Date: Mon, 30 Dec 1996 14:52:37 -0500
To: [c--m--x] at [facteur.std.com]
From: [b--ea--y] at [po-box.mcgill.ca] (bart)
Subject: Send Info: March

>From the book:  The Curse of Kewl: The Death of the Comic Book in America
(London and New York: Routledge, 2038).

Chapter Seven: "1997 - The Distribution Implosion"

        Marvel's declaration of Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the end of 1996
has, for many of the reasons suggested in chapter six, been generally
regarded as the single proximate factor which pushed the tottering American
comics industry towards its ultimate collapse (for an example of this
argument see Gene Kannenberg, Spiegelman's Legacy: How Marvel Destroyed the
Spirit of the Art, Duke University Press, 2023). Closer attention to the
specifics, however, suggests that this may not, in fact, be the case. While
it is true that Marvel's rapid decline in market significance during the
second half of 1997 (coinciding with the months of transition of ownership
from Perelman to Icahn) and eventual descent into receivership in early
1998 played a key role in the snuffing of the comics industry,
responsibility cannot be laid solely at the feet of Marvel as many
contemporary comics historians have suggested. Indeed, culpability should
be shared by any number of comics publishers active at the time.

        A quick perusal of the distribution catalogue released by Diamond
Comics Distribution -- at the time the single largest distributor of comics
in the United States (for a history of Diamond please see Matthew High,
"Understanding the Diamond Three Hundred: A Historiography of Lies and
Deception", Inks vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 147-192) -- indicates the degree to
which publishers other than Marvel had badly misjudged the audience for
comics in the United States of the fin de millenium period. What is obvious
from the Diamond catalogue (Previews) is the fact that even without the
store bankruptcies which resulted from Marvel's spectacular death in 1998
the direct market was essentially doomed. Indeed, it may be possible to
suggest that the Marvel crisis was in actuality a fortuitous occasion
because it enabled a great deal of dead wood to be stripped away from the
industry, thus prolonging its health well into what has come to be known as
the post-national era of comics.

        Let us turn at this point to a specific consideration of the state
of the non-Marvel comics market at the time of the first Marvel bankruptcy
in order to clear up a number of surviving myths about the time.

        What is most obvious, of course, is the fact that Marvel's troubles
coincided with the disastrous decision by DC Comics to significantly alter
the costume and powers of Superman for the first time in fifty-nine years.
It was bad enough that the editors simply turned the beloved character into
a watered-down cross between the Ray and Black Lightning, but the initial
promo art made the tragic mistake of foregrounding the ridiculously small
size of Superman's genitals. This hit too close to home for the majority of
Superman's remaining fans and the Superman titles were cancelled after only
six more issues and replaced by photo comics comprised of images scanned
from the low-rated television series "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of
Superman". DC's decision to produce and "all nude, all Teri" issue in June
1998 is still considered to be the low point of the medium by many (see for
example, Charles Hatfield "Superman and the Supreme Court: The Historic
Stakes of the Kiddie Porn Trial of 1999", The Journal of American Justice,
v. 47, n. 2, pp. 345-378). If Superman's Death can be seen as the high
water mark of the speculation frenzy and his return as the first sign that
the frenzy had ended, the re-powering of Superman should be regarded as the
first signal that the industry had completely lost its way.

        Evidence of this fact is offered by Diamond's selection of the "Top
Ten Stories" of 1996. Laughingly myopic as a listing of significant events,
Diamond suggested that the release of a Star Wars mini-series was more
important than the bankruptcy of Capital City distribution. Other
knee-slappers that made the list included: the tenth anniversary of Frank
Miller's wildly over-praised hyper-paranoid remasculinization of Batman,
The Dark Knight Returns; the short-lived Acclaim superhero relaunch
(erroneously referred to as "exciting" by the catalogue); and Jim Lee's
formation of Homage Comics, an imprint which had already been reabsorbed
into Image less than six months after it had begun and which would be
bankrupt before the end of 1997.

        Yet if Diamond was completely out to lunch it may only be because
the publishers were even moreso. Acclaim Comics, long the laughing stock of
serious superhero fans, accelerated their drive into oblivion by releasing
two new titles which had absolutely no chance for success whatsoever.
Bloodshot (by the uninspired team of Len Kaminski and Sal Velluto) was an
embarassingly unselfconscious attempt to cater to the Image audience by
featuring a character who was equal parts Terminator and Spawn. Bloodshot
was discontinued after only four issues. Worse was Trinity Angels (by Kevin
"Jerry" Maguire and Dan "The Man" Panosian), the ludicrously sophomoroic
sexcapade adventures of three women from Long Island with impossibly large
breasts. The abject nature of Trinity Angels was clearly signalled by its
advertising which promised "sex, sass, sizzle" and claimed that it was both
"saucy" and "titillating". Ultimately however it was probably the claim
that Trinity Angels would be a "word-of-mouth buzz" that doomed the title.
Only two issues were published and Kevin Maguire never worked in the comics
industry again.

        From the contemporary vantage point it is difficult to believe that
anyone believed that Acclaim could possibly make money printing comic books
like Quantum and Woody #2. Certainly retailers and fans could not believe
it and when Acclaim folded in the spring of 1998 the blame was correctly
laid at the feet of Fabian Nicieza, the man who had collected an outrageous
group of uninspired hacks and attempted to build a comics company on
nothing more than a combination of warmed over cliches, bad art and video
game tie-ins. These three came together most obviously in Nicieza's own
Turok Quarterly: Spring Break in the Lost Land, a lame rip off of Marvel's
Kazar crossed with the low-impact masturbation potential of a Gen 13
swimsuit issue. Sadly Acclaim had not factored in the degree to which
Rafael Kayanan was unable to draw blondes in bikinis with their legs
splayed at the reader in a manner that would properly eroticize seven
year-old readers. Turok Quarterly is best remembered as the lowest selling
comic since the original relaunch of Turok: Dinousaur Hunter by Valiant.

        Over at Dark Horse, the little company that had long ago sold its
soul to be Marvel lite, fourteen titles were released in March that
featured colons in their titles. Obviously the worst of these was Aliens:
Pig (by Chuck "Chuck" Dixon and Flint "Flint" Henry) but other so-called
artists struggled mightily to take the title from the laughably inadequate
bad boy Batman writer and his struggle to bring credibility to the Aliens
concept by tying it to the success of Babe the talking pig. Of these the
most memorable would have to be Frank "Mr Sexual Paranoia" Miller's aptly
named Sin City: Sex and Violence, a story which uncannily prefigured
Miller's own arrest the next year (see Mack White, "Frank Miller and the
Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco: A Conspiracy of Silence",
self-distributed xerox, 2008). Also significant at the time was P. Craig
Russell's Elric: Stormbringer, a comic which had its run cut precipitously
short by a lawsuit from Dave Sim claiming copyright infringement.

        Surprisingly, March was the month during which Dark Horse
executives ruled that it was acceptable for their employees to do work
which was, in fact, colon-less. Word reached Paul Chadwick too late however
and when his Concrete: Think Like a Mountain trade-paperback was released
on non-recycled paper Chadwick was beaten to death by FBI agents posing as
Earth First members at a protest in Maine (see Mack White, "Paul Chadwick
and the FBI: Frank Miller was only the beginning!", self-distributed stone
carving, 2010). Among the non-colon titles released by Dark Horse in 1997
was the slashed Batman/Aliens #1 (a comics adaptation of the script for the
Oscar-winning film of the same name) by Ron "Men are from" Marz and Bernie
"Gotta pay the bills" Wrightson; and The Ninth Gland by Renee "Everyone
hates the" French. Unsurprisingly, French's work was the more popular of
the two and Dark Horse's inability to fill reorders -- combined with the
warehouses full of unsold copies of Batman/Aliens that were the result of a
sustained boycott of Dark Horse by outraged Green Lantern readers --
ultimately bankrupted the company, a turn of events which have tied up the
rights to publish Grendel to this day.

        DC's decision to destroy Superman as a viable licensed property by
removing his cape and turning him blue (still taught at Harvard's Nevins
School of Business as a case study of horrifyingly stupid marketing
decisions) was merely one example of that company's lack of vision. It is
imperative to remember, however, that no matter how misguided the Superman
decision was it did not exist in a vacuum. Other decisions which were
equally stupid included: Resurrection Man, an ongoing series by superstars
Dan Abnet and Jackson Guice which was condemned by Pope Theresa; and 2020
Visions, the kitschily named Jamie Delano sci-fi mini-series (which
demonstrated the good sense to be associated with the poor-faring Vertigo
line rather than the stunningly unsuccessful Helix line, but which also
demonstrated the bad sense of using appallingly ugly photo-montage covers
by John Elder. Unfortunately for DC the photo-montage covers proved the
more powerful and the mini-series was never completed).

        Other trends at DC during March of 1997 included the ill-advised
"crossover with a much less successful comic" (ie. Azrael/Ash); the "get a
guest writer/artist who produces a really unsuccessful comic and let him
work with really lame characters" (ie Dirty Pair's Adam Warren on the
poorly named manga-ish Teen Titans comic, Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone);
and the "start a kids version of really low-selling regular comic rather
than making the low-selling comics accessible to kids" (ie Adventures in
the DC Universe). Ill thought out mini-series included: Vertigo's bad 80s
television knock-off Fault Lines; and Anarky, a four issue series that used
Batman characters to misunderstand philosophical concepts. Amongst the
one-shots were Lobo: Chained, whose incomprehensible ad featured the phrase
"Head Screw Bad Dan Raspler" (for an analysis of the Lobo: Chained ad see
Jacques Derrida, Head Screw Bad: Presence and Absence in the Work of Dan
Raspler, Trans. Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, 2014) and the
Batman Chronicles Gallery, a collection of pin-up art by super-famous
artists like Matt Haley and Lee Weeks.

        Vertigo continued its tradition of ripping people off with House of
Secrets: Foundation, a book which collected the first five issues of the
floundering "horror" series for $1.50 more than the cost of the individual
issues. This scam, a Vertigo standard, paled in comparison to the addition
of three new story pages in the collected version of Neil Gaiman's
ultra-crappy Death: The Time of Your Life, pages which promised to make the
narrative comprehensible. Tragically, these pages were not able to make the
story interesting. Paradox tried to get into the act of ripping off
customers by offering a collected version of the Tom Dehaven and Robin
Smith flop Green Candles at a less-expensive price to bookstores. The
stunningly bizarre belief that the type of comics that sophisticated book
buyers were really looking for were comics by Lobo artists was coupled with
the notion that they also wanted mysteries written by people who had worked
on Judge Dredd. Green Candles and A History of Violence were quickly
remaindered by DC and Pocket Books, once again reaffirming American book
retailers' reluctance to stock comics of any kind.

        Undoubtedly the worst idea to emerge from DC in 1997 was
Christopher Priest and ChrisCross' Xero. One is left to wonder who it was
at DC that thought that combining the talents of two men with silly
pseudonyms whose best known work (The Ray and Blood Syndicate respectively)
had been cancelled would revive the fortunes of a dying company. Certainly
the ads didn't help build much faith in the project, revealing as they did
the utter lunacy of the concept. Suggesting that a character described as
"The world's deadliest assassin. Basketball's most notorious power forward"
would feature in stories "torn from today's headlines" was laughable even
to DC's predominantly pre-teen audience. That the character was named Trane
("Short for Coltrane, short for train wreck") only added further insult to
idiocy. For obvious reasons both Priest and editor Alisande Morales were
let go from the company and neither again worked in the industry.

        More important, however, was the credibility DC lost in fobbing off
this farce on an unsuspecting public. The public clamour raised by outraged
fans severely harmed not only DC but parent company Time/Warner by tipping
public sentiment away from the company at a crucial moment in Ted Turner's
battle with Rupert Murdoch's Fox Corp. When the dust had settled Murdoch
owned not only Time/Warner (and thus DC) but also the newly bankrupted
Marvel. When Murdoch merged the two failing comics companies into one large
block he cast about looking for a President and CEO who knew industry as
well as he knew comics. In retrospect it seems unsurprising that Murdoch
should turn to a young New York business consultant and failed Batman
writer named Mark Nevins to manage the new Fox Comics line but at the time
it seemed quite bold. Nevins' early decisions were seen as quite radical on
the Wall Street of the late-90s to business men not yet accustomed to the
French domination of the American economy which would be the result of the
combined Franco-Quebecois sneak attack of 2002. Nevins' first act was to
fire the entire staff of both companies and replace every writer and artist
with French and German small-press cartoonists. This outraged not only fans
of Chuck Dixon (who wondered where their favourite author would end up) but
the French who were appalled by early efforts like Nicholas de Crecy's
Monsieur Batman and Dupuy and Berberian's Justice League of France. The
turning point came, of course, with the publication of Edmond Baudoin's
X-Men mini-series which won six prizes at Angouleme in 2003. Nevins
relocated Fox Comics to Java in the spring of 2007 and continues to
supervise the operation of the company through a leadership strategy he has
termed "Remote Access" (for more on the remarkable life and career of Mark
Nevins see Paul Socolow and Rich Pettus, Witness to Greatness: The Mark
Nevins Story as Told to the DCC, Prentice-Hall, 2031; for a dissenting
account see Scott Gilbert, Fox in the Chicken Coop: The Real Truth About
Mark Nevins From Someone Who Knows, Random House, 2029).

        1997 was, of course, the turning point for Image comics. What had
begun in 1996 as Silvestri out, Liefeld out, Silvestri in quickly
accelerated into an all out war between the studios. In 1997 McFarlane
left, then rejoined when Lee and Portacio were fired, then quit again when
Larry Marder spilled a cup of coffee on him. Erik Larsen quit on four
separate occasions, wrote two anonymous letters to CBG and was the subject
of an unsuccessful documentary film by terry Zwigoff. Rob Liefeld returned
to Image with the rights to Captain America and the unreturned Jack Kirby
art which he had found hidden under the floorboards in what was once Jim
Shooter's office. Hailed as a hero of creator's rights Liefeld spent the
remainder of his life reading Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Anatomy. Jim Lee was
fired but the Homage line remained part of Image. Silvestri died in an as
yet unexplained golfing accident (see Mack White, Marc Silvestri's Golf
Ball and the CIA: Only the Beginning", self-published, 1999). By the end of
the year the only original Image founder still at the company was
Valentino, gamely chasing the flavours of the month while explaining that
online romance comics were what "he had always dreamed of doing".

        That's not to say that Image didn't produce it's share of
interesting comics in 1997. Arcanum was Brandon Peterson's spin-off from
the Medieval Spawn/Withcblade mini-series, making it the first Image
spin-off from a mini-series based on a crossover between two spin-offs (see
Joseph Witek, Comic Books as Crap: The Narrative Art of Brandon Peterson,
University Press of Mississippi, 2007). March was REM month at Image as
both Larsen and Silvestri used REM lyrics in their ads -- foreshadowing by
six years Peter Buck's decision to dedicate his life full-time to inking
Supreme. Valentino's section of the Image world continued to decline with
the addition of The Adventures of Aaron, Age of Heroes and Soulwind to the
already unremarkable lineup of A Touch of Silver and A Distant Soil, a fact
which simply served to distract people from the reality of how truly awful
Strangers in Paradise #5 was (the issue for which the ad was the nude
blonde eats a bird while standing chest deep in some ice, coupled with a
text portion that indicated that the entire issue had nothing at all to do
with naked bird-eating blondes and everything to do with the humiliation of
the considerably less masturbation friendly brunette). While there was
little doubt that Strangers in Paradise was the stupidest Image comic book,
the issue of stupidest *title* was still very much up in the air. Arriving
in March to challenge Wynnona Earp was Savant Garde, a quickly cancelled
spin-off from Wildcats which demostrated that that title had lost none of
its creativity when Alan Moore left to dedicate his life full time to
working with his mentor, Rob Liefeld.

        If we concede then that the major publishers at the time of the
first Marvel bankruptcy declaration had no clue as to how to revive
interest in the hobbled medium what should we say of the small-press?
Curiously, critics at the time generally held that the small-press held the
hopes for the future of the industry and the art. While that may seem
ridiculously naive in retrospect it was so commmonplace a belief in the
late 1990s that many creators developed a strange fixation with the
smallest possible companies -- self-publishers -- as if their very
proximity to Dave Sim somehow made them ethically superior to their
compatriots.

        Sim, of course, had completely snapped in 1994 and by 1997 the ads
for his Cerebus were primarily concerned with counting backwards from the
number 300. When Sim was institutionalized at Toronto's Kim Campbell
Institute for Deranged Tories in the fall of 1997 self-publishing lost its
most outspoken voice and comics fans everywhere realized that they had
invested hundreds of dollars in a story that had no conceivable end,
Gerhard's attempts to continue the comic with "all-background easy-to-read"
issues notwithstanding. After a protracted legal struggle the rights to
Cerebus reverted to Denise Loubert, whose decision to hire the
near-bankrupt Colleen Doran to finish the series was praised by Friends of
Lulu but condemned by Martin Wagner, sensitive-newage-guy (see Glenn
Carnagey, Operation Crazed Ferret: The Strange and Wonderful Life of Dave
Sim, Red Planet Press Online, 2113).

        Not that Sim was the sole deranged voice in comics at the time.
There was also, for instance, the people at Aardwolf who released Crib
Death: The Babysitter's Companion. Crib Death featured the volatile story
"Queers", which single-handedly destroyed what remained of the careers of
Bill Messner-Loebs, Dave Cockrum, Marie Severin and Tony Isabella. Joe
Linsner found his reputation enhanced by his association with this comic,
which was banned in Canada as hate-propaganda.

        But hate-propaganda isn't a marketing tool that everyone felt
comfortable with in the late-90s era (it would take the riots of 2124 to
bring about that change). Take Slave Labor/Amaze Ink, for example. Slave
Labor's marketing strategy in 1997 consisted primarily of printing
everything indiscriminately and hoping for the best. Thus we find Slave
pushing Abel #1, a comic about racism during the Second World War; Dork #4
with its now infamous Eltingville Twilight Zone story; a $13 comic entitled
Beer and Roaming in Las Vegas; and something called Space Hustlers #1. The
bizarre mix of high-minded social commentary, space opera and ridiculously
broad parody was apparently too much for fans and Slave Labor folded
shortly after Evan Dorkin was trampled to death at a Mighty Mighty
Bosstones concert in New Jersey (for details see Kyle Baker, Why I Hate
Bosstones, Paradox Press, 1999).

        By mid-1997 Antarctic Press' real-life comics (Hepcats and Box
Office Poison) had orders significantly higher than those of Antarctic's
mainstay: Warrior Nun Areala. Sadly Antarctic was never able to capitalize
on this success as Alex Robinson defected from the company to join
Valentino's sulky self-referential wing of Image and Martin Wagner, who was
never able to ship a Hepcats reprint book on schedule, bankrupted Antarctic
with resolicitation fees. Wagner, who died in 2028, spent the rest of his
life re-drawing the first six pages of Hepcats #5.

        1997 saw the last comics released from both Black Eye and Drawn and
Quarterly. Both of these Montreal-based English-language publishers
suffered severe hardships in early 1998 following Quebec's unilateral
declaration of sovereignty. DQ's Chris Oliveros fled to Toronto shortly
before the outbreak of the bloody civil war that rocked Canada until 2003.
There Oliveros tried in vain to recover the money he had lent to Joe Matt
over the years, eventually dying penniless in a Winnipeg soup kitchen.
While DQ was nationalized by the Quebec government, Michel Vrana of Black
Eye opted to stay in Montreal in a valiant effort to maintain a strong
anglo presence in the world of Quebec cartooning. Vrana's show trial of
2002 became a cause celebre in those parts of Canada which had not been
colonized by Quebec (mostly the suburbs surrounding Calgary). Black Eye and
Drawn and Quarterly were merged into a single company following the
Franco-Quebecois conquest of the United States, and thrived under the
supervision of Julie Doucet, who had become world famous because of the
success of the Dirty Plotte children's television show and the marketing
muscle of the "Monkey and the Living Dead" action figure line. Jay
Stephens, whose Land of Nod #3 featured Tutenstein, was hunted down and
killed for his crimes. Adrian Tomine, whose last published work was Optic
Nerve #4, resided in the Los Angeles badlands with Dan Clowes' zip-a-tone
collection until his tragic death at the age of twenty-threee, upon which
time he was inducted into the Eisner hall of fame. Seth, whose Palookaville
#10 began a whole new 10 part storyline, fled with Joe Matt and Chester
Brown to Europe where they joined a small band of radicals in Rotterdam
known to the world simply as (a|c|w) (generally held to be an acronym for
"art|comics|work"), waging armed opposition to both Mark Nevins' Fox Comics
and Doucet's L'oeil dessine, the two largest comic book companies in the
world.

        Other small-press companies fared little better. By 1997 it had
become clear that the new seriousness in comics would fall not to the
traditional standard bearers from the past (Fantagraphics, Kitchen Sink,
Last Gasp) but with highbrow endeavours like Garth Ennis' Event Comics
title: Painkiller Jane vs The Darkness: Stripper #1, a comic which Ennis'
entire career had been leading up to. As for the companies of the past not
much could be done to save them.

        By 1997 it was obvious to everyone that Fantagraphics had become
enamored with the world of pornography. In March Fantagraphics offered only
three comics worth of new material (Naughty Bits #22, New Love #4 and Mark
Kalesniko's 88 page graphic novel Why Did Pete Duel Kill Himself?) in
opposition to the ten new Eros titles. Faced with increasing skepticism
about the notion that three Eros books were required to make up the losses
incurred by the high production costs of Naughty Bits, Fantagraphics
changed its raison d'etre in 1998 and, in a long lead editorial in issue
#198 of the Comics Journal, Gary Groth admitted that it was not the Eros
titles that paid for comics like Jim but comics like Jim that lost money so
that Eros could pay less in taxes each year. The total conversion of
Fantagraphics to pornography occurred shortly after when Bob Fingerman was
hired as the editor of the newly renamed Porno Journal. Ray Mescallado's
column, The Handjob Politik, was an immediate sensation.

        Things weren't much better at Kitchen Sink and Last Gasp, those
bastions of 70s era taste. Last Gasp folded around the same time when
everyone realized that they were publishing nothing but Horny Biker Sluts.
Things were slightly different for Kitchen Sink, which opted in March of
1997 to follow the lead of the hyper-successful Acclaim by releasing
merchandise based on video games (Duke Nukem 3D and SPQR), hyper-violent
yet incomprehensible superhero stories (The Crow: Waking Nightmares), and
pornography (Melody #11). In order to differentiate themselves from
Acclaim, however, Kitchen Sink introduced a line of Peter Rabbit trading
cards (with five levels of chase cards!) in a decision that was praised as
genius by both Friends of Lulu and Wizard. The Peter Rabbit trading cards
were an immediate sensation with sales estimates in the tens of millions
and lines around the block for the sold out show of Potter's work at the
Words and Pictures Museum at Northhampton ("Beatrix Potter and Simon
Bisley: Two Sides of the Same Coin"). Sadly, however, this success brought
the attention of the IRS who arrested Dennis Kitchen in late 1998 after he
was unable to provide accurate sales figures during an audit (see Mack
White, The Taxman Cometh: Mavrides, Kitchen and the Attack on Comics,
self-published, 2006).

        Kitchen's last great comics success was his contribution to Gay
Comix #25 (which also featured the talents of Craig Russell, Howard Cruse,
Diane DiMassa, Lee Marrs, Reed Waller, Roberta Gregory, Donna Barr, Trina
Robbins and others) which defied all expectations by becoming the
top-selling title of 1997, thus vidicating the decision to put superheroes
on the cover. Sensing the beginning of a trend, the ultra-untalented Dale
Keown outed Pitt shortly after to great critical acclaim. The Larry Bareala
scripted issues of Pitt still command a large price from collectors.

        The official change of policy at NBM in March of 1997 caught few
off guard. NBM's decision to deep discount their warehouses of Euro-trash
at $3 each coincided with the publication of their last translated comic:
Giardino's A Jew in Communist Prague: Loss of Innocence. NBM's new
direction was signalled by the publication of Drabble: Son of Drabble by
the multiple award-winning Kevin Fagan. Andrews and McMeel, meanwhile,
published the latest in a tiresome series of post-Drabble comics, Scott
Adams' Dilbert collection Casual Day Has Gone Too Far. Of course nothing
really compared to the Dilbert dolls offered in the Previews toys section.
Smart newspaper editors took one look and realized that the New York Times
had been right all along.

        The high point of 1997 occurred when Maxon Crumb proved that
sitting on a bed of nails eating a long piece of string can be profitable
if it's on film because then a company like Word Play will pay you for
seven illustrations and slap them on some public domain writing, call the
whole thing Maxon's Poe and sell it as a limited edition of 1000 copies,
which was about 994 more than were actually ordered.

        Thus, it is necessary to realize that the end of the direct market
in 1997 was not simply the fault of Marvel. Few if any publishers had any
real clue about where to go with comics as a medium and most had completely
alienated what little fan base they had at the time. It should come as no
surprise then that the last of Bart Beaty's highly unpopular cyber-screeds,
Send Info, would coincide with the release of Diamond's March catalogue.
Beaty later dedicated his life to collating sales figures for comics in
sub-Saharan Africa.

Next: 1998 - Verotik Triumphant

bart


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