Thread by @tegan_oneil5000

You know, in all seriousness I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about Marvel in any capacity. Every bit of news is just - so incredibly depressing.

Even I - never one to shy from criticizing the company - have been *shocked* by the speed of their institutional decline.

All the rot was already there, it’s not like any novel depravity burst on the scene - but it seems like 2017 represented a kind of watershed in terms of the tsunami of awful press.

And there’s just nothing good in the books at all. The company is almost uniformly unreadable. Even the good creators have declined in that environment, and good books can’t even last half a year.

Now, here’s the thing about Marvel, and why the Disney acquisition was always going to hurt the company’s output:

For the first few decades of its existence it was a family firm that was run according to the whims of one man: Martin Goodman. Goodman was - not an ethical business.

No one in comics *was* at the time, of course. But he’s the reason Simon & Kirby left CAPTAIN AMERICA.

Goodman made most of his money doing cheap exploitation stuff - men’s magazines and the like. Pre-Code Marvel is some of the most gruesome stuff you can find in terms of content.

For Goodman publishing was an essentially fly-by-night business that worked by chasing trends.

None of this is novel scholarship, by he way. Even the most glowing corporate hagiographies generally agree: Goodman was a son of a bitch who made his poor nephew’s life pretty dang miserable for decades.

(His poor nephew was Stan Lee, of course.)

So, you know, always remember the reason Lee did what he did was that the primary conflict vector for his career was always his uncle.

Now no one remembers his uncle, but they remember the people he screwed while fighting his uncle.

So Marvel is a business whose business model - down to its core - is a nimble and exploitive model that can change quickly to exploit trends. The way Marvel does that is by treating people like shit.

Ok, so far, so good, Comics History 101.

Now, Marvel ceases to be a family firm in any way at all in the 70s. Lee made the company into a valuable commodity, and it had a succession of owners after Goodman and before Disney.

And this is how Marvel “worked” for over thirty years: lots of turnover. Marvel has to completely upend its corporate culture every ten years or so, because the business burns out people, burns out editorial directions, burns out business models.

Marvel has to be able to tear everything down from scratch every ten years or the rot sets in at the very top. This is a hard and fast rule of the comics industry that has been true for *over forty years.*

But then what happens when a business whose very survival depends on being able to turnover executive and editorial positions at a fair clip is bought by the *most* stable entertainment conglomerate in the world?

Now, here’s where I think my appreciation for George Lucas has grown significantly in the last few years.

When Disney bought Marvel they said much the same as when they bought Star Wars and Pixar. In all three cases, their messaging was very strong: they’re buying profitable firms and keeping as much of the corporate culture intact as possible.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

A lot of people point to the Disney purchase as the beginning of a decline at Pixar. I’ve never been the biggest fan of the studio but it’s hard to argue that the raft of sequels and ever-declining critical acclaim hasn’t cheapened the brand significantly in the last ten years.

That’s arguably a different story because Pixar and Disney were already very closely entwined before the outright purchase. Disney’s ownwership probably only accelerated inevitable and preexisting trends in the life of any animation studio - that’s a very cyclical business.

Lucasfilm has remained more or less intact, and the stunning success of every Star Wars movie since the Disney acquisition rather proves that Lucas built a very sturdy company.

Lucas didn’t sell a catalog of IP to be strip-mined by another company, he sold a machine designed and built by him for the purpose of making Star Wars.

Disney seems to be pretty confident in the value of their purchase, so far, and it’s hard not to see why.

With Marvel, Disney probably thought they were getting just that - a machine designed and built for the purpose of making Marvel Comics.

Oooooh boy. Yeah. Actually “making” comics has never been Marvel’s strength.

Marvel is very good at selling comic books.

The important thing to remember here is that, traditionally, Marvel has regarded “quality” as merely another variable to be adjusted - and a bothersome one, at that.

“Good” comics are never the point. Marvel can make good comics, but really regards the idea of “quality” as a gimmick roughly equivalent to lenticular covers or computer coloring.

When lenticular covers sell, they will sell lenticular covers. When good comics sell, etc.

Since Marvel’s business model is inherently boom-and-bust, and actual “quality” is regarded as less a static goal and more as a variable attribute that can be adjusted to fit audience tastes, they will only make good comics when absolutely nothing else works.

This is why the company’s most fertile periods often come on the heels of an editorial turnover.

When nothing else will do, the only thing guaranteed to actually attract readers is having good books. But it doesn’t come natural to the company, and it’s never first choice.

So just what happens when he company reaches another one of its choke points, but because of the stability of recent movie successes + the Disney acquisition, feels little external pressure to actually bring about change at the top?

The EIC turnover at the company has traditionally been contentious and fraught, corporate bloodbaths that leave casualties on every side.

Since 2001 editorial succession has been peaceful. Everyone at the top is buddies. They’re all very rich now.

The company has also spawned a toxic corporate culture, has been bleeding creators for years, faces plummeting sales, serious readership fatigue & alienation, thrives on the bad will of every retailer in the nation -

- to say nothing of Perlmutter, arms contractors, Nazi Cap, etc -

- basically, everything in and around the company is on fire, but the economic incentives that formerly mandated frequent editorial turnover have been removed.

Disney promised not to fire everyone, and they can’t fire everyone, but they need to fire everyone.

And I say that based on nothing other than a fair knowledge of the company’s history: the only way Marvel has ever been able to overcome the company’s own significant institutional barriers against producing readable comics has been by burning down everything and starting again.