Michael's Long Box: How An Intra-Company Crossover Event Brought Down An Industry

My brain's a confused maze of twisty little passages, all alike, piled to the rafters with useless shit I can't bear to throw away, most of which pertains to comic books and video games. When I did my Let's Read for Hero Illustrated #1 a couple of days ago (quick, go upvote it, there's still time!), I must have dislodged an iceberg-sized pile of mind-turds because I haven't been able to stop thinking about 90's comics. Thank you, Steve Harris. So I figure if I'm going to suffer for my hobby, the least the rest of you can do is suffer alongside me as I clean up the mess.

The title's a little hyperbolic, by the way. The implosion of the comic book market in 1996 which shuttered studios, bankrupted publishers, wrecked havoc on mom-and-pop stores across the nation, and caused long-term fans to walk away from the hobby in droves was too large to have been caused by one instance of awful ideas. Nevertheless, I contend that this 1994 mega-crossover involving virtually every major and minor character in the stables of both Image and Valiant comics, did more to open eyes about what was wrong--truly wrong--with the industry than anything else could or would in the years prior or hence.

So here it is, in stunning black-and-white: the crossover which made the mere idea of intra-company relations persona non grata everywhere from the boardroom to the water cooler. The comics industry's encounter with a four-color, foil-embossed Crohn's Disease equivalent. More words than any sane person should write or read about something so awful, from a 90's kid who saw the aftermath unfold in his favorite local comic book shops, and survived to tell the tale.

This, my devoted stable of sanity-challenged Followers, is Deathmate.

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What is Deathmate?

If you were casually browsing the racks of your local comic store in 1994 and saw that cover in the thumbnail up there, you could have been forgiven for thinking this 'Deathmate' was a character. Given that virtually every comic book out there was named after either an individual (Spawn, Captain America, Superman) or a team (The Uncanny X-Men, Justice League of America, The Transformers), it stood to reason 'Deathmate' was not a 'what', but rather a 'who'. I know I did, since I knew very little about either Image Comics or Valiant at the time.

You've already figured out I was wrong. 'Deathmate' wasn't a person, but a title given to a multi-issue crossover like Marvel's Secret Wars or DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths. The idea was that Solar, an atomic-powered super-being from the Valiant universe, in the throes of grief following the death of his girlfriend Gayle, sets out into the universe to be alone and collect himself. He accidentally passes through the fringe at the edge of the Valiant-verse and meets Void, a member of the WildCATs from Image's Wildstorm universe, similarly on the run from her own emotions.

Solar and Void have destiny sex, thus causing a merging of the two universes which should not happen. This starts a stream of dominoes falling that threaten to create a new Big Bang, wiping out both the Image and Valiant universes forever unless their heroes and villains can work together and come up with a way to stop it. In a departure from the traditional way crossovers were presented, Deathmate would be written in such a way that it didn't matter what order in which you read the central books of the series, since each individual book was focused around different protagonists and antagonists from the companies' lines.

Doesn't sound so bad. How many issues was it?

Good question.

I don't mean to be snarky, it's just sort of difficult to explain. Deathmate, since it was meant to be read in whatever order you wanted, dispensed with the notion of issue numbers. Its four main books are thus differentiated by color, so there's Deathmate Black, Deathmate Yellow, Deathmate Blue, and Deathmate Red. Four issues, right? Easy-peasy.

Yeah, not so fast. This is the 90's, so it's gotta be more extreme. There was also a Deathmate Prologue, which led into the four-book crossover, and a Deathmate Epilogue that was supposed to tie up all of the loose ends. But still, that's only six issues. Math's not hard.

Or is it? Because in addition to the four main books and two bookends, Image and Valiant also released Deathmate Preview, an eight-page lead-up to the events depicted in Deathmate Yellow. We're up to seven issues...

...and we're still not done! Since Image and Valiant knew there would be a number of readers unfamiliar with one or both sides of this crossover to end all crossovers, the Deathmate Tour Book arrived on the scene. While it bears the 'Deathmate' moniker, this book is a guide to the artists and writers behind the books themselves as opposed to anything having to do with the actual story, but hey, if you weren't down with the 90's and didn't know any better, you'd probably have this one added to your pull list too, just in case. So, eight issues? Well, actually...

...you keep forgetting this is the 90's, so you need to account for other quirks of the Dark Age era. All six primary books of the Deathmate saga shipped with special Gold variant cover versions as well, meaning a true completionist needs to devote fourteen valuable long box slots to a full collection. There were also four different editions of the Preview book given out by different publications--each one contained the same story, but three of them featured different cover artwork, and the fourth was the same as the first, just with a different logo, so make sure you collect 'em all, ya fanboy!

That, uh, sounds expensive.

Ya think? Let's run the numbers.

Assuming you paid cover price for each entry, and also assuming for the sake of argument you didn't pick up the gold variants for each book, this is how it breaks down.

Deathmate Prologue: $2.95
Deathmate Epilogue: $2.95
Deathmate Black, Yellow, Blue, & Red: $4.95 each.
Deathmate Tour Book: $3.95
Deathmate Preview: Free...with purchase of whatever it came bagged with/bound into (Previews magazine in two cases, Advance Comics magazine in one case, and with the purchase of one Comic Defense System storage box in the last).

So, assuming you got your Deathmate Preview by purchasing an issue of Advance Comics for $1.95, the total cost to acquire the full run was $31.60 (plus sales tax)...in 1994 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, that's over $50 US in 2018 currency.

Why the hell would anybody pay that much for a crossover?!

Because Deathmate wasn't produced for a reader's market, it was produced for a speculator's market.

This crossover came at a time when it wasn't uncommon for comics from either company to sell through at a six- or even seven-figure rate. We're talking about the era where Todd McFarlane's Spawn, an unknown character from a newly-formed studio with only the writer/artist's name as a selling point, sold 1.7 million copies of its first issue based on that name recognition...and the assumption it would go up in value. Image wasn't the only one doing numbers like this either. Valiant's Turok: Dinosaur Hunter sold four million copies of its first issue, and it was only the sixth-best selling book released that month. Speculators had commandeered the driver's seat, and while the solicitation numbers for Deathmate never rose past the high six-figure range, it was still unprecedented for a crossover series.

A bunch of greedy ass-breathers doesn't automatically translate to a shitty return on my investment though!

Right, but like a freshly-minted teen porn starlet with a poor gag reflex hitting the deepthroat circuit, both Valiant and Image learned a valuable lesson about terrible life choices.

If there's one thing you need to know about Image in the 90's, it's that they viewed deadlines and delivery dates somewhat more...lackadaisical...than the other studios. Wilce Portacio's first contribution to Image's stable, Wetworks, was delayed for so long that even after the first issue was finished, Image refused to offer it for solicitation until the next two books were completed. To be fair, this wasn't entirely Portacio's fault: a family tragedy called him to the Philippines, so he wasn't even in the country to work on the book. Still, since Diamond Distribution had a habit of straight-up cancelling books that didn't show up on time, and comics distribution is one of the most ass-backwards supply lines on the planet, Image's legendary inability to hit deadlines was a thorn in everybody's side.

In most cases, when a store decides they want a product, they place an order from the distributor saying how many of that product they want. The distributor then ships them the order, the store pays for it upon receiving, and returns the leftover items that didn't sell. Makes sense, right? Screw you, this is the 90's, and comics didn't work like that.

Because of the production schedules required to get stories written, penciled, inked, colored, edited, and printed, companies worked six months to a year in advance. To gauge interest in a potential product, studios send out solicitation lists months in advance. Store owners would indicate how many of a given book they wanted to stock, generally basing this information on their customers' pull lists then adding a few extra copies for shelf display. The studios then collect the solicitation data and extrapolate from that how many issues they need to fulfill the demand. The twist? Stores submit payment for those books in advance in order to guarantee reception of the material.

Store owners literally had to pay, up front, for merchandise they weren't going to receive for half a year or more. Shop owners also faced another problem in that once they received the merchandise, it belonged to them. Barring some mishap with the printer or the distributor, if you ordered ten copies of a book and only sold two, you were stuck with the remaining eight. Shop owners struggled to walk the tightrope between ordering too many copies of a book and not selling out, and ordering too few copies and facing angry customers.

The occasional slipped deadline or cancellation was annoying, but shops were refunded when this happened, though those refunds could take weeks to process and return. A slew of missed deadlines or unexpected cancellations in a row, however, were a devastating impact on a store's bottom line: without the next week's assets coming in to pay off last week's debts, comic distribution took on the look of a failed Ponzi scheme rather than a standard business model.

Remember what I said about Image and deadlines?

Yeah, but Image was only half the equation. What was Valiant doing? Twiddling their thumbs?

Not exactly. The production of Deathmate was rather egalitarian: of the six main issues, Valiant was responsible for producing three, and Image was responsible for the other three. Assuming both companies kept everything on track, this would be smooth as silk. Unfortunately, three major problems quickly reared their heads.

First, a number of artists/creators from Image declined to participate in the project. Most notably, Todd McFarlane and Erik Larsen bowed out, which meant the crossover would be missing both Spawn and Savage Dragon, two of the biggest money makers in Image's stable.

Second, while Valiant and Image shared the duties of production between themselves, there was almost no contact between the writers and artists pertaining to the other company's materials. Valiant writers found themselves scripting characters they had no experience writing, and Image's writers faced the same hurdles. What's more, since each of the four main books was meant to be a stand-alone story, readable in any order, this compounded the problems. Characters like the kids from Jim Lee's upcoming Gen13 were introduced in Deathmate Black, for example, only for all but Fairchild to get killed or incapacitated a few pages later before the reader gets to know them. The plethora of characters combined with the reader's likely unfamiliarity with at least half of them from any given book, resulted in a disjointed, text-block-heavy mess that wasn't helped by the different writers and artists working on each issue completely lacking any sense of editorial or artistic cohesion.

Third, The Liefeld Factor. I personally think Rob Liefeld gets a lot of unnecessary shit heaped on him. Yes, he's made mistakes over the years, but by and large he's a happy guy with a huge following who's been fortunate enough to do what he loves ever since he was still an immature kid. Liefeld's mistakes are often more the result of a relentless optimism about what he thought he could accomplish as opposed to any malice on his part, but in the 90's and unrestrained by Marvel's guiding hand, Liefeld's blunders this time cost the hobby dearly. Despite being in charge of the Deathmate Prologue, Liefeld's contributions were so late in coming that the book shipped well after issues of the actual crossover had hit store shelves. Deathmate Red, also under his guidance, slipped its schedule by over a year. By the time it arrived, the Epilogue had been out for months and readers no longer cared.

So Deathmate arrived late. It still came out, didn't it? What's the big deal?

Remember how shop owners had to solicit and pay for their copies of books in advance? Imagine the combined cost to comic book stores paying for 700,000 issues of Deathmate Red, only to have that potential revenue sit in limbo for over a year before the product was delivered and to discover that by then it was too little, too late. Heavy pre-orders for Deathmate books tied up funds that could otherwise have been used to pay other debts or solicit other, timelier titles from other studios. Also remember the distributors didn't allow refunds once the merchandise was delivered. This left a number of mom-and-pop shops stuck with crates of books they had to sit on due to both readers and speculators realizing this series was nothing special.

Ironically, it was Valiant who suffered the worst of the backlash. Despite delivering their half of the project on time and as scheduled, when the angry fans pulled their support for Valiant in the wake of the Deathmate debacle, Valiant had nothing to fall back on. Image, while bloodied, still had the rock start capitol of their creators, as well as books like the aforementioned Spawn and Savage Dragon with readerships large enough to weather the storm. Valiant, on the other hand, deflated like a hovercraft with a slow leak, becoming a shadow of their former selves before Acclaim scooped them up and re-branded the company with their logo.

In short, two companies with a grand vision but little ability to communicate and achieve consensus on just what that vision should entail, almost single-handedly destroyed the comic book market with Deathmate. A saga meant to solidify and excite the fan bases of both Valiant and Image instead laid waste to an industry from front to back, pissing off readers, driving away speculators, and shuttering beleaguered independent comic shops across the nation.

That, loyal minions, is why you never cross the (time)streams.

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Don't let what happened to comics in the 90's happen to you! Protect your investment in 90's Nostalgia by upvoting and resteeming this post so others can know of the horrors, and following me so you never miss another opportunity to learn from past mistakes and be entertained.

Then follow other awesome Steemians like @cryplectibles, @bryan-imhoff, @goldenage, @steven.nam, and @nickmorphew so you can enjoy all their comic-related jiggery-pokery as well.

Who am I kidding? Nipple-themed photography is way more interesting than comics. If you don't agree, a quick trip to the lovely @peekbit's feed will change your mind.

Excelsior!!

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