By Jarrod Hoogendam
“Next they annex Poland!” jokes Mitch Risman, owner of Shoebox Heroes in Richmond Hill. “Marvel is trying to gain market share, not by improving their product, but by buying their competitors.”
Within the last couple of years, Marvel Comics (Spider-Man, Hulk, X-Men) has become a corporation in every nasty sense of the world. Fans and retailers alike feel that quality has become secondary to profit. Marvel has bought several competitors and companies that sell comic-related items such Fleer cards, Toy-Biz toys, Malibu Comics, Skybox cards, and most notably, Heroes World distribution. Heroes World served as the third largest middleman between hte various publishers and the retailers until it was bought.
“They bought heroes World to gain more control over the market,” Risman continues. “This may be the first step towards Marvel stores that would exclusively sell Marvel comics. The only response from D.C. (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman) is to buy a distributor of their own. This starts a dangerous trend for the direct market, since smaller publishers would be excluded in such a practice, and thus have no way to distribute their product.”
Reactions are, however, mixed as to the impact of the sale. In a recent issue of Comic Book Business magazine, many publishers and distributors thought that very little would change—that Heroes World would operate as a regular competitor. ut what happens if Marvel takes sole control over the distribution of its materials?
“The point at which things get interesting is if Marvel changes their relationship with the rest of direct market distributors. If they operate status quo, then there’s really nothing to discuss here. If they opt to disrupt those relations in almost any manner, then they are effectively destroying the foundation upon which this industry was built,” notes the executive vice-president of Dark Horse Comics.
So American distributors and small publishers may or may not be in trouble. What about Canadian distributors and independent publishers? As yet, there are no Heroes World facilities within Canada, nor have there been any agreements made with the two main Canadian distributors, Andromeda and Multi-Book. There is a slim chance that the entire market may be overlooked.
Any grade seven economics student could argue in favour of Marvel’s buy-outs. After all, the goal of every business within a capitalist system is to become the market leader and to eliminate the competition. From that perspective, it is a shrews method to increasing profits. Many comic fans, however, do not appreciate the end result.
“Many customers who have collected Marvel product for decades are being turned off by inferior product,” Risman added, “they think Marvel is spending too much of its time and money buying companies to compensate for their dropping market share, instead of looking internally for their problems. The customers wouldn’t care what ‘Corporation Marvel’ did as long as the quality of the comics was still decent.”
The issue is summed up best by Bob Chapman of Graphitti Designs: “I believe Marvel is doing what they have to do to gain the position necessary to fulfill their corporate mandate.” The bottom line—sad, but true.
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