Comic book speculators are back in a big way. Enough for the topic to be recurring theme on the Comic Book Industry Insiders podcast, and the subject of an entire recent episode. But I think everyone’s talking about the wrong thing. It’s not that the speculators caused the comic book industry collapse in the 1990s. It as the way the industry reacted to the speculators.
In short: The industry took the dollars generated from speculators for granted, acting as though they were in inexhaustible source of future revenue, and built their business models around the assumption that not only would they be around forever, but that they were the only market worth catering to.
Note: Speculators are not the same as collectors. Speculators are people who buy a comic not to read it or because they see some intrinsic value in owning it, but because they think it will increase in value. In other words, they buy comics in order to sell them at a profit. Collectors may or may not plan to sell their collections at some point. The difference between speculators and investors is beyond the scope of this article.
The bust
To summarize what happened during the bust: After record breaking sales in the early 1990s, retailers bought more books than they could sell as comic book spending dried up. Comics distributor Capital City estimated the number of comic stores declined from 10,000 in 1993 to 4,500 by early 1996. As stores disappeared, so did revenue for publishers and distributors. Marvel declared bankruptcy in 1996, and many publishers exited the market by the end of 2000, including Awesome Comics, Broadway Comics, Caliber Press, Comico, Defiant Comics, Eclipse, London Night Studios, and Topps Comics. Capital City sold out to Diamond Distributors in 1996. Here’s a good retrospective from IGN on the bubble burst.
Some context: Comic book retailers typically pre-order comics on a non-returnable basis, so they’re stuck with anything they don’t sell. That’s changed some in recent years, but it was a pretty strict rule in the 1990s. Reports of record breaking comics were actually the number of books distributors sold to retailers, not the number that sold through to customers.
It would be easy to lay the blame at retailers feet: They over-estimated what customers would buy and went under because of it. But it’s not fair to lay the blame entirely on retailers.
DC helped inflate the speculative bubble with the massive hype behind the Death of Superman, only to launch the Return of Superman event less than a year later. Comic book historians like Jason Sacks and George Khoury now typically cite this as the inciting incident for the speculative bubble burst. Buyers who invested in the Death of Superman expecting a big pay day down the road felt betrayed and stopped buying comics, or at least spent less. Meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly obvious that far too many copies of books like X-Men # 1 and Superman # 75 existed for these to be considered rare collector’s items.
Chuck Rozanski, president of comics retailer Mile High Comics, suggests that this understanding is skewed. He places the blame on distributors Diamond and Capital City for making it too easy for under-capitalized sellers to create accounts and go into the comics retail business, thus propping up a bunch of sellers who would compete with more established sellers (and each other) in the same markets. In other words, there weren’t people going to comic book stores and buying multiple copies of hot titles. The real speculators were the new retailers who cropped up in the early 1990s (my recollection is that many of these were stores that started as sports card sellers). I think he’s partially right. The existence of speculators who were not also retailers and bought bagged and boarded comics with intention of getting rich (or at least harvesting a decent profit off of them) is well attested. But Rozanski could well be right that there were far fewer of these folks than typically acknowledged and that retailers were buying inventory for customers that mostly just didn’t exist. In support of Rozanski’s thesis: Barron’s magazine was sounding the alarm about sell-through problems at retailers all the way back in early 1992, before the Death of Superman event.
Then there was Image’s problems with shipping books late. These days the Return of Superman and Marvel moving to an exclusive distribution deal with its own company, Heroes World Distribution, receive the lion’s share of the blame for the collapse of the comic book market in the mid-to-late 1990s. But I don’t want to let Image off the hook entirely. Many of their books shipped late. Two issues of Spawn ended up shipping out of sequence, and the first issue of the Brigade ongoing series ended up shipping before the conclusion of the Brigade mini-series and ending up spoiling the ending of the mini. Most infamously, Deathmate Red from Rob Liefeld’s Extreme Studios shipped months late, after the Deathmate Epilogue book.
Expensive, late shipping books created cash-flow problems for retailers and made pre-order decisions more difficult. This might not seem like it has much to do with speculators, but I would speculate that some of the problems with late shipping stemmed from the Image creators taking it for granted that their work would sell no matter how late it was. But readers did begin shying away from late shipping books, perhaps less interested in issues that had already been spoiled, and/or noticing that taking more time didn’t seem to improve the quality of many of the books, many of which weren’t even drawn by the superstar Image founders.
Lessons learned
I think launching the Return of Superman storyline so shortly after hyping the Death of Superman, and the Image creators’ persistent tardiness are good examples of the industry taking speculator dollars for granted. That resulted in a bigger problem: Most publishers didn’t invest enough in growing the market for comic books. They didn’t invest the windfall profits from the boom into finding ways to get comics into young readers’ hands (thus creating the next generation fans), or publishing more titles that appealed to women (ie, half the population), or comic books that could be marketed to people with no familiarity with comics. Mostly they just doubled down on trying to extract more money from their existing customers. Marvel was particularly bad about this, while DC, to their credit, was much better about diversifying.
DC had comics based on Batman: The Animated Series for younger readers, and various imprints, most notably Vertigo, marketed towards non-traditional comics fans. Marvel largely exited the kids comic market, and turned the Epic imprint into a line of Image knock-offs. (To be clear: I’ve not seen any reason to believe that Vertigo was the beneficiary of Death of Superman money. As far as I can tell, it was created and succeeded on its own merits. But the industry was certainly a beneficiary of Vertigo’s success in bringing new fans and keeping existing fans [like myself] from aging out.)
A fun little example: Malibu ran some television commercials for its Ultraverse line. A decent enough idea to try to create awareness outside of the fan press… but watch the commercials and tell me if you think they would have done anything to actually bring new readers to comic book stores:
Retailers weren’t blameless here either: Comic shops were often notoriously unwelcoming and often unpleasant spaces that only true believers would be willing to frequent. That’s changed over the years, in part thanks to a growing number of woman-owned comic book stores. (Though great comic stores have been around for a long time: Shout-out to the Danger Room in Olympia.)
What’s different this time
One of the biggest differences this time around is that the industry, as a whole, has been investing more in bringing in new readers, from young readers (Dogman, Raina Telgemeier) to overlooked audiences (erotica for women, more memoirs), to everything in between (tabletop role playing tie-ins, manga). The fundamentals of the comic book market are more sound.
The industry is also more diversified in terms of channels. The decline of newsstand sales left publishers highly dependent on comic book stores, and as those collapsed, so too did the publishers. Now publishers also have regular book stores (the book trade in industry speak), digital comic platforms like GlobalComix, and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. That’s not always good news for comic book stores as they have more competition, but crowdfunding in particular has actually proven addititive. Ie, these other channels can help grow the market and actually bring new people into comic book stores, as opposed to only siphoning customers away.
Warning signs
Overall, I’m optimistic that even if speculators pulled out of the comic book market entirely today, it would be only a minor blip for the industry requiring a few adjustments but it wouldn’t take down many businesses. Heck, look at how well the industry has weathered the end of Diamond. It’s been extremely rough for some publishers (certainly more than a blip), and having more distributors to order from created more work and stress for retailers. But a year later the industry is stronger than ever.
That said, there are things that make me twitchy. The surge in comic book speculation corresponds to a surge in speculation and gambling more broadly. The overall economy is precarious and we’re yet to see the full effects of the the new Gulf War or even Trump’s tariffs. Disposable income for comics could start drying up soon, and that could well lead to more comics companies trying to extract more money out of increasingly desperate speculators, to the detriment of everyone.
But it’s not the speculators who could bring the industry crashing down. It was the exploitation of speculators that led to the previous industry collapse. The industry needs to resist the temptation to make the same mistakes.