While I suspect that the answer to this question could very well be, "No, you idiot," I would be curious if you could think of any possible bright sides of the bust. Did anything good come out of it (besides the death of a ton of lousy titles) or was it just a great big pile of suck without any glimmering glints of gold peeking out from underneath the rubble?
Allan | Email | Homepage | 07.18.07 - 12:45 am | #

One observation: Marat Mycheals.

Ugh...


Wait, one more: Darker Image. Still waiting for number two there, fellas.
Chris | 07.18.07 - 4:26 am | #

As a retailer, did you ever try to talk any customers out of buying multiple issues or otherwise contributing to the speculation bug? If you did, was it regular customers or just guys thinking they would cash in on the Death Of Superman or X-Men 1, etc?
During the bust, the owner of my regular shop (since gone out of business)would look out for stuff I might like ("Hey, you like Swamp Thing, you might like this Sandman character")but would also tell me "there's not much to that issue besides the die cut cover" if I was looking at something outside my pull list of questionable merit. He also explained to my son why buying a few dozen issues of X-Men 1 wasn't going to pay his college tuition. I always appreciated the input.
Damn I miss that store. At the place I visit now, only one of the dozen or so employees I've dealt with seems to give a crap about anything beyond their Gameboys or the anime they're watching while he rings me up. I enjoyed dealing with a guy who cared about the product and his customers.

I don't know why he went out of business because we moved out of the area for a few years and he was gone when we moved back. Maybe the bust or the fact that he was in the alleyway of a large strip mall. No kidding, you had to drive around behind the mall and park in amongst the various dumpsters and access the shop in a back area sandwiched between recruiters for each branch of the armed services. There was no signage in the main area to indicate he was even back there. Guess I answered the question of why he went out of business.
Larry E | Email | 07.18.07 - 5:49 am | #

One side-effect of the crash, for me, was that I became more selective in what I was buying.

I was NOT buying every turd they were putting out there, but I was buying everything I didn't already have out of the shop's quarter box. Cheap comics, I figured I would be getting my money's worth and something to read. It didn't take to long to realize that even at a quarter some things were not worth my time.

This is what finally forced me to begin to ignore everything except my DC collection, which has always been the backbone of my collecting. I'd been reading DC for 20 years by the time the crash happened and after the crash I went solely to DC.

I'm just now, all these years later, beginning to try some non-DC books. Usually things I see recommended multiple places on the blogs. I still will barely even think about buying a new series, unless there is a creator on it that I already like.

Mike Nielsen
Mike Nielsen | Email | 07.18.07 - 6:08 am | #

I was probably one of the canaries in the coalmine for the '90s market crash.

I was never into speculating on comics; I was just a reader. I'd go to the comics shop ever week, get a few titles, mostly DC... I didn't have a pull list (did they have them back then?), but if I did there probably would have been about ten or twelve comics on it. One of which was The New Titans.

I was going through a period when my interest in comics was at relatively low ebb. Which means I still went every week, and liked the comics I was getting, but when I wasn't reading them I was thinking about something else. At that time (early '90s... maybe '93?), Titans was in the middle of its 'Titans Hunt' storyline, which was a period of approximately five years during which the team membership changed again and again and again. They introduced a boring group of characters from the near future called the 'Team Titans' (I think) which included such obvious superhero characters as a vampire on a motorcycle. Then there was an announcement: in the next issue of Titans, the first half of the comic would be a story. The second half would be devoted to the origins of two of the Team Titans. And since there were eight Team Titans altogether, that means there would be four different versions of the next issue, each with a different pair of origins. So if you wanted to follow the story, you'd have to buy four comics, and for the price of four comics, you'd get two-and-a-half comics worth of story.

I stopped collecting comics right then.

If I had been a little more interested in comics right then, I might have kept going with my favourites (Sandman, Groo, LSH), but I didn't; I quit cold turkey and didn't start up again until a few years ago when I had a Legion jones I just couldn't shake.
Matthew E | Email | Homepage | 07.18.07 - 6:45 am | #

I've often wondered if Overstreet and the other pricing guides acknowledged the crash, or whether their "market prices" for various issues just kept going up, and up...
Scratchie | 07.18.07 - 7:14 am | #

Only tangentially related to the crash--do you think there will ever be another time when comics are a mass medium, as they were from the 1940s-1990s? And if so, what changes in the comics industry and/or society will be necessary for that to happen?

Okay, I realize that sounds like an essay question, but I thought you might have some thoughts on the topic.
Thelonious_Nick | 07.18.07 - 7:16 am | #

Maybe you've already covered this, but was there one "eureka" moment for you when you knew the crash was coming? When you knew things were falling apart, or about to fall apart?

For that matter, did you smell the crash at all?

I'd just be interested in a comprehensive history post on the actual "crash" at your shop, and how you experienced it. I think that'd be fascinating. Dick Hyacinth is writing up his personal history of comics in the nineties and his habits, and I think his idea for a series of "microhistories" could be really illuminating on a topic like this.
Matt | Email | Homepage | 07.18.07 - 7:32 am | #

The 90's was was when I gave up on comics, at least superhero comics. It was Millenium that did it for me. It sucked on so many levels and I realized that if I wanted to read a comic, I wanted to laugh.

I switched over to reading only Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck and Walt Disney's Comics & Stories. Rereading all of the Carl Barks classics, being amazed at the genius that is Don Rosa, and finally coming to appreciate all the other duck artists around the world.

The books are pricey now ($7 a pop), but I keep telling myself that it will be worth it just to keep these books in print.
Dwayne "the canoe guy" | Email | Homepage | 07.18.07 - 8:05 am | #

I guess like Larry E, I'm interested in, for lack of a better word, the "ethics" of the 90's speculator boom. Did you feel a certain responsibility to dissuade folks from being a bit too silly with their money (multiple issues, "investing," etc.), or is this sort of like asking a liquor store owner if he feels bad about taking money off a guy who buys a 30 pack?

I know you to be a generally swell and ethical guy, but were there ever any moments in the 90's where you felt tested, or even points where you were like "No, this is not why I got into this business at. all."?
jimbo | Email | Homepage | 07.18.07 - 8:23 am | #

You failed to mention it was in BAD, learning-to-speak-French-French. Kick-ass!

Zut alors! Ca c'est Batman avec les boobies!

On the plus side, the speaking was so slow I understood most of it.
Mark | Email | 07.18.07 - 9:09 am | #

Were you around for the '80s "Black and White" boom? If so, how was it similar and different?
David C | Email | 07.18.07 - 12:44 pm | #

Elseworlds Batman slash is a terrible enough thing without dragging the children into it.
Ron Hogan | Email | Homepage | 07.18.07 - 1:58 pm | #

i worked as a graphic designer or a company that had Comic Images as a client during that time, and i was repulsed at some of absolutely hideous artwork that was being sent to us(from Marvel, mostly) to use as the base for merchandise like t-shirts and trading cards and such.

i can't help but think almost everything we produced at that time is now sitting in a landfill somewhere.
rob! | Email | Homepage | 07.18.07 - 3:07 pm | #

I would like to see a more detailed discussion of breaking down the "90s".
Remember....that is 10 years of shit vs shinola. Valiant comics began around 1990.....Image comics 1992...death of Supes 93....clone saga...1994 til 1997....Heroes World Distribution in 1995.... Depending on how you look at it, that was the shit part. However, the 90's eventually brought us great names associated with comic book writing. It seems that the super star status artists were receiving in the early 90's just shifted eventually to writers in the late 90's. We saw the birth of Vertigo, and the beginning stages of the experiment that eventually became today's graphic novel market. There was the sports cards crash (which brought a lot of speculators to comics) and the comic cards boom and bust. Wow, there is just so much. I know it felt like it happened overnight, however we are still talking about an entire decade of very important comic book and direct market history.
Comic Bob | 07.18.07 - 3:08 pm | #

I'd lost interest in new comics by '88 -- before the bust. I recall that the comic book guys in those days were very much like the Simpsons' "Comic Book Guy" -- sneeringly condescending to children, often morbidly overweight, deeply involved in RPGs, and unpleasant in their conversation.

I got a hankering for Groo ten years ago -- went thru every store I could find to make that collection (I didn't know they'd been collected in TPBs) and I've gotta say, today's comic book guy is a cool guy to deal with. The Simpsons' stereotype is outdated. I say the improvement in comic book guys is a positive effect of the bust.
rockie bee | Email | Homepage | 07.18.07 - 8:30 pm | #

Right on, Comic Bob! One of my peeves is how fandom seems to focus on "The '90s" as the Boom/Bust, Imagification, Variant Covers, Big Deaths, and Kewl Retooling. Which it was...for the first half or so. But there's sort of recollective haze about the latter half, which was remarkably stellar:

Vertigo was in its Golden Age. The DCU had one final crapfest in Zero Hour, then spent the rest of the decade in a creative renaissance: Waid's FLASH and IMPULSE; Waid/Peyer's LEGION/NAIRES, followed by DnA's LEGION LOST/WORLDS; Robinson's STARMAN and JSA; Dixon's ROBIN, NIGHTWING, and BoPs; David's YOUNG JUSTICE; Kesel's SUPERBOY; Ennis's HITMAN; the short-lived triumvirate CHASE, CHRONOS, and CREEPER; a pair of solid crossovers with DC ONE MILLION and FINAL NIGHT; and of course Morrison's flagship JLA (an era apparently even DC forgot about, since the whole plot to INFINITE CRISIS revolved around the DCU being nothing but crap since Crisis). And while Marvel had very little to be proud of (well, sales I guess) during the decade, it did end with Waid's CAP, Busiek's AVENGERS, and Jurgens's THOR, a solid base for their own renaissance that Marvel naturally bungled completely.

Creatively, comics had gotten back on track where they were headed in the late '80s before the Image Age hit. It didn't last, but it DID happen.

Which I guess would be my question for Mike: Did you as a retailer see any signs that comics were recovering in the late-'90s, or was it just a long period of malaise from the Bust until Quesada/Jemas at Marvel kicked off the Media Age?
Cove West | Email | 07.19.07 - 1:19 am | #

I grew up reading comings in the early/mid-80's, and by the early 90's it felt like comics were being dumbed down. My monthly reading list went on a downward trajectory from reading a monthly history lesson with Roy Thomas' All-Star Squadron in the mid-80's to the trying out the foil-covered first issue of Punisher 2099, which was just horrible.

Most of the creators I grew up with seemed to leave (or were left out of) the industry by that point, so by 1994 I finally gave up my comics habit due to a lack of titles I felt were worth reading. After 10 years of being a faithful monthly comics collecter, I went cold turkey and gave up the habit.

It was just before the bust, but even then I could tell it was coming. Comics are worth more the harder they are to get, and every comic shop I went to seemed very well stocked in each new #1 issue that was coming out.
Pete | Email | 07.19.07 - 9:12 am | #

I don't know if it's too late to add another question to the thread, but I was wondering if your shop saw a lot of customers who, like me, didn't even notice the boom and bust. I had dropped just about all of my superhero titles in the late 80's when they got rather too grim'n'gritty for me and was reading a lot of indies (including most of First's line)and then Vertigo books right up until Heroes Return got me to return too. Was that just me or was I part of a recognizable group?
Bill | Email | 07.19.07 - 9:23 am | #