From Humongous Boom to Hideous Bust

“We were not just selling the comics, we were merchandising them, giving the reader something special to glom onto. It was very obvious how much money we were making, and I heard rumblings that people at Warner Bros. were saying, ‘Holy shit! What are those guys doing over there?!’ We were attacking the market on all fronts.”

—Marvel’s former president Terry Stewart

Since its very beginning the comic book industry has careened through a series of booms and busts, like a blotto Vegas blackjack player on an all-night bender. A period of extraordinarily strong gains are often followed by a downturn so severe that it borders on existential.

The Golden Age of prosperity was killed by the 1950s anticomics crusade. The Marvel-led superhero revival of the 1960s gave way to plummeting sales in the 1970s. And so it went, continuously ping-ponging between elation and despair. Those looking for stability best look elsewhere.

But the mother of all booms and busts was yet to come. By the end of the 1980s the industry was about to enjoy a historic explosion that would inject a tsunami of money into the biz and change the way it operated forever.

And it all started with a movie.

Back in 1979, a year after Superman hit theaters, a young comic book fan named Michael Uslan and his partner Benjamin Melniker approached DC about optioning the film rights to the company’s other A-plus character, Batman. Despite the fact that Uslan had never made a film, DC agreed—with the condition that the producers steer as far away from the 1966 TV series’ Biffs! Pows! and Bams! as possible.

Uslan and Melniker obtained the rights to Batman in October 1979 and set out to make a “serious” Batman film the producers thought would appeal to a wide audience. Thus began a torturous ten-year journey that would involve rejections from every studio in Hollywood, multiple directors, and a small army of screenwriters.

Batman, starring Michael Keaton and directed by Tim Burton, finally arrived in June 1989, notching the biggest opening ever at the time. The flick quickly raced past $100 million on its way to becoming the highest-grossing movie of the year.

The movie was notable for many reasons, not the least of which was that it finished the mission that Superman had started more than ten years earlier, once and for all proving that moviegoers would line up to see straightforward superheroes movies.

But Batman’s most enduring legacy may not be at the box office; it would be in the realm of merchandising. Batman was a trailblazer in licensing and cross-promotion, as Warner Bros. set out to exploit the hell out of every possible revenue stream in an orgasmic frenzy of intracompany synergy.

Bat-fans could plunk down cash for some twelve hundred items—everything from a $5.95 Batman action figure to $35.95 Batcave playset. Hungry? Pour a bowl of Bat cereal, munch on Bat tortilla chips. Chilly? Strap on a $50 satin jacket. Warner Bros. record execs even strong-armed Burton into including—rather incongruously—their artist Prince in the film in a bid to piggyback an album.

Batman was able to tap ancillary dollars like no movie since Star Wars, ringing up an estimated $750 million in merchandising sales.

Everyone involved was getting filthy rich. And that included Bob Kane, Batman’s cocreator. One day after the film opened, the seventy-three-year-old artist dropped by the DC offices to pick up a check for his slice of the Batman spoils. On his way out he happened to ride the elevator down with a group of DC editors. The cocky Kane couldn’t resist flashing his check to the group, revealing a number with more zeroes than Batman had utility-belt compartments.

“Well,” one of the editors said dryly, “I guess lunch is on you.”

The Batman windfall was such a shock to so many in the industry because of the nature of comic book properties previously.

“It’s hard to imagine now, with the increasing success of superhero movies, but superheroes were not a big deal in the merchandising business back then,” says Marvel’s former publisher Mike Hobson. “You could not give away Spider-Man or Batman for toys or anything else.”

Batman changed all that, and the movie’s river of merchandising money would open the eyes of many to the value of comic book–related properties, including one man whose sudden interest in all things spandex would ultimately have a disastrous impact on Marvel.

Marvel’s one-time owner, Cadence Industries (formerly known as Perfect Film), had in 1986 sold the publishing company to New World Pictures, the studio behind low-budget schlock such as The Slumber Party Massacre. Just two years later Marvel was on the block again.

This time the buyer would be Ronald Perelman, a filthy-rich, bald, cigar-smoking financier who specialized in taking over undervalued companies. Perelman paid $82.5 million in January 1989, tossing in $10.5 million of his own money. The Wall Street titan seemed an odd fit to run the company, and plunking down the hefty sum had nothing do with love of comic books. He claimed to literally not know how to read them. He was after what DC had.

“One of the reasons that Perelman wound up buying Marvel was the success of the Batman movie,” says Terry Stewart, who worked for Perelman and was installed as Marvel’s president. “What everyone was really shocked about was the half-billion, billion dollars’ worth of merchandise it sold. That was a big eye-opener there, because there’s money in them there hills.”

Stewart was among the few in Marvel’s new corporate management ranks who was a comic book fan. He’d grown up in Arkansas, methodically hunting DC books at the limited outlets in his town. But Perelman and the rest of his crew knew or cared little about the industry. What they knew was money, and they set out to use Marvel to make as much of it as possible. Suddenly Marvel was reduced to a moneymaking machine, with the same kinds of earning demands that drove more traditional corporate enterprises. Creativity would have to take a backseat to profit.

“When Ron Perelman took over Marvel, he came into my office and said, ‘I wanted to meet you. You have the highest-selling books,’” says former Uncanny X-Men editor Ann Nocenti. “Then he apparently walked down the hall and said to somebody, ‘Well, if things with an X sell, why don’t you put an X on everything?’ He didn’t understand the product. He didn’t understand that you couldn’t stamp an X on every book and that they’d sell.”

Marvel under Perelman began to take aggressive steps to increase profits. In May 1989 Marvel jacked the cover price of standard comics from 75 cents to $1 and was pleasantly surprised when no noticeable decrease in sales followed.

The company improved the quality of its paper and printing to try to attract advertisers who previously had been wary of running their ads on the cheap, nearly transparent paper many comics were published on. An ad on the prime back or inside-front cover was soon commanding around $65,000.

Marvel’s other strategy was simple: release more product. More product in stores meant more money.

“We saw that the market seemed to be calling for more titles and more books, particularly #1s,” Stewart says. “How far can we push spin-offs, and how far can we push new comics?”

The company that had built its legend by releasing just eight titles a month was now set to ramp up its output to levels never before seen. Some of Marvel’s more popular offerings, including The Amazing Spider-Man and the Uncanny X-Men, were released twice a month during the summer, continuing an experiment from the previous year. Second-tier characters no one had much cared about before were suddenly fronting their own titles. (Nomad, anyone?) And Marvel’s most popular heroes were spun off into new titles that, at times, had all the creative necessity of AfterMASH. One particular spin-off—a gluttonous expansion of the Spider-Man line—would prove to be a sensation and would set the tone for the industry for the next few years to come.

For better or worse.

Todd McFarlane was a brash, young Canadian artist who’d broken into comics in the early 1980s before landing his first regular gig drawing DC’s Infinity Inc. in 1985. McFarlane’s unique visual style was evident, even on his earliest jobs. He hacked a boring rectangular page into experimental panel layouts and had a way of rendering capes in such a dramatic, billowing way that it made the lamest hero look plain cool. He was clearly a star on the rise.

During his time at DC McFarlane was desperate to live in America, and he asked his employer for help in obtaining papers. After the company dragged its feet with the request, McFarlane bolted from DC and began drawing The Incredible Hulk for Marvel. Fans enjoyed his unusual interpretation, but Marvel management was less thrilled—art director John Romita included. Romita griped to McFarlane’s editor that he didn’t like the way the artist drew the Hulk, and that complaint led to the break of McFarlane’s life. He was then put on The Amazing Spider-Man, starting with issue #298 (March 1988).

His take on Spider-Man and the book’s cast of characters was just as unique as that of the Hulk. McFarlane drew the hero in a stylized, exaggerated manner, giving him eyes so large that they rivaled Amanda Seyfried’s. He posed Spidey in acrobatic positions impossible for a normal human and drew his webbing in a more realistic, three-dimensional way. He made Peter Parker’s then wife, Mary Jane, look like something out of a Victoria’s Secret catalog.

“Todd broke that lock of the Jim Shooter aesthetic, where everything looked staid and conservative,” says artist Steve Bissette. “He busted that page up. I love looking at Todd’s pages. They bristle with power and energy.”

McFarlane breathed new life into the Marvel warhorse, then approaching its three hundredth issue, and in the process he became the hottest artist going.

After two years on The Amazing Spider-Man, the grueling schedule began to take its toll, and McFarlane asked to be taken off the title. He expected to be demoted to one of the company’s lesser books, but to his surprise his editor asked if he was interested in launching a completely new Spider-Man title—Marvel’s fourth starring the web slinger. And McFarlane would be tasked with drawing and writing it.

No comic book fan on earth would turn down that offer, McFarlane included. The first issue of the new series, simply called Spider-Man, was released in the summer of 1990 to massive hype driven by Marvel’s marketing muscle. If you were reading comic books that year, it was inevitable you bought this comic. Resistance was futile.

Spider-Man #1 proved to be a sales success the likes of which had not been seen in the industry for a long, long time. Records from comics’ early years are spotty, but Marvel researched sales data and concluded that a 1948 issue of Fawcett’s Captain Marvel was most likely the all-time record holder, having sold 1.7 million copies. McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 destroyed that previous best-seller by a million.

“Todd was the hottest thing since sliced bread. Giving him his own title and turning him loose on that was the right thing to do,” Stewart says. “We had the machinery oiled and greased to promote this stuff. The shops pushed it hard. It was sort of the perfect storm.”

“Spider-Man #1 had a huge effect [on the industry],” says David Michelinie, a writer and McFarlane’s collaborator on The Amazing Spider-Man. “It showed that a creator alone—by popularity or talent—could sell a lot of comics. Todd McFarlane changed the face of comics in America and deserves much of the credit—or blame—for the state of the industry today.”

Sales were certainly strong. There was only one problem, however. In its hunger to drop this hot new title on the market, Marvel had overlooked a small but crucial detail. McFarlane had never written anything in his life, and it showed. Spider-Man #1 was loaded with McFarlane’s unique artistic stylings, but the story, to put it charitably, was incomprehensible.

McFarlane was more of a jock than a sensitive poet, and at the time he admitted that he didn’t “read nothing.” Earlier in his career when it had become clear that McFarlane was intent on writing, DC had offered him a chance to learn the craft by penning a movie adaptation—a low-profile gig that wouldn’t embarrass anyone even if it turned out badly. Marvel had required no such training wheels. McFarlane was handed the keys to Marvel’s important franchise without even having been required to submit writing samples. Pairing him with a professional to help shape the story was rejected out of fear that McFarlane would become frustrated with the oversight.

“I mean, fuck, I didn’t let some little thing like not being able to write stop me, so I didn’t really see where that should actually be that much of a problem,” the artist said in 1992. “I just wanted to test to see how much balls people had.”

Comic books, by their nature, had always been somewhat driven by gimmicks. Shocking cover lines and images were often guilty of exaggerating the significance of the events inside, for example. But quality storytelling was still paramount. Spider-Man seemed to represent a cynical new low, a triumph of product and commerce over artistry.

The book naturally elicited eyerolls at DC, where quality, not marketing, was thought of as the guiding principle, and the company had always had a feeling of superiority—deserved or not—to its rival. To DC, Marvel published cartoons, while it—being the home of Sandman and other adult-oriented projects—produced literature. A DC staffer came running up to Sandman writer Neil Gaiman with a copy of Spider-Man #1, laughing that the contents demonstrated that the person writing it had never written anything before.

Amateurish writing or not, Marvel was on to something. The next year Marvel used almost the exact same formula to generate another monster success. The company tapped a hot newbie artist—this time twenty-three-year-old Rob Liefeld—to launch a hyped new spin-off.

Rob Liefeld, a self-described “young punk,” had gotten his big break at DC drawing a 1988 Hawk and Dove miniseries that established the penciler, like McFarlane, as an artist with a unique and recognizable style—in this case, hyper-muscled men, pneumatic-chested women, floppy nineties hair, and faces slashed with lines, straining from effort. And also like McFarlane, Liefeld would defect to Marvel, where he would attain superstardom.

“The story goes that [Liefeld’s Hawk and Dove editor] was a bit of a hard-ass, and he wanted certain things done with the art and to teach Rob certain things,” says Gregg Schigiel, an editor and artist who got his start with Marvel in the 1990s. “And [Marvel editor] Bob Harras sort of pulled Rob over to Marvel saying, ‘You’re awesome, you can do whatever you want.’ So Rob went over to Marvel and became Rob Liefeld.”

Liefeld quickly parlayed his success into a high-profile, debut title. X-Force, a New Mutants spin-off about a superpowered strike force, was released in June 1991 and became an even bigger mover than Spider-Man, selling almost 4 million copies. Like Spider-Man, it too was not great literature, but look at that really cool gun!

That sales record lasted for all of two months until X-Men #1 came along. The new title—another wallet-straining expansion of the popular mutant line—was conceived as a platform for yet another hot, young artist, Jim Lee. It blew the doors off anything that had come before, selling a staggering 8 million units and earning a Guinness World Record.

Marvel kept producing more and more, churning out a veritable mountain of material.

“The summer that I was there in ’93, Marvel had 120 titles in August,” says Deadpool artist and former Marvel staffer Scott Koblish. “It was a tremendous amount of product. Even something called Darkhawk was selling three hundred thousand copies.”

Marvel was producing so many titles that over at DC, where employees got free copies of its rival’s output, the mail room had to double its rounds to keep up with it all.

The aggressive strategy was paying off for Marvel. After just two years under Perelman’s new management, the company’s profits had jumped tenfold, which was especially good news, as Marvel had gone public in July 1991. Unlike DC, whose financial goings-on were largely hidden within the Time Warner mothership, Marvel had less cover. Its profits and losses were now a matter of public record, enormously ratcheting up the pressure to boost earnings.

Anyone who’s taken an Economics 101 class knows that there are two ways to increase sales: sell your product to new customers or sell more of your product to the customers you already have. In the latter case, it boils down to, how can we get someone to buy two of something when they’d normally buy one?

The answer came with the variant cover.

The gimmick had been pioneered by DC in the 1980s, and the idea was to print the same issue with multiple cover versions in an attempt to get collectors to purchase multiple copies. John Byrne’s 1986 miniseries The Man of Steel had been released with a newsstand cover as well another for the direct market.

In 1989, to coincide with the release of the Batman movie, DC launched a new series called Legends of the Dark Knight. It was the first new, ongoing Batman title in some fifty years, and the orders were stratospheric. DC’s marketing chief worried that there was no way so many copies would sell through to the consumer, so he borrowed an idea from the book industry.

Some paperbacks at the time were printed with multiple covers in an ingenious bid to obtain multiple front-facing (as opposed to spine) placements in bookstores. Printing a book with different covers meant it occupied more shelf space and was more visible, so buyers were less likely to overlook it.

DC deployed a crude version of this strategy, printing four different versions of Legends of the Dark Knight #1 in which the only difference was the cover’s background color. Then the company sat back and watched as OCD comics fans snapped up all four in a bid to obtain a complete set. Collect them all, or you will never feel whole!

It took Marvel and its rapacious Wall Street owners to take the concept to a crass, new level. Variant covers quickly became a reliable scheme to increase sales on a single issue exponentially and keep those precious dollars rolling in. McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 was released with thirteen different covers, including gold, silver, and platinum versions. One came sealed in a plastic bag, presenting fanboys with the Sophie’s Choice of whether to read the comic or simply peer at it through plastic for all eternity.

X-Force #1 deployed a different sort of variant trick, offering polybagged versions with one of five different trading cards hidden inside. X-Men #1 also came in five variations, one complete with an accordion-like fold-out cover for the low, low price of $3.95—or quadruple the price of a normal comic book.

Marvel’s increasing excesses did not escape industry notice. At the 1991 San Diego Comic-Con, DC editor Michael Eury was tapped to present an award to writer-artist Keith Giffen. During the introduction Eury joked that Giffen had “more ideas per minute than Marvel had covers of Spider-Man #1.”

“Marvel’s head of marketing, Carol Kalish, shot me a look,” Eury says. “I think it was in jest.”

DC didn’t go as big as Marvel did on the variant trend, approving the gimmick covers only on books that that were guaranteed big sellers, such as the Batman family of titles. But the company was hardly innocent.

“DC was the first one to do it,” says Brian Hibbs, owner of San Francisco’s Comix Experience and an influential retailer. “I’m sure that employees at DC feel that they were less fucked up about it than Marvel was, but their hands were just as bloody.”

A 1991 miniseries starring Batman’s sidekick Robin was slapped with a hologram cover, and an issue of event comic Eclipso: The Darkness Within came with a cheap plastic “jewel” embedded on its front. Soon there would be no cover variation too gimmicky for either company. Comics were die-cut, embossed with foil, tinted in gold, and made to glow in the dark in a desperate bid to throw something novel onto the stands.

“There was this level of one-upsmanship,” says former DC editor Frank Pittarese. “You do a foil cover, we’re going to do a hologram cover. You do a hologram cover, we’re doing colorforms. You always wanted to top the other guy.”

“Everyone was doing well. It was like, ‘Yay, our gimmicky comic book outsold their gimmicky comic book,’” says former DC production manager Bob Rozakis. “But if you put a glow-in-the-dark, silver-foil cover on a crappy comic book story, it’s still a crappy comic book story.”

The gimmicks quickly became the draw, immunizing subpar material against low sales. Fans were eagerly snapping up everything, no matter how good or bad it was.

“At the time we were like, ugh, this is kind of gross,” says former Uncanny X-Men editor Ann Nocenti.

An industry that had generally been about telling entertaining stories first and foremost was quickly becoming little more than a four-color shell game. The publishers’ marketing departments, which had been virtually nonexistent a few years earlier, became so powerful that they actually began to dictate content.

“You’d get into meetings with the sales people, and they’d ask, ‘How can we add an enhanced cover that will raise the price $1 or $2? Or, ‘How can we put out multiple covers?’ ‘How can we start this over with issue #1 or publish this twice as often?’” says Bob Budiansky, former editor of the Amazing Spider-Man. “This was coming from the very top. What can we do to get people’s attention and get them to buy more books and more copies of books?”

“I would kick and scream and bite and scratch to avoid that stuff,” says Dan Raspler, a former DC editor. “I would get yelled at. At one point [editor] Neal Pozner came to my office when I was editing Lobo and told me about a scheme where we could print a number on a cover, and every cover would be unique. It would have a different number on each one. He was like, ‘Isn’t that great? There will be nothing but unique covers. People will have to buy all of them.’ I was like, ‘That’s the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard.’ But I was a dick for standing in the way of profit.”

The corporations weren’t the only ones getting rich. Thanks to the royalties program instituted in the 1980s, the creators—who’d been trampled on and treated like whores for decades—were finally getting their piece of the pie.

“There was a lot of money sloshing around,” says Koblish. “If you sold a million copies, you were probably earning somewhere between $40,000 and $50,000 per issue as a royalty.”

Chris Claremont, the scribe behind the top-selling Uncanny X-Men title, went from pulling down a modest $769 a week in salary in 1982 to taking home a mint.

“I bought a plane,” Claremont says. “You can either have a plane or you can have kids. It was an indulgence when I was doing the X-Men.”

Legend has it that Marvel’s Scott Lobdell got handed an X-Men title at the height of the boom because he happened to be walking by the panicked editor’s office at the exact moment a replacement writer was needed. He was soon earning $85,000 a month in royalties.

“One time a check arrived at the office for [X-Men artist] Jim Lee, and the assistant was curious and held it up to the light, and you couldn’t tell how much it was, but there were quite a few numbers in the check,” says Ruben Diaz, a Marvel and DC editor in the 1990s. “Even if you factored in two numbers for cents, there had to be at least six figures in a royalty check. That was for work already performed and was probably not the first time he was getting paid for that work.”

The Marvel editors also reaped rewards in the form of a bonus pool instituted under new owner, Perelman. If Marvel reached its profit goals, the staff would be handsomely rewarded.

“In my case the bonuses were bigger than my annual salary,” says former Marvel editor Bob Budiansky. “Sales kept going up.”

Unfortunately, DC’s talent did not enjoy the same ridiculous windfalls keeping Marvel artists in yachts and private planes, in large part because DC’s titles sold far fewer copies than Marvel’s. There were exceptions, of course. Grant Morrison, the Scottish writer behind the hardcover 1989 Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum, pocketed $150,000 on pre-orders alone. He soon moved into a 130-year-old townhouse on Glasgow’s so-called millionaire’s row.

The pay discrepancy between the companies would become a major attraction for Marvel—and a bit of a sore subject for DC. One night some twenty-five DC and Marvel staffers were out for a friendly dinner together when the check arrived. The DC editors grabbed for their wallets and began trying to parse the bill among several credit cards, exasperating the distressed waiter.

“I finally said, ‘Screw it,’ and pulled out my Amex and paid for the whole thing,” says Chris Claremont. “I was doing it for obvious reasons. It was gamesmanship. I was showing off. ‘I work for Marvel. I can afford it. Duh. I write the X-Men, dude.’”

The next day Claremont got an unpleasant phone call from DC honcho Paul Levitz.

“Under no circumstances will DC editors ever allow a Marvel freelancer to pay for their dinner,” Levitz told him.

“He knew what I was doing,” Claremont says. “It was like I was saying, ‘Yes, I work for the cool guy. Maybe you should think about it next time your contract is up.’”

Claremont’s subtle invitation was no small deal. At the time DC, despite some half-hearted attempts to capitalize on the gimmicks working so well for Marvel, still lagged far behind its rival in sales. And it continued to lose ground through the early days of the comic book boom. DC’s direct-market share dropped in 1991, hovering around an anemic 20 percent—less than half of Marvel’s. The situation didn’t improve much through most of 1992. In August of that year DC actually fell behind Malibu, a smaller independent publisher that had been founded in 1986. It was the first time in history a third-party publisher had moved ahead of either Marvel or DC in direct-market sales, and it was an unimaginable—and humiliating—turn of events for the once-mighty publisher that would have been enough for the company’s founder, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, to throw himself on his cavalry sword, had he been alive.

“In the early nineties Marvel consistently had the whole top ten,” says former DC editor Dan Raspler. “There was an inferiority complex that we all permanently had. Even Marvel’s not-important titles would still be outselling important DC titles on a consistent basis. It was infuriating. You do all the right things, and then your sales go down because Marvel puts out a third alternate Machine Man cover. Marvel was just crushing us. Crushing us and crushing us.”

DC staffers took to joking that the company was “number two with a bullet”—a nod to DC’s circular logo, known as the “DC bullet.”

“When I got to DC [in 1992] there was definitely a push to reclaim that market share. Not necessarily to beat Marvel, but to reclaim a piece of this pie,” former editor Diaz says. “Marvel was like, we’re beating DC every month and we’re hip and cool and having fun in this frat-house environment. DC was like, yeah, we’re nerds, but we’re putting out really good books, and it would be cool if people liked us more, but if they don’t, we’re gonna be sitting in this corner doing our thing for the people that like what we do.”

DC lagged because the company, with its entrenched corporate culture and aspirations of literature, was less prone to cash in on the fads. It also continued to suffer from the chronic popularity deficit, in comparison to Marvel, that had plagued it since the 1960s.

“I’m going to speak frankly. I think our characters are bigger than Marvel’s.”

—DC’s Geoff Johns speaking in 2010

“dc sucks big hairy monkey balls. theyre just jelous”

—IGN.com commenter tony_von_terror responding in 2010

Something had to change. Enough was enough. And so in late 1992 DC set out to beat Marvel at its own game, launching a storyline so bold that it that would make national headlines and become the company’s most commercial endeavor yet.

In a way it all happened by accident. The writers and editors behind the various Superman titles had been planning to marry off Lois Lane and Clark Kent. But unbeknownst to the braintrust, a TV series called Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman was in the works at ABC, much of whose success would depend on the will-they-or-won’t-they nature of the relationship between the two leads. DC’s president Jenette Kahn decided that any wedding in the comics would have to coincide with a TV wedding, and so she nixed the editors’ proposal.

With their carefully laid plans suddenly killed, the disgruntled group was forced to go back to the drawing board.

“Let’s just kill him,” longtime Superman writer-artist Jerry Ordway suggested at a planning session.

With that pronouncement was born “The Death of Superman,” a multipart epic spread out over seven issues of different DC titles. The storyline was, ironically, an attempt to do something that the movie that partially adapted it, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, was criticized for not doing—to show the horrible ramifications of a battle between two superpowered beings.

“The death actually came out of the desire to do a big Marvel-style punch fest, where there were consequences rather than just fights where cities are destroyed,” Ordway says.

The climax, in which the hero is felled at the hands of a powerful villain called Doomsday, arrived in Superman #75 (January 1993). The death issue was of course released in multiple formats, including a special edition that came wrapped in a black bag, bearing Superman’s “S” logo dripping blood and packaged with a poster and a black armband.

“We were pretty much kicking DC’s butt all the way through that period, and I always felt like DC was looking at the success that Marvel was having,” says Marvel’s then-president Terry Stewart. “We were doing a lot of things that DC was not aggressively doing. DC was pretty much doing what it always did. There was not a lot of new direction going on there. I always felt ‘The Death of Superman’ was something they pretty much had to come up with—something that would bring their brand back to another level of sales success. And it was successful.”

Superman’s demise became a major news story and was covered on TV and in magazines and newspapers. It brought DC a much-needed dose of attention—as well as customers.

The death issue put up Marvel-like numbers, selling more than 4 million units—second behind only 1991’s X-Men #1. It also helped DC capture the market share lead the month of its release, doubling DC’s percentage from the previous month to 31 percent. In the process it also kneecapped Marvel, whose share plummeted 17 points.

At some stores customers were literally lined up by the hundreds to purchase this supposedly historic issue. The sales and media madness shocked anyone familiar with the soap-opera nature of comic books, where death was often as permanent as a pimple.

“We had no reason at the time to suspect that the world would give a shit,” Paul Levitz says. “We’d killed him before.”

Superman would return, of course. He was resurrected nearly a year later (sporting a sweet mullet, no less) at the conclusion of a carefully padded saga spread over multiple titles.

The success of “The Death of Superman” may have surprised many within the industry, but it reinforced the lesson that events equaled sales. If Secret Wars and Crisis on Infinite Earths had been the companies learning to crawl, “The Death of Superman” was a full sprint. Both companies doubled down on the strategy.

“I remember an editorial meeting where the sentiment was simply, ‘We killed Superman and sold 4 million copies. Marvel is doing this or that, and they’re selling a million copies,’” says former DC editor Brian Augustyn. “The underlying message was, ‘We’re not sure what it is, but these epic events are selling out and driving the market.’ There was almost like a dictate that if your book is considered a comer or a mainstay, then you’ve got to shake it up.”

Big, important stories promising massive changes for these familiar characters became the order of the day. Soon Batman had his back broken by a villain named Bane and was replaced by an apprentice. The multipart story was called “Knightfall,” and it snaked through dozens of issues and lasted some two years. In 1994 Hal Jordan, who’d served as Earth’s Green Lantern for thirty-five years, was replaced by a new one.

“The feeling was, there was value in events if people got excited about them,” says Chris Duffy, a DC associate editor from 1993 to 1996. “The word on the street was that [editor] Kevin Dooley had gone in for his yearly review on Green Lantern, where you talked about what was in the works for the book. All the group editors were there and Paul [Levitz]. The success of ‘The Death of Superman’ and ‘Knightfall’ turned that meeting into, ‘How can we do this for Green Lantern?’ So Kevin had to throw out all his plans for Green Lantern because they weren’t big enough, and that’s when they concocted [the replacement storyline].”

The success of “The Death of Superman” led to similar mandates at Marvel.

“At an editorial meeting in 1993 or 1994 with various executives, they were noting that ‘The Death of Superman’ had just been mentioned on the Today show,” says Marvel’s Budiansky. “This was like DC had just dropped a nuclear bomb on us. ‘They’re on the Today show, and we’re not!’ Back then, to get onto a mainstream TV show was such a big deal.”

Marvel began to formulate a response to DC’s big event, one that might pull similarly heavyweight coverage in the process. The idea they landed on was that Peter Parker and his wife would have a Spider-baby.

“The audience of the Today show was considered to be a lot of women, and they’ll want to grab onto something like this,” Budiansky says. “This will be friendly to those kinds of shows.”

The story was set in motion as part of an ongoing Spider-Man epic that reintroduced a mostly forgotten Peter Parker clone from 1975. The new story revealed that the Peter Parker, whose adventures the readers had been following since the 1970s, was not, in fact, the real Peter Parker but rather Parker’s old clone, who believed himself to be the actual Parker. As one might imagine, this did not sit well with devoted readers. It was like being told you’ve been secretly married to your wife’s twin sister for two decades.

As for the baby, the powers-that-be soon got buyer’s remorse, worrying that having Peter Parker become a father would distance him from Marvel’s large fan base of male, teenage readers. Mary Jane is shown miscarrying in Amazing Spider-Man #418 (December 1996).

“The Clone Saga” eventually dragged on for more than two years through some one hundred issues, in the process becoming one of the most torturous, muddled—and controversial—stories Marvel had ever published. Even when Marvel poached Dan Jurgens, the main artist on “The Death of Superman,” to contribute, it couldn’t save the storyline. Many now view it with disdain, and mentioning it in the presence of a hardcore Spidey fan might be enough to earn a swift slap.

“Here was a case where the competition between the two companies adversely affected something Marvel was doing,” Budiansky says. “By trying to be a media story, Marvel came up with a story that didn’t support the character in a positive way.”

Events like “The Death of Superman” and “The Clone Saga” as well as the variant covers and other gimmicks propelled the industry to new heights, but what goes up must eventually come down.

“There was a ridiculous amount of money being made, a ridiculous amount of product being sold, and also ridiculous expectations during that time,” former DC writer Paul Kupperberg says. “I thought, Holy God, we’re headed for a fall.”

Few at the time could have guessed how bad that inevitable fall would be. As it turned out, the industry’s greedy practices had done little to benefit its long-term health and had instead attracted hordes of speculators who were buying up product in hopes of paying for their kids’ braces down the road. Thousands of new comic book shops, who could get an account with the one of the major distributors by spending as little as $300, had cropped up across the country to deal in this newly fashionable collectible.

New faces, fueled by media hype, were showing up at comic shops across the country to buy a case of Superman or X-Men comics.

“My dad even got hoodwinked because of something he saw on TV,” says comic dealer Bob Beerbohm. “He calls me up, ‘Hey, kid. I’ve invested in comics for the first time.’ He bought five copies of ‘The Death of Superman.’ I said, ‘Pop, are you nuts? You paid $5 for these things? You’re never gonna get your money back.’ He didn’t want to hear it. People don’t want to hear the truth.”

The idea that comic books were collectibles that would increase in value dated back to at least the 1960s when Newsweek wrote an influential article on comic fandom and noted, to the author’s shock, that a copy of Superman’s first appearance in Action Comics #1 was selling for an astronomical $100. (A copy went for $3.2 million in 2014.) Suddenly everyone had visions that the stack of Aquamans collecting dust in their garage could be worth big money.

DC editor Len Wein in the early 1980s used to keep boxes containing one hundred copies each of The New Teen Titans #1 and #2 under his desk, claiming they would be his retirement account. A few years later, when he left the company, he didn’t bother taking the boxes.

What Wein and others were waking up to was the reality that scarcity largely drove the value of collectibles, and a comic book printed by the millions was a terrible investment. Those profit seekers who had swooped into the industry during the early 1990s soon fled the business, as did many casual readers pushed away by all the gimmicks, the increasing prices, and the flood of mediocre titles. Sales in comic shops began to taper off.

“The Death of Superman” would prove to be the high point of the era. The comic book market peaked in April 1993, then dropped the next month and continued spiraling downward.

Events that once moved millions found themselves unable to sell through. The issue in which Superman died was a pop culture sensation, but by the time he returned in Adventures of Superman #500 a few months later, many of the speculators who had been propping up the industry had scattered.

“I know a guy who made a throne out of unsold copies of Adventures Superman #500,” says retailer Brian Hibbs. “A lot of people thought it would sell as many copies as when he died. And of course it didn’t sell the tiniest, tiniest fraction of that.”

DC editor K. C. Carlson got chewed out when he visited his local comic shop in New Jersey that had ordered big on the Superman return issue. “Why didn’t you tell me not to do this?” the owner snapped.

The bubble was bursting. The comic shops that had cropped up to capitalize on the hype soon found themselves stuck with product they could not sell and were deeply in debt. They began to close their doors. By the end of the decade the number of specialty stores had dropped by 75 percent, according to some estimates.

“Certainly we overdid the number of titles,” Marvel’s former president Terry Stewart says. “And that’s something I did. I went too far on that.”

“Nobody knew when it went too far,” says former publisher Mike Hobson, who left Marvel in 1996. “We had twelve years of continual growth at that time, and we thought it would go on forever, like the stock market.”

The loss of a handful of Marvel’s top artists, including Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, and then-Spider-Man-artist Erik Larsen, compounded its growing troubles. They had quit to form an independent company in 1992 called Image. X-Men artist Jim Lee had at first been reluctant to join the exodus due to the ungodly amount of money he was making in royalties, but he finally acquiesced after Marvel refused to fly him and his wife first class to a convention.

Image grew quickly, gaining a double-digit market share, while Marvel’s dropped. The publisher went from accounting for nearly half the direct market in 1991 to less than 32 percent in 1994.

With Image offering the first challenge to DC and Marvel in decades, the established publishers began to become more concerned about a loss of market share. And the easiest way to boost your presence was to acquire another company. In April of 1994 DC began trying to do just that. Their target was Malibu, the indie that had briefly passed them in sales in 1992. Malibu had recently launched a superhero line of its own called the Ultraverse that had garnered buzz. During a friendly meal DC’s Paul Levitz floated the idea of a purchase to Malibu founder Scott Rosenberg.

“DC was concerned about market share,” Rosenberg says. “They were embarrassed to be number two.”

DC was also interested in Malibu’s ability to create and market new characters—a rarity in an industry driven by legacy characters. Levitz told Rosenberg that he was concerned that DC, which was better than Marvel at taking a long view, couldn’t keep relaunching its core superheroes over and over forever. To survive in the future, it would need new properties.

Negotiations between the two companies carried on throughout the summer. Sample artwork was prepared, showing the companies’ characters together. By the time the San Diego Comic-Con rolled around in August, the merger was close to being finalized.

“I can remember being in editorial and laughing about the rumor that DC was going to buy Malibu,” says then-Marvel-editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco. “DC had [partnered with] First Comics, Comico, and a couple of other companies, and those deals never worked out. We were laughing, ‘Don’t these guys ever learn their lesson?’”

“Then I hear we’re buying it.”

Word had leaked of the intended Malibu-DC merger, and before contracts were signed, Marvel leapt into the negotiations. Terry Stewart called Rosenberg one afternoon and asked to meet the next morning. Marvel was desperate to gobble up Malibu’s 5 percent market share and keep it from going to DC. The executives were terrified that DC and Malibu’s combined market share could drop them into second place—a shameful turn of events that mighty Marvel simply would not tolerate. They also hoped to exploit the company’s properties for film and TV projects.

“Marvel had had some interest before, but the DC negotiations completely pushed them over the edge,” Rosenberg says. “It went from a normal acquisition to one that was immediate.”

Perelman soon appeared at Malibu’s Southern California offices for a walk-through. He showed up puffing on a cigar, in spite of the strict no-smoking rules. Marvel’s lawyers were flown out from New York and put up at nearby hotel with orders not to check out until they closed a deal.

In November 1994 Marvel signed a deal to acquire Malibu, stealing the asset out from under DC’s nose. The whole deal was done in less than thirty days—a lightning-fast turnaround.

“Ronald [Perelman] loved acquisitions,” says Terry Stewart. “That’s what his whole life has been about. Comics got so hot, and everybody was chasing these properties. Ronald thought we should do this deal, and he’s the owner and the boss, so we did it.”

Not everyone thought it was a good idea, though. Malibu, like the other publishers, was stumbling amidst the industry’s woes. DeFalco confronted the president in the Marvel offices, asking, “Are you out of your freakin’ mind?”

“Well,” Stewart replied, “we can’t have DC be the only aggressive buyer of properties.”

Publicly the reason Marvel gave for the purchase was that Malibu had a state-of-the-art coloring system. Computer coloring was fairly new at that point, and it provided a wider array of tones and a more sophisticated look than the primitive, four-color hand separation that had been the industry standard for so many years. Computer coloring was one of the things that set Image books apart, helping the rogue publisher establish a look that would come to define the decade. But setting up a computer coloring system was expensive and difficult. DC had tried a year earlier and failed—a minor motivation for Marvel in the Malibu purchase.

“There were a lot of rumors, but none of them made any sense,” DeFalco says. “If you were interested in computer coloring, all you had to do was buy up-to-date computers. They also said the Malibu stuff appealed to an older audience than we did. That was bull. Nothing they said made any sense to me.”

In the end the acquisition Marvel scrambled to make never amounted to much. Marvel canceled Malibu’s Ultraverse line, later relaunching a handful of titles, but all eventually faded into oblivion.

The Malibu acquisition would not turn out to be Marvel’s most catastrophic of the decade, however. It wouldn’t even be the most catastrophic of the year. That honor would go to the company’s December 1994 purchase of Heroes World, the country’s third-largest comic book distributor, located in New Jersey.

News of the takeover rocked the industry, and for good reason. The move would fundamentally change the way the comic book business worked and would have terrible implications for both Marvel and DC down the road.

Prior to the deal comic book shops could buy Marvel comics from multiple distributors. The Heroes World acquisition meant that if a retailer wanted Marvel comics—still the lifeblood of the industry, despite the publisher’s recent decline—they would be forced to buy from a single distributor at whatever terms Marvel established.

The deal was a raw one for retailers, but to the Marvel brass it made all the sense in the world. During the recent industry boom the publisher had become increasingly frustrated with the lack of information available about its end consumer. Marvel knew how many copies it was selling to the various distributors, but it didn’t have a clear handle on which stores were buying from them or what kind of customers were buying from the stores. Even just identifying the eight thousand or so outlets selling comics at the time proved challenging. The previous few years had led to a huge increase in the number of retail locations selling comics to try to ride the comics wave, including some nontraditional venues such as card and hobby shops. Marvel even discovered that some comic book “stores” were actually located in storage units that opened up for a day or two each week to sell comics.

“It was one of those things that if we’re going to continue to grow the business, how could we control our own destiny?” Marvel’s Stewart says. “And one of the things was, you can distribute your own product. This was a classic textbook, MBA kind of thing. As a proprietor, it had become impossible to get all the business information that we needed, so that’s the direction we went.”

Marvel’s executives under Perelman came from the financial world, and to them most problems could be solved with business-school thinking. To the comic book veterans, however, the Heroes World deal raised eyebrows, just as the Malibu purchase before it. How would Heroes World, which handled a small fraction of the market, be able to scale up basically overnight to handle the exclusive Marvel load, they wondered?

“Here it is, twenty or thirty years later, and I still can’t figure out why they bought it,” DeFalco says.

Upon hearing the news at a convention one retailer announced he was going home, closing up his comic book shop, and opening a tobacco store.

“It made us look really, really bad—overly aggressive and predatory,” says Glenn Greenberg, a Marvel writer and editor from 1992 to 1998. “The people who understood the business, the inner workings, said this is going to be a disaster and was going to have a ripple effect.”

The effects did ripple. The other distributors, who had depended on Marvel and Malibu for nearly half their business, were suddenly left scrambling to cut exclusive deals with other publishers in a desperate attempt to keep their doors open.

Marvel’s alliance with Heroes World shook DC’s executives and marketing department, and the company was unsure how to respond. But as the second-biggest publisher, DC was suddenly in a position of power, able to field offers from distributors desperate to handle its business. In 1995 the company announced it had chosen Diamond as its exclusive dealer to the direct market. The choice essentially killed off the other distributors who could no longer survive without DC or Marvel products.

DC’s contract was reported to have come with one interesting caveat: in the event of the death or retirement of Diamond’s owner, or after ten years, DC had the option to buy Diamond outright.

DC’s insistence on the clause looked shrewd in 1995. Two years later it looked absolutely genius. That’s when Heroes World collapsed for all the reasons insiders expected, leaving Marvel without a distributor and forcing the publisher to come crawling back to the only option left: Diamond.

The DC contract has since been renegotiated, and it’s unclear whether the rumored purchase option for DC remains, but if it does, and DC eventually opts to buy Diamond, it would return the industry to the days of the 1960s, when DC was distributing Marvel.

“DC wants to control that market. They want to own it,” says former DC artist Steve Bissette. “DC never forgot the power they had in the late fifties, early sixties. Corporations have long memories. Even when they go through multiple iterations, there’s some part of that corporate brain in the back of the cortex that wants to be back there.”

If that day ever does come, DC would have Marvel over a barrel. It would assume control over certain vital aspects of Marvel’s business, including depth of inventory and its position in the monthly solicitations catalog.

Whatever the future may hold, the death of Heroes World left the industry under the control of a monopoly—an arrangement that remains to this day—and it’s worse off for it.

“It used to be if you wanted to buy any given book, you had twenty different choices of places to buy from,” says retailer Brian Hibbs. “Then you had one. And if they didn’t have it, whether from it selling out or because they just didn’t give a shit, you couldn’t get the book.”

The mid-1990s crash wasn’t all bad. It did have at least one positive effect in that it forced to the two publishers to begin cooperating again. The 1982 JLA/Avengers debacle had killed the desire to do crossovers, but after a decade tempers had cooled, personnel had changed, and both sides were potentially ready to try again.

“The early nineties were huge boom years, so Marvel and DC didn’t need each other,” says Ron Marz, who was writing DC’s Green Lantern at the time. “Then the bottom dropped out and lots of shops closed. Sales went into the tank. Suddenly it was, ‘Well, what can we do to boost sales for our properties but also to keep stores in business?’”

The solution was a new round of crossovers to rival Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man and the rest from the seventies and early eighties. The two sides began discussing potential projects, though Marvel’s new corporate ownership was somewhat reticent to collaborate.

“The problem was, Marvel was a publicly traded company, and you’re talking about taking the characters of a publicly traded company and giving some of that equity to a competitor, which is kind of crazy if you think about it,” says Terry Stewart. “But I was able to convince Perelman and everybody that this is what you do in a comic book world. This is something that fans will look forward to. We’ll win big. And it will engender a lot of love, the fact that the two companies have gotten together, even though we’re big competitors.”

One catalyst on the Marvel side involved another crossover book the company was planning: Archie Meets the Punisher. The one-off special, released in 1994, remains one of the most left-field books Marvel has ever published. It found the Punisher—a murderous, gun-toting vigilante created as a Spider-Man villain by Gerry Conway and John Romita Sr. back in 1974—heading to Riverdale, home of Archie, Jughead, and the rest of the kooky, clean-cut teen gang.

The oddball pairing was conceived in the early 1990s by the editor-in-chief of Archie Comics and Marvel’s Punisher editor, Don Daley. They pitched the crossover to Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Tom DeFalco, who was generally skeptical of crossovers.

“The Archie editor, Victor Gorelick, used to be Tom’s boss [in the early 1970s], so he couldn’t say no,” says Greenberg. “It was the first Marvel intercompany crossover in years, and it opened the door for more. That Punisher-Archie book broke the wall down.”

Archie and Marvel working together was one thing. The two entities published different kinds of comics and were in less direct competition. DC and Marvel was a completely different story. Getting the two on the same page to restart the crossovers proved difficult.

Marvel’s Tom DeFalco, Terry Stewart, and Mike Hobson went to lunch one day with DC’s Jenette Kahn and Paul Levitz to discuss a potential deal. The group discussed character pairings and terms as they ate and managed to hammer out a tentative agreement. But at the end of the meal Kahn suddenly dropped a bomb.

“I remember I was just getting up from the table, and everybody was congratulating ourselves because we’d somehow got past all the bullshit of the past,” DeFalco says. “And Jenette suddenly says, ‘This is all good, but there are two characters you can’t use for any of these crossovers: Superman and Batman.’ I sat back down, and I remember that Mike Hobson and Terry Stewart were both still standing.”

Kahn was reticent to include Batman and Superman because both characters were involved in complicated ongoing story lines across multiple titles at the time. Freeing them for a crossover would require no small amount of coordination among editors and could turn into an in-house headache. Kahn suggested other team-ups.

“You can do things like Lobo and Wolverine,” she said.

“Wait a minute,” DeFalco countered. “Wolverine sells four hundred thousand copies a month. Lobo sells forty thousand. Why would we do a team-up like that? All it does is help you.”

“Why not Green Arrow and Hawkeye?” Kahn suggested.

“Because it wouldn’t sell,” DeFalco said.

Marvel was adamant that the team-ups had to involve characters of equal stature and popularity. Without Superman and Batman—DC’s best assets—the deal was off.

DC ultimately relented, and the first new wave of crossovers appeared in June 1994. It united two of the era’s hottest heroes, Punisher and Batman, and had them battling Punisher villain Jigsaw. Another volume pairing the same characters, Deadly Knights, was released a few months later.

More crossovers followed in 1995. Cosmic heroes Green Lantern and Silver Surfer joined forces, and Spider-Man and Batman fought the Joker. Each of the universe’s world-devouring villains squared off in Darkseid vs. Galactus: The Hunger.

The companies traded off production of the special books, with the other side getting editorial approval. (To figure out who published what, look to see which company’s character comes first in the title.) The cooperation this time around was more congenial than it had been back in 1976. But some general rules still applied to ensure neither company got the upper hand.

“Everyone had to get equal time, and you couldn’t have Batman beating up Spider-Man too much,” says Graham Nolan, who penciled 1997’s Batman & Spider-Man: New Age Dawning.

The need for equality led to a promotion for one Marvel staffer. Many of the crossover books contained a page listing the executive staff for DC and Marvel in two, neat, side-by-side columns.

“There was a great effort to make sure we had the same number of people they had, the same number of lines,” says Shirrel Rhoades, who joined Marvel in 1996 as publisher. “I took the page to [president] David Schreff, and I said, ‘Here we have Paul Levitz on DC’s side. What title should I have?’ Basically Schreff said, ‘You can have whatever title Levitz has.’”

So Rhoades walked out of the office a new executive vice president.

This latest batch of crossovers was aimed straight at the heart of the market’s increasingly insular fanbase. The recent bust had driven out many of the comic book tourists, and with newsstands becoming a less viable outlet with every passing day, the number of casual and younger readers was diminishing. The aging fanboys, who were the bread and butter of the direct market, were suddenly becoming all the industry had left. A Marvel survey in the late nineties, for example, found that the average reader was a geriatric twenty-six-year-old. The days of “Hey, kids! Comics!” were fading.

These new crossovers were not the same kind of pop-culture curiosity the original in 1976 had been. Superman meeting Spider-Man for the first time had been a mainstream news story, but the Punisher going toe-to-toe with Batman—and not the Batman that you know, by the way, but a new Batman named Jean-Paul Valley who used to be called Azrael but took up the mantle after … er, never mind. These books were for the hardcore hobbyists whose heads were filled with deep knowledge about every corner, character, and costume of both the Marvel and DC universes.

But for all the fan service showered on the readership over the years, there was still one project that hadn’t yet happened—one that fans had been begging for, mailing letters about, and beseeching the great Odin to deliver unto them. Characters fighting each other was great and all, but all that did was determine which single person was stronger. What fans truly craved was a battle of universes, an all-encompassing smack-down between DC and Marvel, pitting scads of heroes against one another to determine, once and for all, which reigned supreme. Who was better? Marvel or DC?

After more than thirty years readers were about to find out.

The market downturn had made such a project not only possible but necessary, and hopes were it could prove to be a major fiscal shot in the arm. Also serving to grease the wheels was the ascendency of Mike Carlin at DC and Mark Gruenwald at Marvel to the executive editor positions.

Gruenwald was a former fanzine editor who had begun working for Marvel in the 1970s. His knowledge of the characters’ histories was among the deepest on staff, and he served as a sort of “continuity cop.” Carlin had gotten his start as Gruenwald’s assistant back in the early eighties before jumping to DC and handling the Superman titles. The two were like brothers, and Gruenwald had hanging on his office wall an image of his face morphed together with Carlin’s.

In 1995 Carlin and Gruenwald hatched a plan for the ultimate crossover, which was to be called Marvel/DC: Super War. As with past crossovers, the idea was to choose talent from both sides who was emblematic of each company—an interesting idea that set up the series as not just a clash of characters but of each publisher’s style and expertise. The artists were to switch off, with each side drawing two of the four issues.

DC’s initial choice to pencil the company’s half was José Luis García-López, a longtime DC artist who drew the characters so on model, so perfectly within DC’s house style that his work was often used for images on licensed products. He declined, and DC tapped Dan Jurgens, the penciler on “The Death of Superman,” instead.

Marvel at first had problems securing an artist for the same reasons it did back in 1976.

“There was some reticence on Marvel’s part to pull one of their A-list guys from one of their titles to do this thing that was only half of a Marvel project, so we went through a list of guys who ended up turning it down,” Marz says.

John Romita Jr., the son of Marvel’s longtime art director and the artist of Spider-Man, passed. As did Andy and Adam Kubert, the sons of former DC editor Joe Kubert and superstars in their own right. Marvel ultimately settled for Claudio Castellini, an Italian artist who had done very little work for them. In a way it perfectly summed up the companies. DC chose a seasoned veteran, Marvel went for a hot newcomer.

The writing duties were also to be tag-teamed. For its part DC selected Ron Marz, the Green Lantern writer and someone who, at age six, had penned a letter to Marvel (in crayon, no less) demanding that the Avengers fight the Justice League.

“Mike [Carlin] called me to ask if I wanted to write the crossover, and ten-year-old me had a head explosion,” Marz says. “I fell off my chair. I thought, I actually get to do this?”

Marvel’s contribution was Peter David, a former sales department employee who broke into writing and was known for his work on The Incredible Hulk.

The writers and editors began planning the series, but fearful that the details of the project would leak, they met in secret at Gruenwald’s uptown Manhattan apartment. There they hashed out the basic plot. It involved two warring godlike brothers—one representing Marvel and the other DC—challenging each other to a proxy duel that would pit champions from each of their universes against one another to see which was superior. And the universe that lost “could cease to exist forever.” (And if you buy that, we’ve got a super-bridge to sell you.)

“It was a popcorn story. It was an excuse to have these characters meet and fight, which was what everybody wanted,” Marz says. “We knew we weren’t doing Shakespeare.”

The list of one-on-one battles came together pretty easily, as most DC characters had a reasonably obvious counterpart. Marvel’s scrappy, violent Wolverine would fight DC’s scrappy, violent Lobo. Marvel archer Hawkeye would battle DC archer Green Arrow. Aquaman would square off against the Sub-Mariner. The four issues would contain eleven battles in total—an odd number to ensure there would be no tie. The first six contests would end in stalemates. But the outcome of the final five would be determined by a fan vote, cast through email or regular mail. Those match-ups—Batman vs. Captain America, Hulk vs. Superman, Superboy vs. Spider-Man, Wolverine vs. Lobo and Wonder Woman vs. Storm—were carefully chosen to avoid a drubbing by either side.

“We knew who’d win based on popularity and which character was more well known,” Marz says. “Batman and Superman were going to win. The only one we didn’t know was Wonder Woman and Storm.”

For the record the X-Men’s Storm triumphed. But somewhere out there is a page in which Wonder Woman emerges victorious. Because of the tight production schedule, two different pages had to be drawn to cover both possible outcomes of the vote.

The Storm win sealed Marvel’s victory for the whole event. Despite the loss, the DC universe was spared. At the end of issue #4 the cosmic brothers shake hands and agree that both universes have value—and, presumably, merchandising potential.

Marvel wasn’t quite as good of a sport. The company later ran a house ad in some of its comics crowing about the victory. “We won!” the page read in massive red type. The ad was quickly discontinued because the contract between the two companies forbade either side from publicly declaring themselves the victor.

The spirit of cooperation between the two companies extended further than just the four issues that comprised Marvel versus DC. The real surprise of the crossover came with the announcement that for one month between the third and fourth issue of the miniseries the companies would be creating new, hybrid characters by combining one from each company. The temporary line—it was to last for one month only, publishing twelve titles—was to be called Rival Comics. That was later changed to Amalgam, due to trademark issues.

At a DC meeting each editor and assistant was asked to write down five ideas for the proposed line. The titles and concepts were to come first, with the stories determined later. JLX mashed up DC’s JLA (Justice League of America) and Marvel’s X-Men. Doctor Strangefate combined the two occult heroes from both companies, Marvel’s Doctor Strange and DC’s Doctor Fate.

“One idea that didn’t make it was Giant-Sized Man Servant, which was some sort of combo between [Batman’s butler] Alfred and [Avengers butler] Jarvis with growing powers,” says Chris Duffy, the assistant editor on DC versus Marvel.

The initial twelve Amalgam titles landed on shelves in February 1996, leaving the fanboy community trembling with joy at seeing the universes mashed up. If readers only knew how far the original plans extended. The initial proposal called for one particularly unprecedented piece of cooperation: The publishers would actually exchange characters for a year. Someone from the Marvel universe—She-Hulk was given as an example—would appear in DC’s publications, and someone from the DC universe would cross over into Marvel’s.

“That didn’t happen,” Duffy says. “I imagine that was just too complicated to figure out how they could reprint that material.”

Marvel versus DC and the Amalgam experiment were, for many, among the high points of the 1990s—a decade known more for its unnecessary titles, flashy art, sloppy writing, and cash-grab gimmicks. The projects certainly marked an apex for Marvel.

The company, once stable and small, had grown increasingly chaotic since its new corporate overlords assumed control. It cycled through executive leadership, with some honchos lasting just a matter of months. At a 1996 editorial retreat writer Scott Lobdell joked to the assembled crowd, “Don’t worry if you haven’t met the new president, Scott Marden. Wait a few weeks and you can meet the new one.”

Marvel continued to struggle with slowing sales and mounting debt. In December 1996 Perelman filed for bankruptcy protection. For longtime comic book readers the news was akin to being told Strawberry Shortcake had cancer, an unwelcome intrusion of harsh reality into a beloved fantasy world. The bankruptcy also helped, once and for all, to kill the myth that Stan Lee had cultivated for so many years, painting Marvel as a rollicking, carefree place staffed by the wacky bullpenners who did it for the love of superheroes and the pursuit of far-out ideas. In the end Marvel had no special magic. It was just like every other business—all about dollars and cents and vulnerable to the cruel whims of capitalism.

The once-great publisher was in such dire straits that it literally sold the doors off its office. The glass entryway, etched with Marvel’s characters, was snapped up by a collector.

The bankruptcy rightfully spooked many at DC. As much animosity as the companies might have had with one another, as much pride as the staff might have had that its company was better, Marvel and DC needed one another. If one were to disappear, it wouldn’t be long until the other collapsed as well.

“There were no parties at DC about the Marvel situation,” says former DC editor K. C. Carlson. “We were very concerned about the industry as a whole. We were aware this was not good times.”

That sympathy only extended so far, however. Rumors began to swirl that Marvel might cease publishing its own books—similar to the whispers that had dogged DC in the seventies and eighties.

“DC was hoping to get the Fantastic Four publishing rights,” says one insider who asked to remain anonymous. “If a few dominoes had fallen differently or a few people made minutely different decisions, the face of comics would look very different—and worse—today.”

Marvel did continue to publish, though, and after a long, complicated (and boring) corporate battle among wealthy titans—few of whom had probably ever read a comic book—the company emerged from bankruptcy under the control of new ownership. Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad, a bearish, Harley-riding Israeli who grew up reading comics in Hebrew, were now in charge. The two were determined to take Marvel in their own direction.

“Avi and [Marvel’s CEO from 1996–1997] Scott Sassa would often team up and override Stan,” former publisher Shirrel Rhoades says. “Stan would say, ‘I was talking to David Schwimmer from Friends, and he’d like to get involved with us.’ And they’d laugh and say, ‘David Schwimmer?! That’s not our image.’”

Perlmutter was a hardened veteran of the Israel Defense Forces who was rarely photographed and had developed a legendary reputation for thrift. While DC continued to enjoy its cushy corporate existence, Marvel was bent to Perlmutter’s penny-pinching ways, compounding the misery many felt working in a dying industry.

Perlmutter killed the company Christmas party and got rid of the office’s free coffee machine. He chastised employees for not photocopying on both sides of a sheet of paper, and was known to make the rounds in the office after hours to dig through the staff’s trash, looking for perfectly good paper clips that had been thrown away. He’d then leave the clips in little piles on the offender’s desk.

“He called me in once to justify why [editor] Tom Brevoort was on the phone with [artist] Carlos Pacheco, who lived in Spain, for an hour?” says former editor Frank Pittarese. “Well, Carlos was drawing the Fantastic Four. ‘They got to talk for an hour?!’ he’d ask.”

The staff was given key cards they were required to swipe when they entered and left the office, and Perlmutter would supposedly study the data to make sure no one was taking too long at lunch. As a joke, someone circulated a fake memo on official Marvel letterhead that demanded employees who needed to “go number two” should use the bathroom at the McDonald’s downstairs.

The bankruptcy period also brought a new editor-in-chief. Marvel ousted Tom DeFalco in 1994, making way for Bob Harras in 1995. The choice was a clear indication where Marvel’s priorities remained, as Harras was best known for launching the mega-selling X-Men #1 back in 1991 and overseeing an increasingly impenetrable X-Men family of titles popular with lifer readers.

Harras seemed to personify Marvel in the nineties, with his sensibilities meshing with the flashy art and superficial storytelling that had come to define the decade. He was also no fan of DC, believing the company’s talent to be inferior. (Which is ironic because Harras became DC’s editor-in-chief in 2010.) When Marvel managed to poach Grant Morrison, the heady Scotsman who had produced the best-selling Arkham Asylum graphic novel for DC, Morrison was put on a low-profile miniseries called Skrull Kill Krew.

“It was considered a real get to land Grant,” says Glenn Greenberg, the assistant editor on Skrull Kill Krew. “But the best that Grant could do was Skrull Kill Krew because, coming from DC, he wasn’t valued.”

Morrison quickly returned to DC, where he helmed a much-lauded relaunch of the Justice League in 1996. He took a little revenge on Marvel in the series’ first issue. The book included a scene in which aliens executed a group of villains, and among those meeting a fiery end—you had to squint to see them—were two characters who looked an awful lot like Marvel’s Doctor Doom and Wolverine.

Morrison must have had clout, or perhaps none of the higher-ups at DC noticed. As the companies became even more corporate, the cheeky, in-book digs and homages to the competition once the currency of the rivalry were becoming less frequent.

“We got in trouble for that stuff,” says former DC editor Dan Raspler. “Paul [Levitz] was nervous about getting sued. I think he thought if it was a general policy of allowance, somebody would cross a line and just put Wolverine in the comic and we’d get sued.”

“I never liked it,” Levitz says. “When I was twelve, I got a kick out of it, but was never a fan past twelve.”

One of the more blatant homages came with the introduction of the Extremists in a 1990 issue of Justice League Europe. The team of villains were clearly modeled after Marvel’s most iconic baddies. Dreamslayer, a magical demon, was based on Doctor Strange foe Dormammu, the armored Lord Havok a stand-in for Doctor Doom, and Gorgon for Doctor Octopus.

“Marvel did this group based on the Justice League, Squadron Supreme, so we thought, turnabout is fair play,” says Extremist cocreator Keith Giffen. “We just threw it in there and thought, let’s have some fun with this. We never heard from Marvel. If they’d come to us and said anything, we’d go, ‘What about [the Squadron Supreme]?’”

“I got to DC in 1992, and it was the kind of thing where some young punk like myself who was a fan would say, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we used the Extremists?’” former DC editor Ruben Diaz says. “And someone would go, ‘Yeahhh, that’s probably not a good idea.’”

Marvel writers, too, were under strict instructions not to include cameos of DC characters.

“Walt Simonson had had [Superman’s alter ego] Clark Kent show up in Thor [#341 in 1984], and DC was not happy with that,” says Marvel writer Peter David.

Despite the ban, David pulled off a stealth crossover of his own in 1994 when he had Death, Dream’s sister from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, briefly appear in an issue of The Incredible Hulk. David sought and received the blessing of Gaiman as well as Paul Levitz under two conditions: Neither Death’s face nor her trademark ankh necklace could be shown.

One of the most costly intercompany jabs came in 1999 with issue #5 of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, published through a DC imprint. The series teamed classic Victorian literary characters and was written by Alan Moore, the bearded Brit genius behind the most influential series of the 1980s, including Watchmen and Swamp Thing.

Each issue of the series reprinted real ads from the 1800s in the back of the comic, and issue #5 contained a rather unfortunate notice for Marvel brand “whirling spray,” a “vaginal syringe.” The implications were pretty clear: Moore was calling Marvel douches.

Deeming the visual barb vulgar and fearful that it would lead to retaliation from Marvel, DC decided to pulp the run and alter the ad to read “Amaze” instead of “Marvel” in a reprinted edition.

The recall cost DC tens of thousands of dollars and delayed the release of issue #5 by several months, but it was consistent with the company’s conservative attitude. Marvel tended to be scrappier, ballsier, and more willing to poke its competition in the eye, while DC continued to hold on to its self-image as the gold standard of comic book publisher—a leftover from the 1960s. Even when given the chance to take a gentle dig at its competitor, DC opted to take a loss instead.

“It’s classy to take the higher road,” DC editor Dan Raspler says. “The attitude was, ‘We’re not going to do the gutter-sniping, playful, childish bullshit. We’re going to be classy gentlemen.’”

DC had better Bubble Wrap its china and stow its pocket square, because its genteel disposition was about to be severely tested. Mud was set to fly between the two companies like never before, marking the nastiest era in the Marvel-DC rivalry to date.