Impel’s people had a sports background, not comics, and lacked the confidence that Budiansky and Marvel did in the ability for the comic characters to carry a line of trading cards. Budiansky was given creative control at the design level, but he had to balance that against the more cautiously thinking executives at Impel, who also had a stake in how the card sets came together. While Marvel was handling the creation, Impel was still publishing the cards, so the two companies had to work together. But in this case, Marvel created all the artwork. “On very rare occasions they might generate some new artwork, but usually they just picked up some good enough shot of whichever character, Spider-Man or Hulk or something, and they stuck it on a lunchbox. “Before that, the creative was done outside of Marvel - they would provide, as they did to all sorts of licensing requirements, artwork that already existed,” Budiansky said. Marvel put the creative production of trading cards in-house, keeping the artwork, copy, and design in the four walls of the main company, then sending it out to the card company for production and distribution. That experience meant Budiansky was well-suited to lead the Marvel Universe card development. “I’d been writing the backs of toy boxes for Hasbro for a number of years for Transformers, so I had a certain style I was looking for, how to say something that gave you a complete feeling of who this character is, but say it very briefly in a few sentences.” “We found people who I trained how to write the backs of the cards,” Budiansky said. Part of his work in the ’80s was to manage the merchandising of Transformers comics and toys, specifically the “back of the box” copy that came with the figures. In 1985, to handle the increased demand for merchandise, editor-in-chief Jim Shooter created the special projects editor role and assigned Budiansky to the position. In 1990, Todd MacFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 broke records a year later, the record was broken by the launches of both X-Force and X-Men.īudiansky started at Marvel in 1976, working his way up from freelancer to a lower level editorial position to editor in 1983. As the company’s top editor, DeFalco didn’t have much time to manage the project alongside the exploding comics market - “They were not one of my highest priorities,” he told Polygon on a recent call - because he was managing the expectations of a hungry board of directors who expected Marvel to continue delivering on the huge sales that the company was generating. Marvel’s then-editor-in-chief, Tom DeFalco, put special projects editor Bob Budiansky in charge of putting together a new card set with trading card company Impel. It was a natural fit.Ī card from Marvel and Impel’s 1990 Marvel Universe run Image: Courtesy of Marvel Comics One of those ways was the trading card market. With sales up across the company and new titles and traditional top line characters both doing brisk business, Marvel looked for other ways to make money. Marvel dominated, grabbing around two-thirds of the market. The advent of the trade paperback as a universal part of the comic reading experience was still a ways off, leading collectors to snap up first issues and special editions of various comics. A speculator’s market in comic books was behind it all lower print runs of popular stories in years prior made scarcity mean value. The company was riding what was, at the time, an unprecedented high. The comic book industry was booming in 1990, and nowhere was that boom felt more than at Marvel Headquarters. The mystical art of alternate revenue sources And history suggests the success of the cards changed the course of Marvel’s history. Without the stats and ratings on the back, the cards likely wouldn’t have been as successful, even with the rabid comic fans at the time. Marvel’s foray into trading cards paralleled the company’s boom and bust fortunes of the ’90s. The rankings gave enthusiasts concrete numbers to point to when arguing over character attributes and helped fuel the crossover comic trading card business. In the early 1990s, Marvel Comics released a series of popular trading card sets called “Marvel Universe” that changed fan debates forever by using power rankings to assign relative ability levels to different characters. Prepare yourself for Polygon's Who Would Win Week. One eternal question spans all of pop culture: "Who would win?" That's why we're dedicating an entire week to debates that have shaped comics, movies, TV, and games, for better and worse.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |