethora of Batman/Superman books. FEBRUARY 1996 (Green Lantern #73 30th overall (not including Marvel titles) 1. Death: The Time of Your Life 2. Batman 3. Superman 4. Detective Comics 5. Action Comics 6. Shadow of the Bat 7. Robin 8. Catwoman 9. Azrael 10. Batman Chronicles 11. Wonder Woman 12. Green Lantern Not a lot of change entering into year three of Marz/Kyle, though both of these lists made me realize just how widely accepted Sandman was in the direct market by the end of its run. FEBRUARY 1997 (Green Lantern #85: 50th overall) 1. JLA 2. Batman 3. Detective Comics 4. Superman 5. Supergirl 6. Action Comics 7. Adventures of Superman 8. Superman: Man of Steel 9. Batman: Long Halloween 10. Batman/Wildcat 11. Legends of the Dark Knight 12. Preacher 13. Unknown Soldier 14. Green Lantern This was the first of these lists that includes the revamped "Big Seven" JLA title. It's obviously the big book, but even so Green Lantern lags behind anything involving Batman, Superman, or Garth Ennis. FEBRUARY 1998 (Green Lantern #97: 45th overall) 1. JLA 2. JLA Year One 3. Superman 4. Batman 5. Superman: Man of Steel 6. Action Comics 7. Adventures of Superman 8. Detective Comics 9. Nightwing 10. Shadow of the Bat 11. Preacher 12. Catwoman 13. Green Lantern See 1997. FEBRUARY 1999 (Green Lantern #111: 30th overall) 1. Battle Chasers 2. Danger Girl 3. JLA 4. Crimson 5. Green Lantern 6. Titans 7. Batman 8. Detective Comics 9. Nightwing 10. Action Comics I'll be a monkey's uncle! Green Lantern was essentially DC's second-best selling title (exclusing mega-delayed creator owned Cliffhanger books they inherited from Wildstorm) in 1999. FEBRUARY 2000 (Green Lantern #123, Ron Marz's third to last issue: 36th overall 1. JLA 2. Batgirl 3. Batman: Dark Victory 4. Batman 5. Steampunk 6. Detective Comics 7. JSA 8. Batman Gotham Knights 9. Nightwing 10. Legends of the Dark Knight 11. Green Lantern By the end of Marz's run the Batbooks had overtaken again, but even in 2000 it was still a solid selling books. I wrongly assumed that the peak of the book's popularity would have been the first couple of years of novelty, or maybe a few years in when Final Night and all of the hoopla about Kyle being THE LAST SINGLE REAL GREEN LANTERN FOR REAL, but it turns out it really did end up winning the DC War of Attrition in the dying days of the 1990s, the only time in my literate life that I was paying less attention to DC Comics than now. I'm sorry I doubted you.
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Feb 11, 2014 04:46
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I actively dislike 99% of the Gail Simone comics I've read, and I still think she raised valid points with the WiF stuff.
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Feb 15, 2014 21:45
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I thought both his F4 and FF were pretty bad, but FF had the benefit of better art and a lot of whimsy/some occasionally charming sequences. His F4 seemed like it was a high concept he got bored with in like two and a half issues. Also not really caring about past characterization is more glaring when it's really well established famous characters versus the Future Foundation crew. You know a F4 run isn't living up to expectations (see Millar/Hitch) when the last couple of issues might as well be credited to Manny Hands.
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Feb 23, 2014 16:48
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In a nutshell: 1) Todd McFarlane and the future Image crew develop fan followings as 'hot' artists even if (because?) they were style over substance. 2) A proto-Internet debate burns up Comic Buyers Guide, Compuserve, Usenet, convention panels after "Name Withheld" (Erik Larsen) writes a letter bemoaning how artists are shafted and disrespected in favor of writers, even though artists are way more important and basically run the show. 3) Perhaps coincidentally, Marvel starts deciding to privilege artists over writers, giving McFarlane (then Larsen) a solo Spider-Man book after neither man got along with David Michelinie, letting Liefeld take over New Mutants/X-Force after not working well with Louise Simonson, and apparently siding with Jim Lee over Chris Claremont for the last two years or so of X-Men stories before Claremont quit and Lee took over writing officially. 4) So now Marvel has a system that privileges artists over writers, and within a year of that their top artists quit anyway and spin off into Image Comics. Marvel's response to this is to privilege marketing ('events' + gimmick covers) over any creators, period. So this is where you had the "1990s" as people recognize it, with constant crossovers, holofoil covers, COLLECTOR'S ITEM CLASSIC FIRST ISSUES, all that jazz. To further put blame on Image/McFarlane though... 5) As wacky and unsustainable as this model is, Image further strains the market by having terrible scheduling issues, contributing to the die-off to the ecology of comic shops that was already untenable outside of the speculator's bubble. Image had numerous books selling at half a million to a million copies, and they'd put off publishing them until the last possible second before they'd become returnable, even if that means the issue shipped only has 12-14 pages of the solicited story/creative team and then the back of the book is filled with second-rate back-ups or pin-ups. Some of the most blatantly mishandled titles (Deathmate, Darker Image) weren't directly handled by McFarlane, but his flagship title Spawn pulled a classic shifty after getting like six issues behind where they shipped Spawn #21 right before it became returnable, but before Spawn 19-20 came out (since those would have already been returnable because they were so late). Spawn #21 appeared to be exactly what was planned for Spawn #19, but admitting that they'd changed the contents of the book might make it returnable, so they insisted that this was what Spawn #21 was supposed to be all along. They later resolicited Spawn 19-20 as a SPECIAL SUPER SECRET STORY WE JUST HAD TO REARRANGE THINGS FOR. As it turned out, it was a story written by Spawn's letterer and drawn as a try-out by Greg Capullo, where Spawn meets Houdini or something, and it came out like eight months later. 6) The other thing McFarlane and co. did to shape the comics industry around this time was to expand and contract Image quickly and capriciously. After about a year of existing they started offering what is now the classic Image clearinghouse/packaging model to other creators. This drew in people like Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, Mike Grell, Jerry Ordway, Keith Giffen, Steve Gerber, etc. Then after less than a year of doing these "Wave Two" books Image decided they were overextended snd abruptly cancelled all of them, saying they had more important things to worry about like getting THEIR books out on time. Which I suppose is accurate, but it threw a lot of people into chaos and further delayed Image (which has tried repeatedly, only seeming to *really* succeed in the past 3-5 years) to develop into what they claimed to be all along. Anyway yeah and then at some point he wandered off to focus on dolls and balls.
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Apr 27, 2014 16:07
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It wasn't *just* Deathmate's fault. Spawn was consistently a top five comic in that period, and its shipping was pretty irregular. code:
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Apr 27, 2014 16:54
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rkajdi posted:I'm also confused about calling his run as EiC good, since the early 70s was a pretty bad time for Marvel overall. They drat near went under, with the only thing saving them being the Star Wars license in the late 70s. Marvel (and the post-newsstand mass market, pre-direct market comics industry in general) didn't have its really bad years until Thomas jumped over to DC and Marvel went through Wein/Wolfman/Conway/Goodwin before getting to Shooter in like 4 1/2 years so I'm not sure why you're pinning that on Thomas. Especially because at the nadir of Marvel's fortunes, Roy Thomas was responsible for two of the only things working for them (he pushed for both the Conan and Star Wars licenses, and wrote Conan forever when it was a top selling book). Not that this makes any of his worst 1980s work any less awful, though I was surprised to look back and see that one of the most Roy Thomas-est stories I ever saw (the West Coast Avengers bit about Hank Pym's FIRST wife and a bunch of no-hoper cold war villains not seen since the early 1960s like The Voice and El Toro) was actually a Steve Englehart joint. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 01:26
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Endless Mike posted:There's also Comic Wars: Marvel's Battle for Survival by Dan Raviv, though as I understand, it's a bit embellished. If you want a book with a lot of weird projection and discussion of what plucky Ike Perlmutter whistled to himself as he went up the elevator on a brisk March afternoon to see Avi Arad watching Seinfeld and thinking back to his time in the 1950s at a little cabin as he says to himself "Ike, you need to remember what your momma told you" even though he didn't even interview anyone so he's basically making up cheesy backstory out of whole cloth, this book is for you. It's hilarious in retrospect how he does his best to portray Perlmutter as a "plucky David" just trying to make ends meet in the face of BIG CORPORATE FATCATS, and it's a struggle to make Perlmutter seem sympathetic. Even one of the cute "plucky common man Ike" stories involves him making money when he first moved to New York by pretending to be an Orthodox Rabbi and loitering outside cemeteries waiting to get hired to do mourner's kaddishes. Also it has tons of basic factual errors too, like how Ron Perelman decided to buy Marvel in 1989 based on how successful gimmick covers and 1991's X-Men #1 and 1992's Atlantis Attacks (the first real crossover event) were. Or how Marvel faced tough competition from their longtime rival, Todd McFarlane's Image Comics.
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May 6, 2014 00:41
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