DC’s Big, Bold Gamble

“I remember hearing that DC was going to focus most of their sales on the direct market. And once I heard that, I turned to [editor] Mark Gruenwald and said, ‘We won’t have to worry about them anymore.’ I thought it would be the end of DC comics.”

—Former Marvel editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco

By the early 1980s it became clear that Marvel was beating DC at its own game. DC had introduced the American superhero, but in decades since, Marvel had done it better and rocketed ahead. To stay relevant, DC needed a new way forward.

It would start with the creation of a momentous miniseries, one that would impose sweeping changes on the previously staid DC universe and ultimately become one of the most important publications in the company’s history.

Continuity had always been a bugaboo at DC. Unlike at Marvel, whose universe was mostly created in a few years by a small handful of people, DC’s world had been haphazardly assembled piecemeal over the decades without an overriding plan or a single guiding voice. As a result, its in-story history was rife with inconsistencies. Marvel’s Jim Shooter once joked that it was like “a Swedish movie with no subtitles.” In a single month in 1974, for example, the Atom declares in an issue of Action Comics that he’s unable to shrink inanimate objects; over in an issue of The Brave and the Bold, however, he’s shown minimizing a camera.

To most of us that mistake would be no big deal. We’re well aware that a story about a man who can shrink to the size of a dust mite isn’t exactly a documentary. But to the hardcore fans this lack of cohesive continuity was a major annoyance. As DC began catering more to the direct market, these hardcore readers who made up the bulk of it became far more important. Those inconsistencies, which once were simply confusing, now threatened to harm DC in the marketplace.

“Don’t put conflicting books on the stand at the same time so the kid can … decide, ‘I’m going to read Marvel where things make sense,’” DC writer Marty Pasko said in 1977. “And then DC loses its audience.”

This lack of cohesion also gnawed at writer-editor Marv Wolfman, the man behind the hit New Teen Titans who’d come over to DC from Marvel in 1980. His worries grew more pronounced when, in 1981 while editing Green Lantern, he received a letter from a reader complaining about a particular story hole from a recent issue. An obscure sci-fi hero had failed to recognize Green Lantern even though they had been shown meeting in an issue three years earlier.

The letter got Wolfman thinking about how to clean up the DC universe. During a train journey he began plotting a far-reaching series he called The History of the DC Universe that was intended to take DC’s jumbled continuity and create a single, clean timeline in its place. He pitched it to DC the following Monday and was given the green light. The series was mentioned at a 1981 comic convention and then briefly noted in a December 1981 issue of the Comics Journal.

Wolfman’s twelve-part maxi-series “will propose to tie together the entire history of the DC Comics world,” the blurb read.

To sort out everything that had come before, DC in 1982 hired a—very lucky or unlucky, depending on your viewpoint—researcher to sit in the company’s extensive library and read through Every. Single. Comic. DC. Had. Ever. Published.

He worked for two years, compiling careful notes on character histories, travels, powers, weaknesses, deaths, births—pretty much every development that had happened in DC Comics—and handed them over to Wolfman.

Putting it all together into a series proved no easy task. The project had originally been announced for 1982. It was later bumped to spring 1983. Finally DC decided to schedule it to coincide with the company’s fiftieth anniversary in 1985 and to call it Crisis on Infinite Earths. George Perez was tapped as penciler, and he relished the gig, believing it gave him an opportunity to strike back at Marvel.

“It was to get revenge for not being able to do the JLA-Avengers book,” Perez said at the time.

Meanwhile the series’ ambitions grew. It set out not only to clean up continuity but also to shake up DC’s image.

“When people think of DC, they think of a very staid company that doesn’t change characters, that publishes the same Superman stories that they published in 1955,” Wolfman said in 1985. “I think we’re publishing some of the better comics, but we have a very bad reputation for being set in our ways. The Crisis is an indication against that.”

The series centered on a mysterious cosmic villain called the Anti-Monitor who begins destroying the vast parallel earths—and their inhabitants—that existed within DC’s continuity. The Superman we know was said to live here on our earth, but there was also another, different Superman (with gray hair at his temples) from an alternate universe dubbed “Earth 2.” Issue #1 hit stands January 1985, and eleven issues later, only one universe would remain. DC could essentially organize its convoluted universe by picking and choosing which events and characters from its long history to keep and which to jettison.

The scope and consequence of Crisis was unmatched in DC’s history, and a series combining so many heroes into a single, far-reaching story might have blown minds even more—had Marvel not offered something similar a few months earlier.

Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars had been born in 1982 when toy company Mattel had lost its bid for the DC license to rival Kenner. The company approached Marvel about producing a line of superhero action figures to compete with Kenner’s. Fearing Marvel’s roster was not as well known as DC’s, Mattel asked Marvel to come up with a special promotion that might goose interest in the characters. Editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, drawing on the letters he got from young people almost every week, proposed a massive miniseries chockablock with more than fifty Marvel heroes and villains. Mattel agreed, suggesting that the series be called Secret Wars—two words that research had discovered resonated with young boys.

The series introduced a powerful cosmic figure called the Beyonder, who later showed up in human form in a sequel series, Secret Wars II, dressed in a white jumpsuit like an interplanetary Siegfried and Roy. For sport he transports a passel of characters to a faraway “battleworld,” where they are forced to face off like spandex-clad gladiators.

Secret Wars got the biggest print run of any Marvel comic for years, and its first issue (May 1984) sold an amazing 750,000 copies.

To some the timing of Secret Wars with respect to Crisis has always been suspicious—or if you’re a Marvel supporter, the timing of Crisis with respect to Secret Wars has been. Which company could rightfully claim introducing the big, multipart superhero blowout?

Secret Wars appeared a full year before Crisis, with the final issue of the Marvel series appearing within days of the first issue of DC’s. But many DC supporters were suspicious that Marvel had gotten wind of Crisis and rushed out Secret Wars to steal some of DC’s thunder. A newspaper article at the time reported that the “cutthroat” Marvel had held up shipping the final issue to “overlap the premiere of the DC series.” (Not true, but it gives you an idea of the conspiracy theories that surrounded the high-profile projects even back then.)

Jim Shooter says it was the other way around. Marvel had the idea first and DC was not planning a “big, company-wide crossover” until after they found out about Secret Wars, which was inevitable considering what a small community the comics biz was back then.

“The first issue of Crisis came out the same [month] as the twelfth issue of Secret Wars,” Shooter says. “And yet they claim they came up with it first.”

“Crisis got announced first,” says DC’s Bob Greenberger, who coplotted the series. “I definitely think Marvel was being calculating in doing Secret Wars. Jim knew we were going to make noise. Jim knew full well, and he was being commercial and strategic. There was a definite rivalry going on, and Jim was doing what he could to make sure Marvel remained number one.”

DC did get in one shot on-page. Wolfman had included a subtle panel in Crisis showing the Marvel universe getting destroyed along with DC’s parallel earths.

The kernel for Crisis might have, in fact, originated many years before it was published.

“When Jenette Kahn first became publisher, she had a party at her apartment on Central Park West [in 1978],” Shooter says. “She comes to me and says, ‘You’re the big comics guru. What do you think I should do with the DC universe?’”

“Kill it,” Shooter replied. “Start it over.”

The Marvel boss laid out a radical overhaul of the DC universe in which the company would announce the cancellation of all its titles, bring their stories to a conclusion, then the next month relaunch everything with a new #1. It would be a clean-slate start in which the essence of each character would be preserved but all the cumbersome continuity could be ejected. Writer Gerry Conway had floated something similar when he returned to DC from Marvel in 1976.

“As a joke I suggested it should all be blown up and restarted,” Conway says. “I have no idea if that was the genesis of Crisis, but someone who was involved once told me Crisis was my joke come to life.”

The joke would soon be on readers. Whatever their respective virtues and weaknesses, Secret Wars and Crisis ushered in the era of the comic book event—a genre whose increasing popularity would have harmful consequences for the industry in the decades to come. No longer would it be enough for Superman to defeat the villain of the month. Readers had now gotten a taste of a big important story that was perceived to matter more than the now-pedestrian yarns that filled the books month after month.

“The DC universe will never be the same,” a 1984 ad for Crisis proclaimed. But once you’ve raised the stakes that high, where do you go from there?

As the comic publishers would quickly discover, anything branded an “event” sold to the comic book diehards, regardless of whether it was any good. Fans had invested so many hours in these fictional universes that the thought of simply skipping a story they were told ad nauseum held great importance was not an option. They, like any addict, had to get their fix—even if they hated themselves for it afterward.

Events also preyed on the completist mentality of many collectors. Failing to buy a series would leave a painful, gaping hole in their meticulously curated collections. One conflicted member of a Chicago comic book club told Comics Interview magazine in 1985 that every member of his group bought Marvel’s Secret Wars—they just didn’t read it. The reason for the purchase, he sheepishly admitted, was “stupidity.”

Marvel’s direct sales manager, Carol Kalish, bluntly told retailers at a 1984 summit, “Let’s be honest. Secret Wars was crap, right? But did it sell?”

It certainly did. And so did its less well-regarded sequel, 1985’s Secret Wars II. Though not in the obscene numbers as the original.

“Each time [Marvel] puts out a book like that, they lose the confidence of the buyer a little bit more, no matter how much money they make on it,” New York comic book retailer Bruce Conklin said in a 1985 interview. “They’re winning the battle but losing the war.”

His were prescient words. Events soon became the staple of the industry, with both Marvel and DC launching dueling ones nearly every summer (prime time for comic reading) from 1986 to the present day. The hallmark of the series was that they would involve dozens of heroes battling some world-beating threat in a story spread across numerous titles. Crisis begat Legends, which was followed by Millennium, which gave way to Invasion. Marvel countered with “Mutant Massacre,” “Fall of the Mutants,” “The Evolutionary War,” and on and on. In a few years events would become so frequent that they would begin to lose their cachet. After all, when everything is an event, nothing is.

But before that, DC would take advantage of the opportunity presented by Crisis on Infinite Earths. The company now had the chance to restructure its universe—to chuff off fifty years of baggage and modernize. And that, in a sense, meant bringing it closer to Marvel’s.

Wolfman had originally pitched a radical coda to the twelve-issue series that called for DC to cancel nearly all its titles and restart them fresh with new #1s. Besides sending a clear signal to the readership and the industry’s talent that DC was serious about revamping itself, the proposed relaunch would have the added benefit of coinciding with Marvel’s twenty-fifth anniversary and would have, Wolfman calculated, “blown out” whatever special plans Marvel had for the milestone. (Marvel, in the end, blew out itself by launching a calamitous line of new titles it called “The New Universe.”)

DC shied away from the full relaunch, instead settling for a targeted reset of its three core heroes known as the trinity: Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman. Dick Giordano, then DC’s executive editor, had talked about the need to rid DC of its “stodgy Wall Street Journal image,” and Crisis had provided an opportunity to do just that. Suddenly the company would begin taking more chances and opening itself up to riskier interpretations of its material.

“A company with the resources of DC should not be a follower of the latest idea or trend, but the leader, the instigator!” a DC fan whined in a 1983 letter to the Comics Journal. “I implore you at the DC offices, quit being led around like sheep and start creating your own ideas and follow your instincts.… I want DC to become #1 in sales again so I can show those no-class Marvel fans who’s boss.”

Chasing the sales lead would require a drastic modernization of its line and an attempt to further appeal to the older, direct-market readers Marvel was so good at capturing.

“DC had to change. Marvel was outselling them hand over fist,” says Steve Bissette, a DC artist in the 1980s. “Dick [Giordano] was always a pretty progressive guy. Paul [Levitz] was a smart business man, and Jenette [Kahn] was a free-thinking publisher, unlike any that had existed at DC. There was a window of opportunity to change.”

DC’s iconic titles had grown stale. Just prior to Crisis former publisher Carmine Infantino, who’d entered the business in the 1940s, was drawing The Flash, and Superman artist Curt Swan was nearing his fortieth anniversary of having first drawn the character.

“A lot of this stuff had not evolved all that much, and that was part of the problem,” says former DC editor Brian Augustyn. “Something like Superman had just become to be seen as stodgy.”

Before Crisis launched, DC began soliciting proposals to update its Trinity. Most important on the list was the Man of Steel.

“At Marvel there would be little jibes that I would hear, like about DC not knowing how to do Superman or DC not knowing what to do with their characters,” says artist Jerry Ordway, who was inking Fantastic Four at the time.

One of those criticizing DC was John Byrne, a writer and artist who had been one of Marvel’s top names since the 1970s, having taken the X-Men to the apex of the sales charts with Chris Claremont. Byrne had recently fallen out with Marvel after he drew an experimental issue of Hulk composed of nothing but full-page images, and it was rejected.

At a July 1985 housewarming party for Byrne’s new Connecticut residence Wolfman and Giordano listened as Byrne laid out what he’d do with DC’s top hero if given the chance. Months of negotiation followed, and Byrne was finally hired.

The news sent shockwaves through the industry. DC had, in the span of three years, managed to poach not only (arguably) its rival’s top two creators but two names who had worked nearly their entire careers at Marvel and were closely identified with the company. The shocking migration led Marvel editor Al Milgrom to quip, “DC is Marvel and Marvel is DC.”

“Spider-Woman has better hair, better costume, frank cho implants and a fucked up origin. Wonder Woman is a walking std farm!!”

—Marvel writer Brian Michael Bendis on Twitter in 2009

“I know this is part of the whole Marvel v. DC PR male privilege fanboy outrage machine something or other. But still. These sort of things are an insult to Bendis’ dignity.”

—Blogger Smith Michaels responding in 2009

“The reason [for hiring Byrne] obviously is to get Byrne away from Marvel, and [DC] felt that he had a large enough following that no matter what he did with the book he was gonna sell it,” writer Steve Gerber said in 1985.

Byrne set out to “Marvelize” Superman—a term that was in popular use at the time. In other words, he would attempt to update the sterile, godlike Superman for a 1980s audience by borrowing the humanizing techniques Lee and Kirby had used on superheroes in the sixties. “The modern audience now wants a superhero who grunts, sweats, and goes to the bathroom,” Byrne said at the time.

Byrne’s The Man of Steel was billed as “the comics event of the century” and debuted in summer 1986. The six-issue miniseries updated Superman’s origin and reset his world, creating a new status quo for the character moving forward.

Marvel just shrugged at the well-publicized makeover—publicly at least. Jim Shooter called The Man of Steel “no big deal” and pointed out that Superman had gotten a similar revamp back in 1971. “Nobody noticed, so they dropped it,” he told the Washington Post in 1985.

The Man of Steel #1 became the best-selling title of 1986, moving more than 1 million copies—twice as many as the top Marvel offering. It led to a brand-new ongoing Superman series written and drawn by Byrne.

In 1987 Wonder Woman got a similar rehabilitation, courtesy of Crisis artist George Perez, but it would be the changes to Batman that would have the biggest impact on DC and the industry—not to mention on pop culture at large.

In the early eighties Frank Miller, along with Steve Gerber, had pitched bold new takes on Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. The proposal called for Miller to write and draw a Batman comic, which seemed a natural fit, given his dark, noir-ish work on Daredevil.

The proposal was later abandoned after Gerber walked away, but Miller kept his notes, hoping to one day put them to use. In 1985, as the artist’s thirtieth birthday loomed two years in the future, Miller began thinking about Batman’s age—a perpetual twenty-nine—and how unsettling it would be for Miller to one day find himself older than the hero he’d been reading since childhood. Miller began to conceive of a tale that would center on a mature, grizzled Batman of AARP membership age who would come out of retirement to tackle one last case.

Miller’s hero would reflect an America that had become increasingly marred by violence, one in which those who fought back were celebrated. Vigilante Bernie Goetz, who gunned down four alleged muggers in New York’s subway in 1984, was a tabloid folk hero, and the Dirty Harry and Death Wish film series were popular at the box office.

Miller, who had been repeatedly mugged in New York, asked himself what kind of world would be scary enough to compel someone to dress up in a bat suit and fight crime. And then he looked out his window.

“If he fights, it’s in a way that leaves them too roughed up to talk,” Miller scrawled in his notebook of his hero’s interrogation tactics.

Miller’s story introduced a fifty-year-old Bruce Wayne who has retired following the murder of sidekick Robin at the hands of the Joker. He’s driven to don the cape and cowl again to battle a violent gang that has taken over Gotham. Later he tangles with Superman—portrayed as a Reagan-era sellout now working for the government—and the homicidal Joker.

According to Miller, his envelope-pushing take on DC’s license-friendly character scared those at DC, and he had to twist arms to get it published. “They hated it,” he has said.

“It was a very gutsy move,” Mike Friedrich says. “Doing Batman in this very adult fashion had nothing to do with children’s toys, which was, of course, where most of the revenue for Batman was coming from at the time. They were actually threatening their franchise by doing him in a different fashion.”

The first part of The Dark Knight Returns was released in February 1986 in a new square-bound volume dubbed the “prestige format.” It sold for $2.95 and offered a quality of production never before seen in American superhero comics. (“We’ll probably copy every one of their formats,” a Marvel editor conceded at the time.)

DC anticipated huge demand, setting the print run some 40 percent over advance orders. Still, within seventy-two hours of issue #1’s release, the company was forced to go back to print to meet demand.

The Dark Knight Returns had a complex story and was peppered with sly commentary on the media as well as bizarre political allusions. If the Nazi women with swastikas covering their bare breasts didn’t signal comics weren’t just for kids anymore, nothing would. And this story was coming from the same company that just a few years earlier had killed a short, comedic story by writer David Anthony Kraft in which Batman orders a shot of whiskey. “Batman doesn’t drink,” the brass grumped. Well, now he paralyzes Joker during an unsettling love-hate fight inside a carnival’s Tunnel of Love.

The next year Miller was tasked with resetting Batman for the post-Crisis universe. His “Year One” ran through four issues of the main Batman title and fleshed out the beginning of Bruce Wayne’s career as a superhero. The revised origin doubled down on the darkness, casting the hero as a violent, outside-the-law vigilante, police detective Gordon as a world-weary adulterer, and Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman, a street-smart prostitute.

DC’s new direction did not go unnoticed by the press. Both The Dark Knight Returns and The Man of Steel made national headlines—a rare time when the mainstream media deemed comics worthy of coverage. The hype had even reached the ears of Stan Lee, long since checked out of the publishing side of comics.

“I think DC, sooner or later, may start competing with us,” he said in 1987. “Their ‘new Batman’ and ‘new Superman’ could create some interest. I know this Batman graphic novel is selling out. We’ll see.”

DC’s post-Crisis revamp boosted sales 22 percent in one year. The company actually beat Marvel in direct-market share in August and September 1987—the first time that had ever happened.

After jousting with Marvel for decades and generally getting trounced, DC had found its new way forward. It wasn’t just about making money in that particular quarter. DC was playing a longer game, attempting to champion projects that would elevate the medium and have a shelf life longer than four weeks. “Quality became the motivation,” as one editor put it.

“We were firmly convinced that the direct market would be the heart of the business for a generation and that readers would be older and more sophisticated and be prepared to pay more,” Paul Levitz says. “We felt we should move towards more creator-driven passion projects that pushed the limits of what we’d done before and see where we could go with it.”

“I always felt that Marvel, especially in the eighties, was more competitive, more invested in a sense of its own uniqueness and superiority to the competition,” says J. M. DeMatteis, a DC and Marvel writer since the seventies. “DC at the time felt more invested in the work at hand. I’m not saying they didn’t want to dominate the market just as much as Marvel did, just that it wasn’t expressed that way around me.”

DC’s gamble on creators and unique voices paid off, producing what is perhaps the most fertile period in the company’s—and the industry’s—history. This was the moment comics finally grew up and began to be taken seriously.

In addition to The Dark Knight, in 1986 DC also released Watchmen, writer Alan Moore’s and artist Dave Gibbons’s dense deconstruction of superheroes that made Time magazine’s list of the best books of all time. Denny O’Neil and artist Denys Cowan turned an old Charlton character called the Question into a Zen-soaked martial arts master. It was perhaps the first comic book to contain a weighty list of recommended reading, including The Tao of Peace, at the back.

A few years earlier DC had missed out on another acclaimed Alan Moore strip from a British magazine, Warrior. In 1982 Moore had taken Marvelman, a British Captain Marvel rip-off from the 1950s, and put an ultra-realistic spin on him, trying to imagine what would happen if a Superman-like figure did actually exist.

Dez Skinn, the British publisher behind Warrior, had been interested in licensing the material to be published in the United States. He flew to New York and met with DC. The company, who was then beginning to embrace edgier work, loved Marvelman. The name, however, was going to be a problem.

“DC Comics publishing something called Marvelman, are you crazy?” DC’s Dick Giordano told Skinn.

And then there was Swamp Thing, a monthly horror-tinged magazine that had become a cult classic after Alan Moore—then a little-known British writer—took it over in 1984. He and his art team quickly turned an overlooked title into among the most literate and sophisticated on the stands.

When the new team began, sales were in the toilet—below twenty thousand. The art team was earning DC’s lowest page rate. To make matters worse, the title enjoyed little promotion from DC as the result of a bad deal the company had made with the producers behind the 1982 movie.

“Paul Levitz said to me, ‘It was the worst licensing deal DC had ever cut,’” Bissette says. “DC had sold all rights to the producers for the duration of the contract. The only rights they’d retained were the comic book publishing rights. They couldn’t do posters; they couldn’t do action figures. As soon as I heard that, I knew why our page rates were so low—because there was nothing to exploit except the comic book.”

Even without promotion, sales slowly improved. Swamp Thing began raking in the industry awards.

The title was definitely not Marvel’s thing. In issue #40 (September 1985), Moore and company created a tale called “The Curse” about a female werewolf whose transformation is tied to her menstrual cycle.

DC’s move toward more mature subject matter in Swamp Thing and other books rankled Marvel, where the stories remained all-ages appropriate, and adult content, such as swearing, was forbidden. At a 1985 Chicago Comicon panel several Marvel editors publicly voiced concern with the recent publication of “The Curse” and stated that comic books should be subject to stricter content control.

While Marvel found Swamp Thing objectionable, DC considered it a touchstone.

“Alan Moore’s work on Swamp Thing directly led to Vertigo,” says Stuart Moore, who was an editor for DC’s trailblazing imprint launched in 1993.

Vertigo served as a home for more outside-the-box, adult work, removed from the regular DC superhero universe. It would include Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan about a chain-smoking, acerbic gonzo journalist fighting corruption in a dystopian future, and most notably The Sandman, author Neil Gaiman’s literate fantasy series about the magical lord of dreams. Those series, as The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen before them, helped push the medium and attract a more diverse audience to comics.

The new direction led to the rise of the “DC Zombie,” a counterpart to the evangelical Marvel fanboy who bought exclusively from one company. “Such creatures were almost nonexistent in the early ’80s since few people knew DC was still publishing,” fanzine Amazing Heroes reported in 1990. “With DC’s latest comeback, Zombies have cropped up.”

For Marvel, however, mainstream superheroes remained the bread and butter.

“Everything we could see about those [Vertigo] comics, both in our own experience and DC’s, was that those comics didn’t make any money,” says Marvel’s president in the 1990s, Terry Stewart. “They were interesting. They appealed to a certain segment of the buyers. But they never sold in any great quantities.”

At least not upon initial publication as monthly comics. But many of these stories have remained in print ever since through the trade paperback, a book-format collection of several consecutive comic books that told a (mostly) complete story.

In 1986 DC cut a deal with sister company Warner Books to release a $12.95 mass-market paperback collection of Frank Miller’s hit Batman series.

“Doing Dark Knight as a trade paperback, in retrospect, was one of the most important things I did in my career,” says Paul Levitz. “We largely created that business. The trade paperback changed the game.”

Other blockbuster collections followed, including one of Watchmen. Graphic novel sections are now a part of most every bookstore.

“I think DC had the vision that books were the format of the future, and Marvel didn’t,” says industry analyst Milton Griepp. “You look at something like Watchmen that was collected in 1987 and has been in print ever since. There’s nothing like that on the Marvel side.”

As DC blossomed, Marvel was grappling with internal issues. Jim Shooter, the editor-in-chief who had brought order to the chaotic company some ten years earlier, was fired in April 1987.

Tom DeFalco, who had been at Marvel since the 1970s, was installed as the new editor-in-chief. Marvel was still the overall leader in monthly comic sales, but the once-bright creative light was dimming somewhat. Writers grumbled that the House of Ideas had become afraid to take chances, and some readers accused the company of stagnation. “Marvel is a backward-looking corporate behemoth,” critic Darcy Sullivan wrote, “paying lip service to the qualities it once embodied.”

“It seems to me that Marvel is in the same place DC was in the late ’60s—fat, complacent and throwing out something good once in a while,” a reader wrote to fanzine Amazing Heroes in 1989. “They’re resting on their laurels, and most fans follow like sheep.”

Marvel would recover, of course, once again becoming the scrappy underdog with the out-there ideas. But it would take another decade and a flirtation with complete and utter ruin to get there.