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How Wonderful! posted:Jeph Loeb-school plotting shenanigans aside, I want to pause on this-- nobody knew who or what Onslaught was and at this point the ultimate scope of the plot was still up in the air as well. quote:When he came to OUR universe, Editorial and I just didn't see it the same way. I wanted Nate to be a rebel without a cause, the most powerful mutant in the Marvel Universe -- who didn't have anything to live for. He would find out he was going to be dead at 21 and so, he would take risks no one else would take. So, the idea was that at Issue #21, he would die. We had these outrageous stories -- he was going to beat the living daylights out of Magneto, toss Juggernaut into outer space -- really go wild since he knew it wouldn't matter. quote:Marvel, already teetering on the brink of bankruptcy as 1995 ended and 1996 began, was in dire need of a dramatic shift in direction. Revenue dipped again in 1995, but the actual losses (as opposed to lower profits) were all from the trading card and other sectors, not publishing. If the Marvel Comics Publishing Group was a freestanding company, it would have been profitable throughout the collapse of the speculator bubble, though it probably still would have been a shambles creatively/administratively. Though again, if it weren't for higher-up executives/accountants pushing for wildly unrealistic returns from the comics division, they might not have ever been in the position they were for MARVELUTION. Flying Zamboni posted:I know that the legacy virus stuff didn't get resolved for several more years which to me seems like it should have been the focus of the next major story arc based on this issue, especially since it had already been around for three years at that point. quote:Since he came from another universe, he was the perfect solution to the Legacy Virus. That something in his gene code could save mutantkind, but he would have to sacrifice himself to save the world.
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May 23, 2021 05:58
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How Wonderful! posted:Yeah, I'll admit that I am not great at grasping the economic side of things in general and even worse at pulling them into anything like a cohesive narrative (eg the Heroes World deal has never quite made sense to me even as an ill-advised and rash gamble(I think I might have really abridged the timeline of things too, and obviously one could easily argue that I should have brought up Jerry Calabrese (who I sometimes see cited as John Calabrese?) here instead of putting it off until later, plus of course the first overtures to the Image guys had already been made by the time X-Men: Prime was on the stands). Even though it was denied (or evaded) in all of the initial public statements about the Heroes World acquisition, I really believe that Marvel Entertainment Group was looking at opening up their own "Marvel Stores" across the country, cutting out the middle man and running their own comic/toy/apparel/merch stores in malls. The Disney Store model launched in 1987 and had grown from 1 store to over 300 by 1994, and Perelman wasn't shy about comparing Marvel to Disney. The whole business model seemed to be controlling everything, which is why they were buying up the trading card company that made Marvel Trading Cards, the toy company making Marvel Toys, etc. So as a power play to both gain leverage over existing stores and to build infrastructure to launch their own stores, it 'made sense'. Those plans themselves were dumb and short sighted, and Marvel Stores never happened, though somehow Tekno Comix managed to open up a few of their own stores, including one in the Mall of America that outlived the comics line.
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May 23, 2021 16:06
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Open Marriage Night posted:Wasn’t there almost a Sack action figure as a pack in with another figure from a canceled X-Men wave in the late 90’s? I remember seeing a picture of him in Toyfare as an immobile lump of plastic.     Husk (and to a lesser extent Trapster) feel like logical outgrowths of lines, but for context the number of appearances the other characters had at the time of this publication: Hemingway: 5 (Generation X #5-6, Uncanny X-Men #325, Storm #3-4) Ever: 2 (UXM #325, 339) Sack: 5 (UXM #323-325, Storm #3-4) Controller 13: 2 (X-Men 2099 #3-4) Caretaker: 29 (he was a regular supporting character in the period where there were multiple Ghost Rider/Midnight Sons comics, though he disappeared when Howard Mackie left and wasn't seen after 1995 except to get brought back/murdered in Jason Aaron's 2000s run) Gauntlet: 18 (he was one of Apocalypse's DARK RIDERS and went by Barrage until Toy Biz pointed out that name was trademarked for toys, so they changed his name to Gauntlet during X-Cutioner's Song. They never made the toy but the name stuck, even though the character disappeared in the 1990s and did not resurface again until Cullen Bunn's 2016 Uncanny X-Men run, where he was quickly killed by Xorn. This sheds some light on the overall structure of the greater Marvel corporate machine in the mid 1990s, as they were at least considering churning out figures for literally any 'hot new character' they could find, despite not having anything resembling real story plans for the same characters in the comics. Sensational character finds like Commcast, Killspree, Krule, Senaka, Slayback, and Tusk all actually got figures produced, despite not being much besides a character model sheet.
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May 25, 2021 00:43
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