A couple of weeks ago I was in a meeting when someone said that a design looked “really powerful, really Marvel Comics.” I turned to the woman next to me, an executive with Warner Brothers, and whispered, “Should I say it looks really ‘DC Comics?’ ” Because after all, Warner Brothers owns DC, and is located right here in beautiful downtown Burbank.

Now, it turns out, Marvel too is owned by a studio headquartered in my hometown. That studio is named Disney.

Although I hadn’t heard anything about this deal in advance — and evidently, just about no one else did either — I’m not surprised. In a world of entertainment agglomeration, where radio stations and television stations and movie studios and newspapers and digital providers and satellites and publishing houses and so forth are all owned ultimately by one company, and that one company is owned by Rupert Murdoch or Steve Jobs or Barry Diller or some combination thereof, it had come to seem increasingly strange that there Marvel was, all by its lonesome, an attractive bauble sitting neglected at the billionaires’ ball. I don’t know how well Ariel, the Little Mermaid, has been feeling lately, but Iron Man and Spider-Man and friends have never been more powerful at the cash register.

While I don’t pine for the moment I spy the Hulk waving glumly alongside Goofy in the Main Street parade, I’m glad the characters have a well-furnished new home backed by unimpeachable credit. Too many characters, and comic-book companies, have found themselves in foreclosure. As Mark Evanier noted on his own blog, I do wish that Jack Kirby were alive to see this day — and, somehow, to financially benefit from it. Although Kirby’s plight pales against that of the creators of Superman (in his declining years, Joe Shuster worked as a deliveryman to make ends meet), he never saw the sort of payday given recently to, say, the creators of RockBand, which has been a persistent money loser but which recently netted a $150 million performance bonus for its creators. For Marvel (or its predecessor, Timely), Kirby co-created Captain America, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Doctor Doom, the Black Panther, the Silver Surfer, and indeed almost all the major characters in the Marvel pantheon. (Spider-Man and Wolverine being the most notable exceptions.) Without Jack Kirby, Marvel wouldn’t have been worth half its $2 billion purchase price today. Just how much would a fair performance bonus have equaled?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Comics, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.