90's comic bubble burst

[ComicCollectorx19]

Could someone give me the general overview as to what happened in the 90s as many in the modern section refer to it and im curious to what exactly went down.

 

Thanks

[Bio-Rupp]

It was the best of times... it was the worst of times.

[Dr. Balls]

It was a dark and stormy night...

[dupont2005]

People who didn't like comics started buying comics. Then people who liked comics quit liking comics. Then everything broke.

[Dr. Balls]

Could someone give me the general overview as to what happened in the 90s as many in the modern section refer to it and im curious to what exactly went down.

 

Thanks

 

I owned a comic shop in the mid-90's and it's hard to pin it to one thing. Comic book creators acted like bltchy rock stars not caring if they were late for anything, Wizard magazine influenced the market with the clout of it's totally awesome publication, comic book collectors had no idea what "print run" meant, nor how it affected the collectibility of a comic, and publishers gouged consumers in every way possible with custom paper stock, variants, mail aways and anything to get them to buy multiple copies.

 

When people went to cash in and resell all the manufactured collectibles they bought - there was no one wanting to buy them. So the guy who paid $150 for 5 copies of Lady Death Lingerie was not only left with a comic that no one wanted, be he couldn't even sell it back to comic shops for a fraction of what they originally paid for it under the impression it would be worth more at a later date - it left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.

 

Consider for a moment that everyone in the Modern section is going completely apeshlt over Saga, which had a print run of 37,000. Multiply that by a factor of 50 and you'll get what people were doing when Spawn came out at a 1,700,000 print run.

 

I loved being a comic shop owner in the 90's - people were throwing money at me for multiple copies of new comics that they thought would turn into gold the minute they got them home. People were trading in silver age books for Bad Girl books because they thought they could put their kids through college on Shi back issues. It was like the first half of the movie Goodfellas. It was awesome, and it came crashing down like a frozen blue turd from an airplane bathroom. Thankfully, I cashed out in 1996 and ran.

[VeryFineNearMint-migration]

Here's some great reading on the '90s boom / bust:

 

The Crash of 1993

As the great comic-book bubble showed, sometimes there’s no recovery from a speculative boom

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/crash-1993_573252.html?nopager=1

 

The Comic Book Apocalypse

http://badmouth.net/the-comic-book-apocalypse/

 

Also recommend Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, look for it on Amazon. Has detailed behind-the-scenes on what lead up to the implosion.

 

VF / NM

[dupont2005]

Could someone give me the general overview as to what happened in the 90s as many in the modern section refer to it and im curious to what exactly went down.

 

Thanks

 

I owned a comic shop in the mid-90's and it's hard to pin it to one thing. Comic book creators acted like bltchy rock stars not caring if they were late for anything, Wizard magazine influenced the market with the clout of it's totally awesome publication, comic book collectors had no idea what "print run" meant, nor how it affected the collectibility of a comic, and publishers gouged consumers in every way possible with custom paper stock, variants, mail aways and anything to get them to buy multiple copies.

 

When people went to cash in and resell all the manufactured collectibles they bought - there was no one wanting to buy them. So the guy who paid $150 for 5 copies of Lady Death Lingerie was not only left with a comic that no one wanted, be he couldn't even sell it back to comic shops for a fraction of what they originally paid for it under the impression it would be worth more at a later date - it left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.

 

Consider for a moment that everyone in the Modern section is going completely apeshlt over Saga, which had a print run of 37,000. Multiply that by a factor of 50 and you'll get what people were doing when Spawn came out at a 1,700,000 print run.

 

I loved being a comic shop owner in the 90's - people were throwing money at me for multiple copies of new comics that they thought would turn into gold the minute they got them home. People were trading in silver age books for Bad Girl books because they thought they could put their kids through college on Shi back issues. It was like the first half of the movie Goodfellas. It was awesome, and it came crashing down like a frozen blue turd from an airplane bathroom. Thankfully, I cashed out in 1996 and ran.

It's interesting hearing about it from a LCS owner's perspective. I was a collector in the early 90's. Not an investor, I was a kid, but I did think my comics would be worth money some day. That didn't really effect my buying though. I remember when the popular Marvel guys first started getting big. McFarlane on ASM, Jim Lee on UXM, so on. At first I thought they were good, but then everyone started imitating them. Everyone!. I'm talking the artists of low print run indy stuff were imitating them, DC artists were imitating them, and it got old. Then they founded Image, and at first I thought that was cool. The super heroes weren't some relic from the 40's. They were completely new. But they weren't really any good. I didn't like turning a comic sideways to read it. I didn't like every page to be a splash page. I didn't like every comic on the stands to look like it was illustrated by one of these four or five guys with nearly identical styles. Then the deaths and resurrections and crossovers and broken backs and more and more titles for the same super heroes popping up and you have to read them all or you won't know what's going on and everything just culminated and I decided I hated super heroes. It just clicked, and I could never turn it off again. And even my last resort holdout comics seemed ruined. Elfquest had like at least five titles and three timelines and multiple continuities going. And they were all in color now. I think even Usagi Yojimbo was in color. The Ex Mutants had super powers, were in color, kid friendly, and looked like they were illustrated by someone who wished he was Rob Liefeld. It was over. For the people actually looking inside these things and not just bagging and boarding them by the hundred, it was a bad time. I was gone before the bad girl craze hit.

[stroszek]

[joecgcmaniac]

 

sad thing is, the market had already collapsed, which is why this was allowed to happen

[Talapas]

 

[thehumantorch]

Here's some great reading on the '90s boom / bust:

 

The Crash of 1993

As the great comic-book bubble showed, sometimes there’s no recovery from a speculative boom

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/crash-1993_573252.html?nopager=1

 

The Comic Book Apocalypse

http://badmouth.net/the-comic-book-apocalypse/

 

Also recommend Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, look for it on Amazon. Has detailed behind-the-scenes on what lead up to the implosion.

 

VF / NM

 

I'd also recommend Comic Wars Marvels Battle For Survival. Some rich junk bond dude took over Marvel, did everything he could to pump up the sales short term, and then sold junk bonds based on Marvel's inflated value. It's a great read and helps to explain all the variant covers and that went on in the industry.

[Prince Namor]

It was a dark and stormy night...

 

The night was sultry. It's too d*mn sultry in here!

[Tony S]

Could someone give me the general overview as to what happened in the 90s as many in the modern section refer to it and im curious to what exactly went down.

 

Thanks

 

I owned a comic shop in the mid-90's and it's hard to pin it to one thing. Comic book creators acted like bltchy rock stars not caring if they were late for anything, Wizard magazine influenced the market with the clout of it's totally awesome publication, comic book collectors had no idea what "print run" meant, nor how it affected the collectibility of a comic, and publishers gouged consumers in every way possible with custom paper stock, variants, mail aways and anything to get them to buy multiple copies.

 

When people went to cash in and resell all the manufactured collectibles they bought - there was no one wanting to buy them. So the guy who paid $150 for 5 copies of Lady Death Lingerie was not only left with a comic that no one wanted, be he couldn't even sell it back to comic shops for a fraction of what they originally paid for it under the impression it would be worth more at a later date - it left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.

 

Consider for a moment that everyone in the Modern section is going completely apeshlt over Saga, which had a print run of 37,000. Multiply that by a factor of 50 and you'll get what people were doing when Spawn came out at a 1,700,000 print run.

 

I loved being a comic shop owner in the 90's - people were throwing money at me for multiple copies of new comics that they thought would turn into gold the minute they got them home. People were trading in silver age books for Bad Girl books because they thought they could put their kids through college on Shi back issues. It was like the first half of the movie Goodfellas. It was awesome, and it came crashing down like a frozen blue turd from an airplane bathroom. Thankfully, I cashed out in 1996 and ran.

 

Great post Balls. Not only is it an excellent yet brief summation of the boom and bust in the 90's, but "it came crashing down like a frozen blue turn from an airplane bathroom" is a wonderfully turned phrase.

[The Amazing Chump]

There was greed from the publishers, the sellers and the collectors. But let's not forget the stories. For the most part, they just weren't any good. Reliably selling well thought out characters dies on the vine and nothing new and worthwhile was created. I fully admit that I bought my fair share of Lobo books, but I was a teenager that didn't know any better. (Of course, as someone that had been buying for about a decade at that point I felt the thrill of McFarlane spideys and Keith on Wolverine-lots of change).

[tinynascarfan-migration]

I also had a comic shop in the 90's.

 

It wasn't much, but I had several loyal customers who always got their new releases from me. Then Marvel decided(in their infinite wisdom) to start distributing their own books thru Heroes world dist. and that was it for me, I had had enough.

 

I got out of the business and away from collecting for a few years and I heard about Marvel's financial problems, and right then I knew there was a God. I just wish they would have taken all those greedy creators from Image with them.

 

All the books Image put out in the 90's sure were pretty, but the stories are something that 5 year olds could have come up with.

 

 

[DeliBebek]

Most people tend to see this from the point of view of the comics shop, because everything was available at a comics shop and that's where most of the chaos occurred. Without a comics shop, I only had the newsstand to understand the state of comics publishing. I was really only looking for good comics to buy every month, but unfortunately, there were very few. There were more different comics than ever, but my monthly "must-buy" list was down to 1 series.

 

I never saw Valiant. There were only a few Image titles on the racks, but Malibu really made an impact in that area. I remember Ultraverse comics hanging off the rack. There just wasn't enough space for all the comics that were coming out every month.

 

I haven't read the official analyses, but in my ignorance I blame the Ninja Turtles. Clearly, the internal effect was the black-and-white boom, hundreds of creators trying to emulate the success of the comic. When the Turtles became a property with value beyond comics, their first appearance really took off in value as well. It's pretty clear the Image founders wanted this same situation with their characters. How long after the launch were the Spawn, WildC.A.T.S. and Savage Dragon cartoons?

 

Everything else is after-effect. Once the idea that a small comic could hit it big was out there, everyone was afraid of missing out on a quick turnaround for that next big thing, Perlman included. Variants and special printing gimmicks were only a fill-in for the lack of anything new or novel going on between the covers.

 

The irony to me is that when I look back at the period in mainstream comics from 1996-2000, it was really a great time for enjoyable comics. Comics crashed in the sense that the industry shrank and the retail side shrank, both for new and back issue comics. The quality of comics took a necessary upswing to keep what readers were still trying to read them.

 

My pitiful two cents.

[tth2]

I haven't read the official analyses, but in my ignorance I blame the Ninja Turtles. Clearly, the internal effect was the black-and-white boom, hundreds of creators trying to emulate the success of the comic. When the Turtles became a property with value beyond comics, their first appearance really took off in value as well. It's pretty clear the Image founders wanted this same situation with their characters. How long after the launch were the Spawn, WildC.A.T.S. and Savage Dragon cartoons?

TMNT were associated with the 80s bubble burst.

 

They had nothing to do with the 90s bubble burst, other than possibly that creators` eyes had been opened to the potential of owning characters who could cross over into mainstream media. But I think the Image guys would have moved from Marvel whether or not the TMNT precedent existed, because they simply made a lot more money by doing so, even if their characters never crossed over.

[Mike's Rack]

Deli- Your point about the quality of "post crash" books was a good one. The financial part of the market crashed and many got burned, but that cleared the field for some truly quality story based books to follow. I don't think you would have books like preacher and walking dead if the crash had not torched away all the drek. It's like a forest fire clearing away all the old debris and allowing healthy foliage to fill in. The fear in the 90's was that the industry would not recover, it's still not like it was but that is a good thing. However, like a forest fire we should also be aware of the risk factors involved and not rush blindly into repeating the past.

 

 

[spidrvacc]

I was one of the lucky ones who sold the image and valiant junk before the crash. I had lived through the sports card crash.(my brother still has tens of thousands of cards in his attic) Knew it was comming. You had people who didn't care at all about comics buying them with the intent to sell. Lots of them. Huge print runs so there was tons of them. Then when everyone wanted to sell you have sellers with no buyers.

For me tipping point that made me sell was when my friend came home with 3 of the foil covered valiant / image books. Told me he paid $320 for them. Comic shop owner told him a great investment for the future, kids college etc. And he then went to his bank to get a safety deposit box for them. I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. Where is his "investment" , I haven't spoken to him in years but I think he threw them out a few years later .

[Gatsby77]

Nostalgia post:

 

I loved being a kid and a comic collector during that time.

 

I started collecting in 1989 with the Marvel Acts of Vengeance storyline and Year 3/Lonely Place of Dying over in Batman and went through to about 1996, when I graduated from high school.

 

It was awesome--1990-1991 had a ridiculous run of good x-books with Jim Lee on Uncanny, Liefeld on New Mutants, Portacio on X-Factor and the introduction of characters like Gambit and Deadpool. And--helped along by Wizard, those 1990-1991 books did increase in value.

 

The excitement around X-Force 1 (ooh could you find a white negative Cable card?), and X-Men 1 (I bought 5 copies of the $3.95 gatefold on day of release, thinking it'd increase like the bagged Spiderman 1s did) was palpable, and the quarterly Overstreets Updates did as much to fuel speculation as did Wizard and Comics Values Monthly.

 

Infinity Gauntlet was my generation's Secret Wars, and it took me years to track down an affordable Silver Surfer 50 (ooh...silver foil!).

 

By 1992 it was in full swing, with Valiant (went to 3 comic shops before I found a "free" Unity 0) and Image (sign at my LCS: "Youngblood # 1. Limit 5 per customer." And yes--they sold out of several hundred copies and it quickly went to $6-8).

 

Say what you will, but between Image and Valiant, we thought it was the dawn of a new age equivalent to Marvel's genesis 30 years earlier. And collectors and dealers alike thought Harbinger 1 (at $125) was equivalent to Giant-Sized X-Men 1 and would go to $250.

 

What Image did, however, was provide a ground floor for speculation starting with pre-orders. This allowed 12 year olds like me to get multiples of books like Spawn 1 or Shadowhawk 1 and see them still increas in value. So, enter the baseball card dealers and others who saw only dollar signs.

 

The beginning of the end, for me, happened in two stages. Superman 75 (media frenzy, price changes literally by the hour at my LCS, and my buying at $2 per and selling to kids in my high school study hall for $12 per that same week); and Ultraverse.

 

Ultraverse was marketed as the new Valiant, and I remember one 3-month span when it was the red hot--a major convention when the hottest book on the floor was Prime # 2. The problem? People only wanted the direct sales versions. When the direct copies of issues 1 and 2 were selling for $8-$12 and the newstand versions were available, in bulk, for cover price or less just two tables over, the market's broken.

 

So...I'm sorry for all of the collectors who left comics due to the crash in 1993 (believe it was Apr. 1993 that saw something like Adv. of Superman 500 and Turok 1 come out the same month or some madness), and that the industry still hasn't recovered.

 

But it was a great time to be a kid, in the thick of it, and gleefully fork over $9 for three copies of Venom # 1 thinking we'd get rich.