Originally published July 29, 1994, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1080
“Things change.”
–Penguin to Batman, and vice versa
Batman Returns
A decade ago, when Carol Kalish was running Marvel direct sales, and I was her assistant… the market suffered from growing pains. There were any number of times when we would come into conflict with distributors over policy decisions; over actions taken by other arms of Marvel (Marvel Books landed us in hot water quite a few times); over opening up new distributors in order to prevent a situation where a handful of distributors controlled the majority of the market (a strategy that ultimately failed); over all kinds of things.
It was also a time when expectations were different. When X-Men (there was one mutant book at the time; what a concept) sold, as I recall, between a quarter million and 350,000, and was the pinnacle of success at Marvel. There was X-Men and there was everything else. When we solicited for the New Universe titles, we pegged sales for the first issues at somewhere around 125,000, and lo, we were thrilled.
There were arguments and disagreements and occasional feuds between all parties. Any number of times there were face-to-face confrontations at distributor meetings, back when such meetings consisted of get-togethers in cramped New York hotels and the editorial presentation consisted mostly of editors talking about what was coming up in their books while distributors took notes.
There was even the occasional blow-up, from which it seemed there would be no way back. But eventually such things would pass over, and all would settle back down to business as usual. Sometimes feelings remained bruised, but we pushed past it and moved on. Because we could afford to.
Things change.
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