Original subtitles

The last Marvel movie I'd seen was The Avengers, and let's be honest, that was

amazing. You know, that was every comic book fan's dream, to see all those

characters on a big screen.

$1 .5 billion worldwide, and that's how much money Avengers made.

That's one of the most successful films of all time.

People love to escape this fantasy. Marvel is modern myth -making of today.

When I was growing up, I was the only guy for probably 500 miles who could

you that Tony Stark was Iron Man. Now we all know it, and it's great.

As recently as two or three years ago, we all sort of lived under the fear.

That, oh my God, one bad superhero movie is going to happen and the whole

Hollywood industry is going to give up and not do it anymore.

That's not the case anymore. Now seeing all these movies, it's sort of like a

validation for comic books because the superhero now has arrived in movies and

they're actually doing it very well.

We've built up enough positive momentum. Marvel has built up enough positive

momentum where I don't know what's going to stop them.

Superheroes today reign as masters on Hollywood and pop culture.

But not so long ago, in the mid -90s, they almost won over by the speculative

madness of Wall Street.

First of all, the Marvel Entertainment Company, home of Spider -Man, Iron Man

Captain America, was declared bankrupt on December 27, 1996, before being

miraculously saved to be reborn from its ashes.

Comics in general, and Marvel was no exception to this, sales were beginning

decline in the 1980s.

1986 was the watershed moment in American comics because that was the

Watchmen, of The Dark Knight, and of Mouse.

These three comics changed everything about what the American public thought

comic books were.

The gritty realism and the fact that The Dark Knight was clearly created for

an audience of adults, or at least late adolescence, but it wasn't kiddie stuff.

And Marvel at that point was not as quick to grab that sort of

brass ring that was being offered of salvation.

X -Men was always the best -selling comic in the late 1970s and all through

1980s. Same with Avengers, same with Spider -Man.

These were still the top -selling comics in America, but every year they would

drop another 5 ,000 or 10 ,000 copies per year in sales.

And prices escalated to try to make up the difference.

So it's an exaggeration to say it was in free fall.

That's not the case.

But there was a slide.

Well, in order to sell more, we'll do an alternate cover. So there'll be three

covers and a retail order more. Or we'll do a shiny cover. Or we'll do something

made out of...

I don't know, uranium.

I don't know. You know, we just put anything on the book that we can maybe

the book to sell more.

And it started relying on gimmicks. And when you rely on gimmicks, you start

losing the soul of the work.

They began trading comics as collectibles, less so than enjoyable,

periodicals. People were buying cases of Spider -Man number one by Todd

McFarlane as a special collectible. They were buying a hundred of these.

Because they thought that someday, years down the road, they'd be able to put

their kids through college based on the investment they were making. They

treated them as investable collectibles. They treated them as bonds and stocks.

But they're not.

They're stories.

From $0 .40 in 1980, the minimum price of his comics rose to $1 in 1988.

This fever of collectors draws attention from the business sector.

In 1989, Ronald Perelman, heavyweight from Wall Street, buys Marvel for more

than $82 million.

Very quickly, he sets up a complex holding system, linked to his own

conglomerate, Back on Rosenfort.

In 1991, Perelman introduces Marvel on the stock market and leads it in a

of acquisitions.

Mr.

Perlman is extremely intelligent, a very good investor, who over a period of

years had put together what I would call an empire.

Also, a man who is not particularly fond of publicity,

but runs a very tight ship. He's in control.

He analyzes businesses.

He looks for growth opportunities, and Marvel was just one part of the empire.

Most of the presidents of Marvel weren't interested in comic books. They weren't

comic book fanboys. They were just people who were trying to manipulate the

stock and ownership and what have you.

I had very little to do with Ron Perlman. He had a townhouse and his own

entourage, and he did not come down to Marvel.

higher executives like the presidents came to him and he had no input into the

day -to -day comic books or storylines or characters any of that he could have

cured less the famous story is that pearlman bought marvel assuming that

superman was part of the deal and only finding out afterwards that oh by the

he's another company they didn't know what they were They just knew that this

was a potential profit center for them. And I don't think it really sank in on

me at the time, the impact that Ron Perlman buying Marvel Comics had and was

going to have.

At that point, it just seemed like, oh, well, at least there's some money in the

coffers. At least somebody's taking care of the company.

But I and many of my fellow freelancers sort of saw as the months and the

years went on that suddenly.

Major Wall Street corporations and major money players were treating the

companies the same way we treated the comics in the 1990s, as collectibles.

idea that they weren't buying these companies because they wanted good

come out. They even cared about the characters.

The comic book editors that reported to me, really, I allowed them to think

that we were in the business of publishing comic books.

But we were really in the business of intellectual properties.

And the idea was that to publish the comic books, you kept the characters

the 5 ,000 or so Marvel characters, and you kept the copyrights and trademarks

alive, and you kept them in front of the public so that we could sell lunchboxes

and bedsheets and movies and TV shows.

That's where the big money was.

Well, there's the dire situation from the financial point of view.

Business plan had been for Marvel to continue to buy companies like Panini.

Cash flow, no growth. So we bought a whole series of companies that had cash

flow and no growth.

And we convinced Wall Street that buying flat companies was the same thing as

growth. There was approximately $500 million of bank debt made up of a

revolving credit facility and a term loan.

and then there must have been something in the area of a million dollars of

trade debt and other debt, maybe more.

But the bank debt was secured. They had liens on

essentially all of the assets of entertainment and entertainment

including the foreign companies, Panini. So the bank group...

basically had liens on all of the operating assets.

As we started to have to pay off the interest, and we felt pressure to make

and more money, we started to make really stupid business decisions.

So we would release more and more different titles, and we would raise the

point, and things would look good for the first month that we would do it, but

in the long haul, we created this really horrible downward cycle where we were

pricing new customers out of the business.

And we were doing so many different books that the storylines got so complex

that no new readers could come in. So basically we slammed the door on new

readers. The challenge was to look surprised when the circulation numbers

dropped. But I couldn't look surprised.

So the first exodus for me was like the first exodus for a lot of people. We saw

that the company was going to go bankrupt. We did our best to be vocal

what to do to fix it, and we did our best to fix it. But when it was clear

that wasn't going to happen, most of the better people left. We couldn't even

fathom the idea that Marvel Comics could go out of business. How is that

possible? Look at all the books.

They're all over the world. They're printed in every language. Like most

creative people, we...

We were just worried about making good books, so we figured somebody else is

taking care of that. You have to understand that at Marvel, you had two

You had the suits and you had the creators.

And the suits were the people running the business, and the creators were the

people creating the comic books.

The people creating the comic books lived in a false euphoria, if you will.

They thought...

Everything was fine. The comic books were coming out. The stories were good.

Everybody was having a good time. The suits upstairs are wheeling and dealing

and fighting for financing and ownership and control and all kind of

Machiavellian plots.

During 1996, as things got increasingly worse, there

were defaults under the bank agreements.

So there were negotiations with the banks for waivers of those defaults.

and agreements were reached with the banks to weigh the defaults for a period

time.

And the hope was that before the end of the year, the economy would come back,

consumer spending would increase, and they could reinstate everything.

As the year progressed, there seemed to be no real hope that that was going to

happen.

So the decision was reaching an agreement with the bank group.

That's who we're restructuring.

And that would be part of what we call a prearranged Chapter 11.

And then there was the news of Chapter 11, and we were just like, well, what

does that mean?

Ron Perrelman and his advisors thus hope to save time for the banks, while

Marvel leads the comics market in its fall.

Yeah, the 90s were a funny time. I was trying to break into the comics industry

just when it was collapsing.

It's like trying to get into international banking in 2009.

You know, it's like everything had completely fallen apart.

Everyone was losing their jobs. Comics was in chaos, and I was coming in at

time as a young guy trying to get jobs, and there was just nothing going at all.

And Marvel, which used to be the ultimate aspiration of anyone working in

comics, was a ghetto. Like, nobody wanted to work there. I mean, there was

stories of people, writers and artists, being sued, this was rumours, you know,

by people that Marvel owed money to.

Like, because they couldn't get the money out of Marvel, they were coming

the writers and artists and sending them lawyers' letters trying to get cash.

So people were getting hit with massive bills. The place was insane. It was

nuts. So it's not as if it was a secret that things were heating up at Marvel,

that things were dire there.

And we get stories in about, suddenly there's no coffee maker in the office

because they thought coffee would be too expensive. Or suddenly...

The FedEx account had been cancelled because they decided that it was too

expensive to have a Federal Express account.

Another thing was they sold the two doors to their conference room because

doors had pictures of Spider -Man on it, and they managed to find a buyer for

their doors. And I don't know the validity of these stories, but stories

were circulating, and freelancers were like, you know, how on earth can we work

for people who can't even afford to make coffee anymore?

Half of the people went, well, I better go get work at DC.

We just hear things.

We'd say, well, even if it goes chapter 11, it's still going to be in business.

That's just some technical thing they have to do. We didn't understand it.

Because all we thought was, well, I need to get the next issue out by Thursday.

That's not really my problem. I need to do this.

So we thought, well, they'll figure it out. These guys know what they're doing.

Ron Perlman would come to Marvel about once a year with his daughter on Bring

Your Daughter to Work Day and say to his daughter, Daddy owns all of this, and

then he would go away.

He was busy.

owning Revlon and Coleman and I think Hummer and all kind of companies, and

basically using one company to leverage the other company, which is what got him

into trouble with Marvel.

Because what Ron Perlman didn't realize is that there was a bigger shark than

him swimming in the waters named Carl Icahn.

Who was Mr. Icahn?

There are various descriptions of Mr. Icahn.

And back in the 90s...

In the 80s, Mr.

Icahn was probably known as a green mailer, that he would take a position,

changes in the company, and to basically get rid of him, he would be

paid green mail.

So if he took a 10 % or 13 % or 14 % interest in an entity,

the entity would pay him a premium over the market value of that stock to go

away and stop bothering him.

And he was very successful at it.

What precipitated his interest is very speculative.

My own guess is that he read the proposed disclosure statement,

noticed that Mr. Perlman, through his companies, was going to infuse another

$365 million and probably came to the conclusion that if Mr. Perlman was going

to put in that kind of money, there must be something here that he knows about

that nobody else knows about, and it might be worth his investment.

So he became active in the Chapter 11 case.

Now there is an even more supreme struggle for the fate of Marvel. But it

like for us, it is as if we were watching Galactus and the Silver Surfer

out above our heads in the skies above, and we are just ordinary mortals. That

is the scale at which the battle is going on.

We have no control over it, but we want to see what's happening next, because

our jobs and livelihoods depend on it.

Between the titans Ron Perlman and Carl Icahn,

I was always a storyteller.

I find out it made life easier.

Developing toys is very much like developing a show or a movie.

To tell a story, you have to find a reason why would someone want to play

it.

When we started talking about Toy Biz, that I believe initially bought it

for liquidation, just to take it apart and sell it in pieces.

And then I noticed that he has...

Rights for Marvel?

Wait a second.

This little company have the rights for the whole Marvel library for

toys. That's unbelievable.

Ike, who is an absolute genius businessman, but had no interest or

for comic books, the only thing he always understood instinctively is the

of a trademark.

Ron Perlman had done a deal with Ike Perlmutter where he got 25 % of

ownership of Toy Biz, but it had extra voting rights that were equivalent

to about 76 % or so. So basically that gave Toy Biz an

unlimited royalty -free license to do Marvel action

figures and toys.

paying Marvel nothing.

But in return, Perlman got controlling ownership.

So it was a very sweet deal.

They made toys and paid no licensing fee.

So in order to protect that, they had to be the winners or else they would have

lost their business.

Keep in mind, while we're talking about a lot of money, this lot of money was

chump change to Ron Perlman and even less money to Carl Icahn.

At the time,

Pearl Mutter took over the company.

He had put all of his eggs in that basket. He had nowhere else to go if he

didn't win the ownership.

It became a David and Goliath because between Karl and Ron

Perlman, there was power, a lot of power, a lot of influence on Wall

And we were like these two guys with an accent. It's different.

Was it a war? Yeah.

So I suggested that it would be a good idea if all of the parties could get

together and see if we could resolve this in some amicable way.

So we had this meeting, which was very well attended by a great many lawyers,

and all of the banks were at the meeting.

And Mr. Icahn came with some of his associates.

And the meeting started off, at most meetings, people expressed their

and the sound volume began to rise.

And then at some point in the meeting, the senior bank officer from J .P.

got up and said, well, it's a very interesting discussion here, but I

the banks, and we have $600 million at stake here, and I want to know how

going to get paid.

And Paul Icahn looked at him and said, who are you?

And Mr.

Repko explained who he was again, and Mr. Icahn said, if I need comic relief,

I'll turn on my TV set, which got Mr. Repko very upset.

And Repko said, I don't have to put up with this.

And he slammed down the lid on his attaché case.

And with that, the other six or seven banks did the same thing.

And they all got up and walked out. So now we were left in a meeting without

banks. And the meeting broke up in disarray.

And nothing was accomplished.

control the operating company, Marvel Entertainment.

After six months of conflict, Ron Perlman realizes that he has more to

to win in this battle and decides to give up.

Carl Icahn, who has not yet repaid the banks, now claims to have all the rights

to Marvel.

And I sat at the head of this conference table, catty -corner with Carl Icahn at

the top, and we put our heads together, and I explained to him how comic books

work. And we talked back and forth, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, and that was

his introduction into what he had just taken over.

Well, listen, Carl is a businessman.

It could have been a comic book company. It could have been a bra company.

It could have been, I don't know, a chair company.

For him, part of the ability of Carl

Icahn, who is unfortunately very, very good in what he does, is that he doesn't

fall in love with anything.

I think if he looked at the...

comic book business and say, well, it's really a suffering business.

He may have just closed it.

I said, we have the characters. We don't need the books.

Yeah, you need the books because that's the Bible. It's keepers of the flame.

And you look at Comic -Con, 150 ,000 keepers of the flames, right?

It was a time where Marvel had to be run by people who really cared about

Marvel.

It was more than a balance sheet. It was a culture.

If Marvel had collapsed, the whole comic book industry would have collapsed.

I controlled over somewhere between 30 and 36 percent of the comic book market

at that time.

And DC controlled probably about maybe 25 at that time. So if Marvel had

collapsed, all the little comic book stores would have collapsed and the

industry would have collapsed. So my job was to keep the comic books coming out.

And there was all kind of lawyers and people fighting up in the clouds above

like Olympian gods.

And they were spending, you know, millions and millions and millions of

on lawyers, I think.

The estimate was like $40 million on lawyers alone fighting over control and

ownership of Marvel.

Carl had a cash offer for the banks.

I believe that the bank probably wrote off the losses in Marvel.

And they had a bank meeting, which was actually not legal.

Literally, we had to run over to a law firm and more or less break down the

and say, no, you're not going to have this meeting without us.

It became like one of these moments that I looked around the room and all these

bankers basically in their minds were going to take the cash from Carl Ica.

And I said to them, you don't understand what you're doing.

Spider -Man is worth a billion dollars.

You're going to take $375 million for this company?

One character, and I was wrong, Spider -Man is worth probably $10 billion, and

it stopped everybody.

I think the thing that made it work for us, that even the investment bankers

and the bankers, there were a lot of young people there, you know, kids out

MBA schools, out of law schools, and many of these kids loved comics.

And when they hear Spider -Man is worth a billion,

They got it.

Very

few

people ever won against Carl Icahn. It's quite powerful.

But this one, it's like you cannot go to war without ideology.

Soldiers without ideology cannot be a good soldier.

I think, thank goodness, I had a partner like Ike.

Not only he's tough, he's just so smart.

How to deal with all these business issues.

And our friendship was so strong that it wasn't even about

just...

The Marvel thing, it's just about the fact that I think I made

him a believer that this thing is very important.

I'll never forget the first meeting with him over X -Men.

He said, what do you want to do? I said, I want to make a show as of X -Men.

What's X -Men?

And it didn't matter.

He said, you know what, you do your thing, I do my thing. That's why we were

such amazing.

friends and partners.

No one knew what to make of it when Avi and Perlmutter

finally managed to wrest control. No one quite knew what was going to come of

any of it.

There was at least some sense that things had settled and a little bit of

that came with that, but a lot of trepidation in the sense that we don't

what this means.

The last place you would imagine you would want to work is Marvel. But in a

it's actually quite exciting going into a place where there's nothing left to

lose. As a creator, you know, as a writer, I love the idea of going in

anything goes.

Like, if you go into something that's very successful, it's kind of boring

because people are scared to take risks.

Whereas Marvel was at such an absolute nadir, things were just dreadful that

they said, let's just try anything.

And that's the kind of Wild West atmosphere that I quite enjoy.

We wanted to...

resurrect some of our older, more tattered characters for future use in

So I talked with Joe Calamari, and Joe suggested that maybe we should do a

deal with Jimmy Palmiati and Joe Quesada.

Joe and I would go to the cons with our own company event. We formed this small

company. We put out a couple of titles like Ash and Painkiller Jane and 22

Brides.

and we self -published it they weren't great books but they were fun books and

uh them saying we want to see what you guys would do with marvel comics if you

had the chance and for joe and i we sat there and said oh my god they're gonna

let us do anything we want i put them up in the penthouse which was a little

office on roof level well away from my comic book creators down on my floor

because there was a certain amount of resentment that i was giving away

four characters to this new group to create under the name Marvel Knights a

whole new line of comic books.

Me and Joe were like, we have the whole penthouse? Again, we even had a

separate, you had to go through a secretary to get up the stairs to go to

penthouse. And Joe and I, of course, we put TVs in there, we put a couch, we put

drawing boards, and we worked up there the whole time.

One of the characters we gave them was Daredevil.

Daredevil had kind of faltered a bit.

And so Joe and Jimmy went out and hired Kevin Smith, the director, to

write the first eight issues of a new Daredevil line.

The whole key to Marvel Knights was the right writer on the right character, the

right artist on the right character. But the bigger issue for us was comics were

always perceived as not cool.

Okay.

So you would never go in a bar and a girl goes, hi, what do you do for a

You'd never say, oh, I make comic books.

Okay, that's, you might as well say, I'm a puppeteer.

You know, the girl's just going to walk the other way. You know, it's just not,

it wasn't cool. And we said, well, if we're two cool guys and we're doing this

cool job, we have to convince everybody else it's a cool thing. So bringing in

Kevin, we said, okay, well, this is a film guy who loves comics.

And all of a sudden, Kevin's on talk shows going, yeah, I'm writing

It's Marvel Night books. It comes out in September.

So all of a sudden, people who never even thought of looking at a comic were

saying, well, Kevin Smith's writing it. Let me at least check it out.

So our thing was to get it to a broader audience.

And because of that cachet, we sold a lot of copies.

And that brought Daredevil back to the forefront where we were able to sell a

Daredevil movie.

Now, I apologize that Ben Affleck didn't do that great a job, but we did get a

movie. That was one of the first kind of Marvel movies that we got by doing

that. Having Kevin there in the launch of Marvel Knights, having us doing MTV

and all these different shows, I think was the actual start where Hollywood

started to come in, to make its way into comics, where all of a sudden, if Kevin

Smith is a filmmaker and he's interested in this,

maybe they'd be interested in making more movies, or maybe another filmmaker

wants to write a book, or a guy who's a screenwriter wants to write a comic. I

remember I was at a party with Spike Lee and Wesley Snipes, and Wesley Snipes

came up to me and said, Jimmy, come outside, I want to talk to you. And he's

like, I want to be the Black Panther. Can you make that happen for me? So all

a sudden, people in Hollywood want to be the characters they grew up with.

It was an exciting time, because we thought, well...

you know what, the company's having whatever issues it's having, yet we're

getting this positive press, we're making some money, and we're also

guys, you know, actors that want to be involved and filmmakers that want to be

involved. And at the same time, Avi's running around putting together deals.

know, we're doing the work on our comics, and we're doing what we're

do is bring attention to the comics, and Avi's out there able to make deals

based on the fact that people are getting more attention now to these

characters, and eventually this is the thing.

that would actually take Marvel and put it in a great place, in a powerful

place, and in a place it deserved to be.

My biggest issue at the time was that if you want to unleash the value, we have

to go to Hollywood.

The X -Men showed it fantastic.

And one of the things he did so great was the household grating, which cannot

come just from the kids.

So it was very clear that you had teenagers and students watching the

was actually at 11, 11 .30 in the morning, which is perfect for teenagers.

And it took a lot of convincing to get Fox to make the movie.

I started working with Bryan Singer as his assistant.

So it was right before Usual Suspects came out. And Brian wasn't, he didn't

up a comic book fan. He was a big science fiction fan.

He had the concept of what most people had about comic books, was that it was

guys running around in their underwear and not, there was no deeper themes.

So I said, no, no, no, it's not like that. It's Malcolm X and Martin Luther

and the next wave in human evolution.

And what if sometime next week...

There's a story on the news that there's a new level of humanity on the planet.

Would we say, oh my God, our children are going to be stronger and better.

They're going to deal with global warming and nuclear proliferation and

better planet.

Or would we react with fear in that Darwinian sense?

And he's like, wow, okay, I like that.

Marvel at that time, even though they had sold the rights to...

for X -Men to Fox, they still had approval rights over anything that would

violate the integrity or damage their copyright on the character.

So we needed to get the approval of Marvel in the direction we were going to

So went over to Marvel and met with Avi Arad and Stan Lee. And for a

kid who grew up, who has 30 ,000 comic books, who waited for comic book day, he

got to meet the Pope.

You know, and Stan Lee, to any comic book fan, is the Pope.

And we basically told him what we wanted to do, which was really go back away

from what X -Men was doing in the comics with Age of Apocalypse and really

rooted in that burned Claremont. It's a school era.

So July of 96, Brian and I wrote the treatment together.

And then...

Through four long and hard years, we went through development, production,

release in July of 2000.

It was spectacular.

Quesada and Bill Jemas, who had come from another arm of trading card

or whatever, we didn't know what to make of that alchemy.

But, oh, my God, they set the comics on fire.

Well, Bill James actually had a very, very interesting idea whenever he

became president of Marvel, which was to start the books over again from

scratch. And it was very, very clever, actually, because there had been 50

of continuity that made it almost impossible to read the books, because to

understand this issue of Spider -Man, you had to have read this issue of X

four and a half years ago and everything. It was just almost

regular readers to just come in. It was starting to appeal to a very niche

audience.

the ultimate line, which rather than being written like a soap opera where

issue related to the past issue, they were written six -issue story arcs. So

would go to a writer and ask them to write ultimate Spider -Man or ultimate X

-Men as if they were writing a movie as opposed to if they were writing a comic

book. We all thought it was an incredibly stupid idea because we were

to what had come before, and we were all of the feeling of, well, how do you...

How do you do it better than Stan Lee and Steve Ditko?

Well, you don't do it better. You do it differently.

You do it for a new time. You do it for a new audience.

Fortunately, there were a handful of writers, most notably Brian Bendis and

Millar, and Joe Quesada, who was running an imprint called Marvel Knights, who

may not have quite believed that was going to work, but liked me enough

personally to hope.

These three creators set the tone.

for Marvel.

Joe Quesada phoned me up and he said to me, Mark, the lunatics are now running

the asylum.

Would you like to come and join us? Because he'd just been put in charge of

Marvel. And I thought, how can I refuse an offer like that? And I actually took

a pay cut to go and work at Marvel. I took a 30 % pay cut to go and work at

Marvel because I just thought, this looks quite exciting. This is like going

into Iraq after the place has been bombed or something.

It's nuts.

Or being an oligarch rising up in Russia.

you know, after the fall of the KGB.

And they had me lined up to do Ultimate X -Men, which was a reboot of the X -Men

franchise. And I had a great time on that. I was very, very lucky. It started

number one, it launched at number one and everything. And that gave me a

amount of credibility at Marvel.

So, like, it was a really exciting time. And the five years that followed, I

think, is probably the most creatively interesting at Marvel, I would say,

since...

Maybe the 80s, but even possibly the 60s, whenever everything started.

The first Gemma's years, the sales in the books exploded, the attention the

books received from the outside media exploded, and comics were back on the

and people were very excited. You're watching what Grant's doing with X -Men,

what Brian is doing with the Ultimate Spider -Man line.

These are must -read comics.

Marvel's all about...

If your book sells well, then you can do anything you like, which is lovely.

It's a great position to be in. So because my first book had sold so well,

said, what do you want to do next?

And I said, I'd love to revamp the Avengers franchise.

And they said to me, people don't like the Avengers, and they showed me the

sales figures. I wanted to go in and make these characters work for the 21st

century. So I wrote an outline for it, and the guys really liked it. And Bill

said, look, you've made us money on X -Men.

You know, let's see what you can do, you know. And Joe became very, very excited

about it. Joe became a real supporter of it too.

And the guys, they just gave me carte blanche.

Gemma, again, had this notion of, damn the torpedoes.

Don't tell us what to do. Let's do things in opposition.

Let's push the boundaries. Let's find new ways of interpreting old rules.

Let's challenge all the thinking that went before this. And Joe was very much

that same mindset. They were a good team.

And that momentum, that energy, really created a new Marvel

renaissance in the early 2000s.

When a big movie will come out, say Iron Man, people are like, I want to read

Iron Man, number one.

Reading Iron Man, number one, for a person who just saw the Iron Man movie

Not the same thing. It was in Vietnam. There were communists. So the Ultimate

Universe and the whole line of books, it's sort of a way to bring people that

are of this time period into Marvel Comics and into these characters in a

that they can relate to as opposed to having to go back and dig through all

continuity in history.

So with the Ultimate books, one thing that you can kind of compare it to is

way the Marvel movies are nowadays, like the first movies where they're origin

stories.

You're going to see stories that are somewhat familiar to the actual original

story, but they've been updated, they've changed.

An X -Men movie, the very first X -Men movie, was like the stepping stones for

all comic book movies, not just Marvel movies. X -Men was like, these

can be real, this world can feel real, and this is how we're going to do it.

X -Men was, I think, the first movie for...

my generation, our generation, that younger generation at the time, which

took comic books seriously.

X -Men was the first step towards being able to do Spider -Man, being able to do

Captain America, being able to do Iron Man. That was the seed from which the

whole Marvel movie universe sprung. Well, I think the first X -Men showed

things. One, you could make these movies cheap with almost nobodies or very,

very...

low -voltage stars in them.

Hugh Jackman was not the most well -known guy when that movie came out.

You know, Halle Berry as Storm was not the most well -known actress. Certainly

hadn't been an Oscar -winning actress at that point. And secondly, you could

make them that they appeal to all genres and demographics.

Yet those movies were able to make enough.

They were able to make enough, they were able to capture the attention of the

public, and they were able to inject what had been a relatively minor comic

series. in the general landscape comic book fans knew who x -men was but the

general public was not very familiar with the x -men you know it was

obby had told me that um uh the success and this was the week

before we're supposed to open and he said uh if x -men doesn't do well sony's

not gonna green light spider -man fortunately we did you know uh amazing

that weekend and that monday There's a big announcement in daily variety of

Spider -Man getting a screen light.

We see Spider -Man.

Oh, my God, they got it.

This was the first time anyone had done a Marvel property

on television or the movies where they weren't embarrassed by the source

material. In fact, they embraced the source material, and they made... What

in the comics that we love worked.

Were there changes?

Yeah, there's always going to be changes when you move anything from one medium

to another.

You have to.

But, oh my God, they got it right. That's Uncle Ben. That's the speech.

great power comes great responsibility.

He's sewing his own costume.

He's fighting a wrestler.

There's the burglar that he doesn't stop to save his uncle.

All the beats were there. All the magic moments were there. We all walked out of

it knowing if this is the approach they're going to take, then this is

work. And we all held our breath that weekend because if that movie had

that would be it. There'd be no more superhero movies.

And that was the turning point. The Spider -Man movie, being as good as it

that opened the door for everything.

Spider -Man makes more than $800 million in the world, just in theaters.

Hollywood receives the signal.

Superheroes attract the crowds.

And thanks to the progress of digital effects, everything becomes possible.

Between 2002 and 2007, five studios released about 15 films adapted from

licenses. But the low royalties reverted on the profits push Arad and Perlmutter

to change their strategy.

Rather than letting Hollywood adapt its catalog, Marvel takes absolute control

over the films.

The Spider -Man movies made what? The first two made $1 .6 billion. Marvel

made $75 million on that deal. So that's...

That wasn't acceptable to Paul Mulder. That wasn't acceptable to Rod and

especially Maisel. So they figured out a way to get this line of credit so they

can make their own movies out of their own characters on their own terms, which

is what everybody in Hollywood chases these days.

I felt very strongly that we needed to start with

familiarity.

And Hulk was in Universal.

And it was an opportunity to start over.

And that's how I went after Louis Leterrier, and what it took to get him,

finally got him.

And he'll always say, and then you left me.

but at the height of 580 million, to make two films, to make Iron Man and

to reboot Hulk, without making an origin story, and to respect Anglim's film,

but to make something different, while reintegrating Hulk inside the

Marvel universe, and then in the logical sequence of what we wanted to do, and

Avi and Kevin, that is to say, create the Avengers, in fact. And that, from

start, we know.

Was it a strategy? Yes.

Was it a strategy that worked? Yes. The first Iron Man movie has a lot more

jokes than it has him in the outfit because they're playing for something.

They're playing for type. They're playing with that character, that

improbability that Downey has that made it seem so accessible.

That was a lot of what led to that success.

Were they smart with a second -tier character? Of course. Were they really

insofar as by that secret ending, they knew that they were kind of planning

something bigger? Yeah.

Was it a Stalinist five -year?

10 -year plan?

I don't know. Arad always had a vision that the future of Marvel laid in

okay? So basically, there was a falling out, I think, between Palmiter and Arad.

David Mizell was becoming more of the favorite son.

It's a palm order than a rod. A rod fell shortchanged. So when he set up the

line of credit for Marvel, he said, you know what? I'm not going to deal with

this anymore.

I'm not the favorite son anymore. So I'm going to take $59 million, cash out my

options, and leave the company. And that's exactly what he did. There were a

of things I wanted to do that would have been a conflict under Marvel.

And there was a time in my life, in 06, where I felt it's all in

place.

And I think I was tired enough to do the right thing, to say,

Sophie, got to move on, or got to move back.

The good news is Marvel was saved.

The bad news is we've been saved by Dr. Doom, and he controls.

Now, Ike, if you meet him, is a very short guy who dresses very snappy in a

slick little suit.

And he came around and was introduced to everybody.

And then people started disappearing.

He did away with the free coffee.

He canceled the Christmas party.

He started haranguing people for Xeroxing on only one side of the paper.

He's a very...

Tight with a nickel kind of guy.

True story.

He would go to the halls, and he would look at people's offices, and he would

look for paperclips on the floor, and he would pick them up and hand them back

to you and insist that you not waste his money this way.

He would literally go around looking for paperclips on the floor to reuse.

This is the level of respect that the editors felt they were getting. That's

absurd.

Talk about feeling micromanaged.

I think have just one photograph of him ever. If you Google Ike, you will find

this one photo that I think was taken in 1989 or something like that. That's an

incredible feat.

He was in the 10th row, eating popcorn.

Kevin Broussard, who was the producer, arrived and said, look, it's Ike.

There are legends.

Inside Marvel, there are legends.

Ike always wears a gun on him. Always.

Charged. I don't know why.

Ike Parlementer remains the only master on board.

Thanks to Iron Man's worldwide triumph, Marvel Studios is definitely committed

to Hollywood.

Between 2002 and 2008, the group's turnover has almost tripled.

It now rests at 80 % on the sale of derivative products and on the cinema.

In the summer of 2009, Perlmutter negotiated in the greatest secret the

of Marvel by Disney for more than 4 billion dollars.

The announcement was officialized on August 31.

Perlmutter keeps his position as CEO and names Kevin Feige as the head of Marvel

Studios. which pulverized the box office in 2012 with Avengers.

Under Disney and Perlmutter, Marvel accelerates its mutation into a

empire, controlling its projects more closely.

It was not

a good feeling at first.

Not that the folks at Disney aren't fine people. You're going to get me fired.

But that a sense of a corporate takeover like that always leaves everybody a

little nervous. What happens to the people who we are working with?

Is there, you know, are there going to be redundancies in the divisions where

they're going to want to fire people that we like? Are they still interested

publishing comics? We don't know. We were able to break what their secret

announcement was, what their secret movie was for 2014, the Secret Marvel

and it was Guardians of the Galaxy.

So we leaked that out before the mainstream press. So the mainstream

Hollywood Reporter, Variety, gave us the credit for breaking that story.

Marvel didn't like that. They didn't like that this quote -unquote fanboy

broke the news, you know, of their exclusive before Comic -Con. They were

furious. They wanted to know who our sources were. They made all sorts of,

made empty threats.

You know, that, you know, if you tell us what your sources are, we won't

prosecute you. We won't do anything to you. We won't harm you, basically.

Because not only did we break the gardens of God, they tried to enforce

tried to bully us.

And then it blew up in their faces because it was not public. It was

was beautiful. Since then, they've taken a very, very antagonistic stance with

us. Now, for better or worse, Marvel is owned by Disney. It's a multinational

corporation.

every statement, every interview, every, you know, everything that Joe Quesada

and editor Axel Alonso and any of these people do, you know, they have to be

aware that they've got big mouth, you know, looking at them. They don't want

step over any sort of lines.

kind of almost thinking about closing his animation division in the 80s to

owning ABC television, to owning vast resources, to having theme parks all

the world, to buying Pixar.

Then you have the acquisition of Marvel. And more recently, you've had the

acquisition of Lucasfilms. So Disney is being a very smart corporate entity.

They're just buying the best.

And they don't have to do half the work.

Because when you buy Pixar, you've got John Lasseter and his team. When you buy

Marvel, you've got a long history, as this store and many of them around the

world show, of already created characters with storyboards and

identities and lovers and backstories and villains.

You're buying Lucasfilms? Well, you know, you already get Han Solo in the

Actually, you get Indiana Jones as well. Disney's, you know, global.

And with that global comes power.

And I think the idea that you can launch a film like The Avengers all over the

world at once.

I like the idea that in India, The Avengers is playing and kids want Spider

toys and all this kind of stuff. You know, so I try to look at it as a very

positive thing.

Where I was around when they were in Chapter 11, I'm thinking, oh, what's the

chances that that's going to happen again?

You know, probably slim to none.

So with this kind of security there, I think now a lot of experimentation can

come, and I have a real positive outlook on how it's going to really affect.

It's the best of all possible worlds.

There is no edict that comes down that says, okay, Avengers made a gajillion

dollars. Now we want the comic to be exactly that.

Disney's great about that. Marvel's great about that. They understand that

strength is not in what we're publishing now. The strength is what we're going

to be publishing six months from now or 12 months from now as well.

In other words, you have to let creative do its magic.

And I've got to say, and I'm not just saying this to keep my job, so far so

good.

In this, we keep our most expensive comic books in this vault.

Most showrooms you'd go into the world of comic books, there aren't even any

other showrooms. But if you were to go in a showroom somewhere else in the

world, maybe they would have a Batman number one, a Superman number one, maybe

one action number one.

My company, we have two copies.

I'm holding in my hands over a million dollars worth of comic books.

Comic books in the modern format started in the early 1930s. And by the modern

format, I mean the staple -bound comic as we know today.

They were actually created as a way to reprint material that had appeared in

newspaper comic strips.

and didn't actually feature original characters at the very start.

And the golden age of comics, as we know it, was started in June 1938 with

Action Comics number one, the first appearance of Superman.

And then a year later, he got his own series, Superman number one.

And the reason Superman number one is so important is...

The entire comic was only devoted to Superman. There were no other

And it was considered risky because Superman wasn't a character from the

He was created strictly for comic books.

And when that was a huge hit, that showed publishers that it could be

to create new characters only for comic books and that those could be top

sellers. That began.

the comic book renaissance that exists to this day.

That catapulted DC Comics into being the forefront, the main player.

Marvel was sort of the second place company at that point. During the 1940s,

1950s, they were doing knockoff comics. If Westerns were big, Marvel would do a

bunch of Westerns. If romance comics were suddenly big, they'd do nothing but

romance comics.

They didn't have a vision.

They just had an imperative to imitate what other people did. They also had

Captain America, Human Torch, Sub -Mariner, a few superheroes, but they

have the outreach. Those characters were not perceived as popular as Superman

and Batman.

And so DC held the torch until about...

1960, 1961.

So the Golden Age basically means the World War II era.

As far as their value, at the beginning, the answer was zero. They were

considered disposable entertainment.

Most of them got thrown away.

And also during World War II, there were always these patriotic paper drives

where... that encouraged everyone to bring in old paper to be recycled to

the troops fighting the war.

And so what did all mothers and fathers think was the worst junk to get rid of?

Comic books were high on their list.

So it's not a matter of 99 % having been thrown away. It's actually more than 99

% that were thrown away.

The concept of teenagers having their own lives, having their own interests,

this was not a conceit of the 1930s and 1940s. Kids just became grown -ups.

By the time you hit the 1960s, older kids, teenagers, they are more

than they've ever been in American society with this generation.

And they're looking for more entertainment. And they don't want just

stuff like Superman and Batman was perceived as.

rightfully so, as written specifically for either eight -year -olds or really

stupid adults.

What happened during the 1960s, during what we call the Silver Age of comics,

that DC was still publishing successfully Superman, Batman, comics

but their momentum was slowing down very quickly because they were still

publishing the same kinds of stories that they'd been publishing since the

1940s. And America was growing up. America was changing.

Kids were changing.

1961, Stan Lee, who had been the editor -in -chief at Marvel forever, he started

at 17 when he was a kid there during the war years.

So Stan got together with Jack Kirby, and they created the Fantastic Four.

And I cannot overstate what a benchmark that was.

in comics publishing, because what Stan and Jack brought to the table with

Fantastic Four was characters that had more depth.

Suddenly, we had characters who didn't necessarily like their powers, who

perceive themselves as superheroes, who thought of themselves as monsters or

freaks, and in doing so, kicked off the Marvel age of comics.

The success of Fantastic Four begat Spider -Man, begat Thor, Hulk, Iron Man.

Captain America becomes revived and instilled in the 1960s. What Stan and

did, what Marvel did, was they gave this new audience of teenagers something

they could relate to.

Suddenly these characters had problems and conflicts that they could

Superman's biggest problem was, I need Lois Lane to stop trying to figure out

that I'm Clark Kent. This is not a problem that anyone of any age can

But Spider -Man having to choose between fighting Dr. Octopus or getting Aunt

May's medicine back to her at home before she has a heart attack, that's a

problem that everybody can understand because everybody has a relative in

family who needs care.

And that changed the face of comics in America.

From about 1968 onward, that's when the mainstream started to...

become aware a little bit of the potential value.

And then once the 1970s and 1980s, once we got into that era, then a lot more

people thought in those terms.

So obviously some people were collecting them from the start, but I don't think

there was too much communication between collectors.

Most people who did it were just doing it for themselves.

One that made news was in the early 70s. This made national news. A teenage boy

named Mitchell Meady paid, I believe, about $1 ,300 for a copy of Action

No. 1.

So he was invited to go on talk shows.

They were in national magazines and such.

But he wasn't showered with praise. Most people said, this guy must be some kind

of idiot.

He got many letters and calls from other people who had copies saying, if you're

paying $1 ,000, you know, I'm selling.

But that was sort of one early time that it registered nationally.

When comics were created in the 1930s, they were a dime.

But so were most magazines. Everything was a dime.

40s, 1950s, 1960s, prices escalate. Sports Illustrated, Life Magazine,

big sellers, 25 cents, 30 cents, 40 cents, 50 cents.

Comics made the deliberate choice to try to keep the prices low for children.

That was a wise move, except the backfire was, by the time you get to the

They realized, wait, why am I giving shelf space to something that costs 10

12 cents and I'm only making two or three cents per copy? I could use that

shelf space for Playboy or Sports Illustrated and I can make 50 cents or a

And so almost overnight in the late 1970s, convenience stores,

grocery stores, they just stopped selling comics.

Sales were plummeting in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

There were specialty stores that sprang up that still exist.

And then to try to compensate for those years of being an underpriced item,

prices rose very quickly in comics. Suddenly they were 25 cents, 50 cents,

cents a buck. Then these comic stores that had begun to spring up in the

they took the forefront in sales.

They got the message out to the public that this is where you buy your comics.

But they began trading in comics as collectibles, less so than

enjoyable, readable periodicals.

En 1992, la prestigieuse société Softbees met aux enchères son premier

book Action Comics n°1, qui sera vendu cette année -là pour 82 500 dollars.

Après une violente crise dans les années 90, les super -héros redeviennent

tendance, et sur le web, l 'explosion de sites de vente structure pour de bon le

marché des collectionneurs.

I'm Barry Sandoval with Heritage Auctions here to tell you about the

Wright Collection, which is one of the great Golden Age finds in recent memory.

We're the only company that still holds the traditional live auctions with an

auctioneer and the people in the room.

But we have added an online element to it. So you can attend those auctions and

bid in person. You can also bid by telephone or you can bid live on the

watching a video of the auctioneer.

full -color catalogs in the traditional style.

We always want to create a very competitive environment with bidders

bidders against each other to get the best possible prices, and we think

the best way to do it.

Metropolis Collectibles is the largest dealership of vintage comic books in the

world. In this room...

There's over 150 ,000 vintage comic books. This is the largest accumulation

comic books from the 1930s to the 1980s in the world. Our company comprises over

100 years of experience in the collectibles market combined.

I want to show you a great part of our office.

Come on in.

Now, many people would think, you know, okay, I'm going to this office. The

showroom is filled with beautiful stuff.

But even when they come into the bathroom.

We want them to feel like a pop culture king when they sit on the throne. This

bathroom is filled with over a half million dollars worth of original art.

have pages from the first appearance of Thor by Jack Kirby, a page from Avengers

number one, and here you have a classic scene, Submariner running through the

streets of Manhattan.

Moment of truth.

What's going to happen next?

By Bill Everett, the creator, because he's my favorite artist in comics. He

not only great superhero art, he also did fantastic horror covers.

If you see his horror covers from Venus, they're mind -blowing.

Just fantastic.

The buyers of these comic books are from every different walk of life. I always

tell people there's a budget.

for every comic book and a comic book for every budget. So whether you can

$50 or $50 ,000, a million dollars, we can find the right comic book for your

collection. So you have people who are garbage men, lawyers, doctors,

CEOs, Fortune 500 businessmen, stockbrokers, advertising executives,

filmmakers, every different walk of life.

You have people buying comic books. You have to remember that almost every

person in this country has read a comic book at one time or another in their

life, has watched a cartoon with Superman, Batman, Spider -Man, has seen

something, played a video game. And when they have that in their minds,

eventually they're making money.

Hmm, I have some extra money.

Maybe I should go buy a comic book.

I say yes, you should.

Well, our role as an auctioneer is really to give our customers what they

already want.

Especially when you're getting into expensive things, it's hard to convince

somebody to spend thousands of dollars for something that they haven't already

decided that they want.

So condition, of course, is a huge factor.

A mint copy of the same comic can be worth a thousand times a beat -up copy

the same comic.

So I advise them.

on which comic books to buy, and then they decide, they buy, some hold for a

long time, and they do very well, some hold for a little bit of time, sometimes

they do well, sometimes they don't, and they invest.

It's become...

Almost commoditized, and a big part of that is because of these plastic holders

you see the comic book in.

CGC has become a form of reassurance to, let's say, the average person

on the street who does not know how to grade a comic book, who doesn't know how

to check for restoration.

They pay this company to do it, and they go, ah, 8 .5.

Perfect. I know what it is. They can look up online how much does an 8 .5

for, and they can go and buy it. So the concept is that the comic

is reviewed by three different graders who are neutral. It's a different

company, so they have no affiliation with the people who submit the comics.

And the people looking at it don't know the identity of the owner. So three

different graders.

review the comic, and assign it a grade, and then they take the consensus of

those three grades. They seal up the comic book in a plastic holder.

So the idea is that as long as that seal has not been broken, the grade remains

valid.

Gotta make sure I look pretty. The wife's coming today.

We hold an auction in Beverly Hills once a year and in New York City once a

year. This is a consignment comic.

This will be sold in our December auction.

The catalog is coming soon, and people from all over the world will be bidding

on this comic book.

So nothing here is actually for sale right now.

It's all just a preview of items that will be auctioned in November.

And so that's why the numbers we put on there are just our best guesses right

now. But a comic with nice eye appeal can, I wouldn't be shocked if it sold

10 or 20 % more than this.

So what's really amazing about comic books is that you can have a comic book

one condition and it's worth one price. And you can have a comic book in a lower

condition and it's worth something completely different.

Case in point, let's take one of the most popular comic books around today,

Incredible Hulk number one.

What I'm going to show you is I'm going to show you a very low -grade copy of

Incredible Hulk, and show you the defects, and then I'm going to show you

-grade copy.

So here you have a 2 .5 graded copy of Incredible Hulk. You can see the creases

and the color loss over here. You can see the rusted staple.

And you get down to the bottom staple, you can see there's actually some paper

missing.

You're not looking to spend $100 ,000 on a comic book. This is a very affordable

copy, and it looks nice for its condition.

Here you see a spectacular specimen, one of the highest -graded copies in the

world, a 9 .0 Incredible Hulk No. 1.

What you'll notice about this copy right off the bat is it's got incredibly rich

colors. It almost looks like it was printed yesterday.

This comic book looks almost perfect.

It has a slight abrasion right here. A year ago, you could have bought this

comic book for about $75 ,000 to $100 ,000.

This comic book should sell for close to $200 ,000 in one year.

You have to understand the Hulk market has exploded over the last few months.

About three months ago, we made an announcement. We sold a 9 .2 for $300

I want to talk to you about that book we were talking about the other day.

Let's talk about the Detective 27.

Okay. Yeah.

So, you know, you've been really tough about the price on this. Yeah, this is

what happened.

And I understand why. I mean, it's the first appearance of Batman.

It's in a 9 .4 condition.

You know, of course, moderately restored.

But I need this book.

And I need it for a client.

And you got a little tough with me yesterday, but I want to come back and

you a second chance. Give me a second chance. See if we can figure something

out.

What's your bottom line on this?

I'd like to make you an offer.

And I can write out a check right now.

If you want to do the deal.

400 grand. I think 400 grand is a really nice offer.

You and I know that...

It's a great book, but it's not the easiest thing to do is finding somebody

half a million bucks to buy a comic book.

And you came here to the show to try to sell it. I did.

But be gentle.

Five is not going to let me do what I need to do with it. Five is

going to be way too tight for me to make something happen. That's why I came in

at four.

I gave myself a little bit of room to negotiate. I can come up to $4 .25. What

do you think about that?

$4 .75.

I think I know where this is heading.

Where's that?

Do it at $4 .50.

All right. Great.

All right. I will be right back with a check.

Thanks so much.

What I've done is I've just made sure that our company is constantly buying

these first appearances.

And what's been really amazing is for years we've had a lot of these comic

that we couldn't sell. They were slow.

And now they mention that they may be in a movie and explosion of prices.

So we've seen the first appearance of Ant -Man, Doctor Strange, Miss Marvel.

Nova, who the Nova Corps appeared prominently in the Guardians of the

movie, and now Nova number one sells for $200. This is a comic book we couldn't

give away just a year ago.

We were the first company to auction a comic for $1 million, and that was in

2010 when we sold Detective Comics number 27, which is the first appearance

Batman. At the time, the auction record for a comic was about $300 ,000, and so

we had advertised the comic as being potentially worth half a million

and it actually then sold for $1 million.

But something like an Action No. 1 or Superman No. 1, there's high demand, but

also a very small supply that isn't going to get higher. I would think it

be hard for Silver Age to ever get to that level just because it's more

The Silver Age comic that everybody wants is Amazing Fantasy No. 15, which

the first appearance of Spider -Man.

And there has been a copy that sold for a million dollars of that.

But what creates value is always the combination of scarcity and demand.

So Amazing Fantasy number 15 isn't scarce by any means, but the demand is

extremely high, and that keeps the value high.

We sold a 9 .6 copy of Amazing Fantasy 15, the first appearance of Spider -Man,

for $1 .1 million.

That is a world record.

Nobody has even come close to this.

And the reason we did, we were able to do this because...

9 .6 was one of one. There was only one known to exist.

And the owner of the comic book was a very wealthy individual.

And I said to him, literally, this is how I negotiated the deal. I said, would

you sell it for $500 ,000?

He goes, no. I said, I'm not offering this, but would you sell it for a

dollars?

And these are his exact words. He says, I'd sell it for a million dollars

because that way I could give the money to charity.

I said, fantastic.

I called up my buyer. I said, it's very aggressive price. It's very expensive,

but you would own the best copy in the world.

And I put a 10%, not even, a little less than 10%. I sold it to him for $1 .1

million, and he was happy.

The seller was happy.

The world was happy, everybody was happy, and I got to be part of the

sale of my favorite superhero.

It was a very exciting day for me.

I don't believe that the comic book market is a bubble.

This is a market built up by thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people

all over the world. Anytime somebody buys a comic book, they're part of the

market, and they're part of what's feeding the market, pushing the market

forward. So I'll give you a for instance. This week, my company, Comic

had their event auction. This was our spring event auction.

Five full days of people bidding on comic books and original comic art and

and memorabilia.

I cannot tell you how many new people were bidding in our auctions.

I didn't recognize the names of half the bidders and winners of the most

expensive items. People I'd never talked to before were spending over $100 ,000

with us. We had the action number one go for $175 ,000. We had Captain America

number one, the first appearance of Captain America, sell for $307 ,000.

A coverless copy of the first appearance of Batman in Detective Comics 27 sold

for $30 ,000. A coverless copy.

This market is strong. This market is here to stay. Just like the coin market,

the stamp market, and the stock market. Comic books are here to stay, and the

market will continue to get stronger and stronger as time goes on. I have no

concern that prices will go down over the next decade for

comics and comic art.

Beyond that, it's hard to say if the kids buying comics today will have the

nostalgia for...

their things as my generation and older generations uh did when they were

growing up one thing that's certainly a concern is that these days if a new

comic sells a hundred thousand copies it's one of the best -selling comics for

that particular month back in the 1960s they would cancel comics that sold less

than 200 000 copies

So it's a smaller pool buying them when they come out.

And the thing that people always pay the most for is the things that they're

nostalgic for from their childhood.

So, yeah, it'll be interesting to see. It's hard to predict whether the

generational shift, how that will change the market.

One of my jobs is I'm a protector, a guardian of nostalgia, of American pop

culture, and I am the person who is able to bring back the fondest memories a

person has of their life, which is usually their childhood. When they were

exposed to comic books and they first had this realization of this other world

and this creativity and fantastic art and stories where anything was possible.

You have to remember, this is before CGI, this is before computer -generated

effects and incredible video games.

Comic books were that world.

We're able to bring those memories back to people in a way that makes them happy

when they're holding them, when they're smelling them, when they're reading

them.

Marvel is so wrapped up with New York that I can't even fathom a New York

without Marvel there.

For so many of us, this was our first impressions of New York.

I lived in a small town in the Midwest where a water tower was one big

on the edge of town.

I was stunned when I first came to New York and saw the water towers because

suddenly there was this thing that I knew about even though I had never seen

because they were in the comic books. That had a tremendous impact on me. It

made the heroes real.

Of course we know it's fiction and it's comic books and it's fantasy.

But you still, you know, when you come to the city and see the buildings and

that, you are actually expecting to see guys playing, you know, around the

buildings and that. That's what makes New York so special.

When Ron Prenz and I worked on Spider -Man, I was very confident to let Ron

handle the city because...

Ron is a maniac when it comes to detail.

He pulls out reference.

He studied the city skyline. Just make sure that everything was realistic.

Because Ron often told me that he learned about New York City by looking

Marvel Comics.

I think that that's something that, you know, little kids who aren't from New

York, it's a whole layer of what Marvel superheroes are. Instead of Gotham City

or Metropolis.

They're reading these really wonderful adventures about some place that

exists. When the Marvel Comics first started that universe, one of the key

things they did that was part of that whole level of reality, establishing

believability, creating the human connection with the characters, was the

that unlike DC...

They didn't set their superheroes in versions of New York City like Gotham or

Metropolis. They just said, no, it's New York City.

Look out your window if you live in New York. Maybe Spider -Man will be swinging

by. That was one of the main keys to making Marvel so attractive and so

appealing. These were heroes right outside your window.

When the Human Torch and the Sub -Mariner first...

crossed over with one another.

They were wrecking Manhattan.

They were obliterating bridges and tunnels.

They were fighting, and you could trace their fight all along the geography.

And, you know, there's a couple things that are really important at that moment

because there's not just the New York underpinning, but there's also you have

these two characters that are created by different people.

and they are brought under one roof. And that set the stage for New York City

being the center of the Marvel Universe.

And from then on, all of these characters were going to be integrated.

They're packed in in this small city, and that's going to set the tone for the

next 75 years.

And I think that's what hooked me to Marvel Comics, was this...

window to a whole world you read dc comics you read superman and batman and

the time you didn't need to pick up the next issue to find out what happened and

you didn't need to pay attention to superman if you wanted to read batman

but once you get into marvel comics once you once you decide that you're going

to give yourself over to that to that world uh you have to go in all the way

marvel really got lucky that Metropolis was taken, or Gotham City

was taken, or Central City, because what could be better than having a real city

as your setting?

And somehow they cornered the market on that.

Marvel almost trademarked New York City as a fictional adventure

land.

When we watch the very first episodes of Superman, we recognize neighborhoods in

New York, we recognize street names, there are indications of waves,

there is what we call the skyline, there are building silhouettes, we recognize

that it is supposed to happen in New York. And then, it's an idealized way to

solve society's problems. That is to say that every day is barely enough, but

every episode, we talk about car risks. Superman goes to see the car

manufacturers and tells them, but be careful, you have to be careful. Stop

building cars in which people die. You have to do your job better. There is an

episode, you will see the directors of casinos explaining to them that they

to stop whitewashing the money of the peasant. This problem of Superman who

into the city and denounces corruption, makes that very quickly from here he

will turn to a generic city that we will call Metropolis.

And then at Batman's we will call it Gotham. Because when the superhero

and then says the police is corrupt or there is a problem of crime in Rome.

The fact that the stories occurred in New York City didn't really occur to me

the time as anything important.

But as time went on, that became more and more important to me. Because in

certain comics like Spider -Man and Daredevil, New York City was actually a

character in those books.

The characters were constantly interacting with the city.

You know, Spider -Man would go over the Queensborough Bridge.

Spider -Man would be taking the subway.

Spider -Man would be going down to Grand Central Station.

New York City was, you know, kind of his best friend in Daredevil. New York City

was really an intimate part of what was going on.

Daredevil was bouncing around Hell's Kitchen, which at the time, I really

know what it was, but it sounded like a scary place.

You know, the Fantastic Four have the Baxter Building, of course,

If we make the comparison between Marvel and DC, accidentally,

maybe, DC's characters are more notable.

We rather have the billionaire or the top journalist of the best newspaper in

the city, Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, all that.

At Marvel, we rather have the little guy, let's say the typical Marvel hero.

When he is human, we have a kind of pulpo who would have become an adult.

And typically, it's the example of Steve Rogers, Captain America, whose legend

will be muscled over the decades by telling his childhood in favorited

environments, in the streets, things like that.

Typically, we also find this in the Fantastic Four. There is Benjamin Grimm,

The Thing, who had his childhood in a fantasy street called Yancy Street,

is harassed by the Canailles.

of Nancy Street, who doesn't stop blaming him for having forgotten his

in the lowlands and making him jokes and stuff like that. And above all, there

is the contribution of screenwriters such as Joe Simon in the 40s and Stan

in the 60s, in terms of superheroes in any case, which gives an argot to these

characters. That is to say, when you read the dialogues of the thing, even if

is at the end of the galaxy, fighting against the terrible Galactus, The thing

is expressed as a New Yorker.

In the 70s, New York was a dirty, dangerous place.

And I believe that certainly in the 60s and the 70s, the

writers who were on those books really reflected New York because they all

in New York City.

Jerry Conway, at the time he was writing Spider -Man, he was about Peter

Parker's age.

A lot of the things that were going on in Peter Parker's life were things that

were going on in Jerry's life, not so much with the supervillains, but the

dramas. You know, Jack Kirby grew up on the Lower East Side, and that was a very

famous, you know, Bowery Boys kind of an atmosphere.

And I think that the personality of the city and the personality of the people

who were making the comic books were, you know, they grew together.

Again, I don't know that it was one of those things where there was a conscious

urge to replicate New York attitude in the comic books so much as it just

organically occurred. It was an intuitive connection.

You have to start with the fact that in the first half of the 20th century, New

York was the gateway city for immigration to the U .S.

And the tribes that were coming in, at that time to New York, were

disproportionately the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Russians, what was called

Pale of Settlement, and to a lesser extent, the Italians who had finally

the right to leave southern Italy and migrate.

Those were the new poor people coming into New York.

Some of those Jews became founders of the first comic book companies, rising

through printing and magazine distribution.

Because those were new and kind of scruffy businesses.

The establishment groups, the white Anglo -Saxon Protestants, even the more

established Catholics, didn't have a big presence in them, looked down on them,

and were happy to leave them to the lesser people.

When you look at the superhero part of the story, you're in the Depression.

You're in a time of enormous pressure on these people's lives.

And there's a real dream of what a better world can be. They've come across

globe in miserable conditions.

So they wanted something better to happen, and they knew it wasn't going to

happen easily.

So it was very easy to imagine that some miraculous figure would have to come in

and do something that would change the scheme of things.

When Joe Simon first came to New York in 1939,

There was a fellow he was working with who said, you ought to try this new

that they're just developing. It's called comic books.

And that really only happened because Joe came to New York. Most of the comic

book writers and artists would be in New York because they needed to be able to

bring their material in to the office and it would be published.

I think the magic of New York City is that it's the aspirational capital of an

aspirational country.

still believe it's a country of dreamers where you can change your life and

whatever your gifts are, you can find a way to use them and bring them to life

and make the world a better place.

The people who are natural entrepreneurs in America have disproportionately

moved to New York over the years just as the people who were natural actors and

beautiful people moved to Los Angeles to go into the movie business.

New York was the place you came if you dreamed of starting a business, if you

dreamed of changing the world.

So it pulled from this enormous country in America the prime talent who were

dreaming of making things better. And that was a very natural fit for the

superhero dream.

The relationship between Marvel and New York also goes through a relationship

with the United States.

Marvel started very quickly in patriotism.

At a time when the United States did not yet have the idea to join the

Second World War. Marvel just started publishing Captain America comics.

On the cover, the patriotic hero breaks the figure to Hitler.

It did not please everyone at the time.

The second point is a moment that will touch, of course, all New Yorkers and

well beyond, of course.

on September 11, 2001.

And you have to understand that the Marvel offices are in the center of New

York, that they will see the attacks, the collapse of the towers, practically

from their windows.

The Marvel staff is part of the people who are evacuated during the day.

And of course, with heroes who themselves live in New York, it is

keep quiet about it.

And two to three months later, there will be an episode of Spider -Man where

see the towers collapse.

We see the reaction of Spider -Man and the other main characters of Marvel in

front of this sad spectacle.

New York City's rich history.

Everything you know about the 20th century in New York City, there's an

with the Marvel Universe.

And so you can look back and you can see the early 60s, the Mad Men era, as

people like to say. You can see that in the Fantastic Four comics.

Just going back and looking at the back issues of Marvel Comics can give you a

history lesson of what city life.

was like over those years.

There's also just, there's the fact that people come to New York and they come

from all different backgrounds and somehow have to figure out how to live

together, which, you know, how could that be, you know, any more

prevalent in the Marvel universe?

Aliens are trying to work with one another and find common ground.

There's also the excitement of urban living, and

it's all right there in the pages of those

comics. It's something that I think is carried forth into the movies.

That's something that's been really great to watch, is the way that the

Comics movies

celebrate in New York City.

And it's a really great tradition.

So that connection with New York is a vital one.

Not just in terms of the fiction, but also the reality.

People that are Marvel fans know very well the stories surrounding the

who lived in New York and made those characters in New York City.

There are entire books written just about the story of Marvel itself.

All those larger -than -life people who were just real people, but they've

become heroes in a sense to many fans worldwide who lived in New York and

created these characters. And now here we are at the New York Comic Con.

which has become one of the largest events of its kind, certainly in this

country, and brings together fans of all generations, people that love comics,

movies, television, all kinds of media. They get to meet Marvel creators up

close. They get to see the actors from all the latest films appearing on stage

in front of them and presenting it.

And that sense of intimacy, that connection with the reality, with that

that they so love.

The conventions are a huge part of that because it brings creator and audience

together in a way that even an individual film or a TV show can't do.

It's part of a sense of community.

And that's something that's fueled these comics in this universe since the very

beginning. And New York is a huge part of that. It's a huge part of Marvel's

identity.

San Diego, which is an amazing Comic -Con, but there wasn't a show like that

all in New York, which just didn't make sense, considering all of New York's

rich publishing, comic book history. It's media clout.

It's culture, you know? So we took it upon ourselves to create this idea and

launched it in 06, and we had no idea what we were doing.

And we expected about 10 ,000 people, and 25 ,000 people showed up.

And the fire marshal shut the event down, and it was an unmitigated

basically.

And now, nine years later, we have 150 ,000 people, and we still don't know

we're doing. So, you know, we've at least been consistent.

It is a 10 -minute walk to DC's offices, a 15 -minute walk from here to Marvel's

offices. So, you know, you have a certain pride in your hometown show.

Those two big publishers don't do a lot of events, really.

But they did a show like New York Comic Con from the first year when we really

had no track record, but they supported it. And I think that has a lot to do

with the fact that it's in Gotham, it's in New York.

I know that DC Comics is moving to Burbank in the coming year.

And I know that's very disruptive to the staff and certainly the creative

community surrounding the staff.

Some people wonder whether or not Marvel will eventually move to the West Coast.

And all I can say is it's possible.

The companies, I believe, were originally here because this is where

was located.

and the comic book publishers were former pulp publishers, and that's

know, they started in New York, they stayed in New York.

Now with the focus on the movies, I can understand the need to move everybody to

the West Coast.

It tells you a lot about where the comic book industry is going

a little bit, right?

It's not just DC and it's not just Marvel. A lot of even medium -sized

publishers are doing the same thing, which is they're developing IP,

intellectual property, for multimedia platforms.

And comic books may be the original format for that

IP, but the idea is film, television, toy, home apparel, video

games, right?

And that world isn't as rooted in New York, per se, as the publishing world.

So I think it's a physical sort of manifestation of the changes that have

going on in publishing period, not just comics, but in comics as well, for quite

some time, really.

In the early days of comic books, certainly in the early days of Marvel...

The creative people, the writers, the artists, they all lived in New York City

because you had to deliver your work by hand.

As time has gone on, people started delivering work through the mail.

And then came Federal Express, and now it's all email.

You can live wherever you want and deliver your work.

I work for publishers in Europe, and I work for non

-publishers on the West Coast.

And it's all the same to me, because all I have to do to send it is hit a

button, and the script is gone.

You have to remember that Jack Kirby moved to Los Angeles and was one of the

first people who actually worked away from New York.

while still working for New York publishing companies.

Because of modern communications, the writers and artists no longer have to be

anywhere near the offices of the publisher.

And in a way, that's opened the world up much more broadly, and it has taken

them out of an epicenter.

Even when most of the talent that works for Marvel, we don't live in the city.

It's always, I don't know, makes you feel like part of the

community, knowing that the office is still in New York, you know,

still has a New York address and that.

So I would like Marvel to stay here for

longer, forever, you know.

If Marvel decided...

to leave the city at some point because of a business reason. Well, you know, my

work doesn't change at all.

But I think we all love to know

that Marvel will stay here for us.

Nostalgia is a tricky thing, you know? Like, you want everyone to stay in New

York where they came from, but, you know, things change, times change.

There's now lights at Wrigley Field.

I mean, you know, the Washington Post has color photographs.

Like, you know, my CDs are worthless. Certainly my cassettes aren't. Like, the

world changes.

There's a part of you that says, man, it would be cool if it stayed that way

forever and that sort of nostalgia could live on.

But the world is changing and how we do business is changing and how people

consume content is changing, you know.

New York being a character in comic books won't change because of where the

publisher's offices are based.

When DC moves to Burbank, I don't think that Gotham's going to change to be a

flat city by the sea with lots of highways.

That history remains.

I'm a New York boy.

I came into comics hanging around the offices of...

than many different comic book companies that were in New York in the early

1970s. DC, Marvel, Warren, Gold Key, Archie.

I was up at them all after school on different afternoons.

So each time one of them closes or moves their door somewhere else,

I feel sad because that's a piece of my childhood moving away.

You can run a great business from anywhere.

I'm sure that D .C. and Los Angeles will still be a magical company and will do

wonderful things and be magic for the young people who are working there who

just starting out today.

My magic time was a few decades ago, and I get to keep that.

But it is in California that the most decisive pages of the future of

superheroes are now being written.

To reach a wider audience, Marvel has also implanted itself in Hollywood.

Since the first Iron Man in 2008, Marvel Studios has produced a world -class box

-office without mistakes in ten films, all produced by your care.

Mais son aventure au cinéma aura nécessité 8 années de tâtonnement et

en amont, une réinvention par l 'éditeur de ses propres comics.

Dès 1999...

Since 2000, there's this realization that there will be movies, big movies,

as Spider -Man, such as X -Men, and that we have stories, perhaps, in the

comics, which are loaded with 30 or 40 years of continuity, which are perhaps a

little too complex, and we tell ourselves that we're going to invent a

start, parallel to the hero in place, and we're going to launch the Ultimates

range, which is mainly based on three titles at the beginning, which are...

Ultimate Spider -Man and Ultimate X -Men.

which are connected with a certain cinematographic expression.

And we will arrive at this third series, where people will say to themselves,

why make a series called The Short Ultimates, which takes back the members

the Avengers, but in a new context, and also much more cinematographic.

And in this new context, which is led by the screenwriter Mark Millar, who is

Scottish, and his father -in -law Brian Hitch, the director... which has a big

importance in narration, we will reinvent codes.

Re -inventing codes means asking yourself the question of why in

characters there are no black decision -makers.

We will decide that Nick Fury could be black, he could have, why not, the face

of Samuel Jackson.

And we will make choices that will be decisive for the future because we

the aesthetics, the behavior of heroes a little more potash maybe, but also a

little more political.

And we create the blueprint.

of what will be the Marvel Studios four or five years later.

It's in there that there is the DNA of this Captain America, of this Iron Man,

of this Thor, and of course of the Avengers movies.

So it's ready to adapt, it's thought to speak to the cinema audience. And the

day when Marvel will say, we're going to the cinema, these series will serve as

warplanes.

DC had an advantage in filmmaking in that they were tied intimately with

Brothers. And so you had Superman the movie and Batman.

And you had the Wonder Woman television show. And all of them were based upon

three of the most iconic characters in existence.

Marvel had essentially two properties that were that iconic.

Spider -Man and the X -Men. In that day, Marvel had no specific...

studio tie.

And so those two properties were developed with Sony and 20th Century

There were a lot of secondary characters who were not going to be developed

because they didn't have that icon status of Spider -Man and the X -Men or

Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.

And I think that the Marvel film division

grew because there was a frustration that there were all of these really rich

characters who weren't being used as film.