Chapter 347: Boom and Bust II

Others may dismiss such bountiful news as no cause for concern but it is quite the concern alright.

As they say... what goes up, must come down.

With such an up in the current market, the down must be coming next...

Alexander was sure of it. He even had examples to turn to.

There's the dot-com bubble. A stock market bubble built during the late 1990s. A period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet.

Then the dot-com bubble burst. Well... that bubble bursted.

There's the real estate bubble of the mid-2000s... then the 2008 great recession.

If it's an example close to the time period, there's Black Monday or Black Tuesday of 1987. A downturn due to inflation.

Why was Alexander even listing out these stock market examples?

He was setting an alarmist view of the comic book market's sudden and incredibly steep rise, so it made sense to look into comic market events.

Even in that category, he had a lot of examples.

This kind of up-and-down trend is especially poignant in the comic book industry, after all.

World War II. The rise of American superheroes and the Golden Age of comic books. Which also came crumbling down when heroes-in-print and men-at-arms were needed no more.

Of course, there's that period of enviable comic book ubiquity. Then Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent came out, bringing with it a period of comic book invisibility.

Then there's that obvious example from the 90s, where comics from big superhero publishers like Marvel, DC, Image, and Valiant went through something a rise and fall. Involving the public's collective insanity.

Massive print runs for purportedly “collectible” issues followed by a mid-decade crash that bankrupted Marvel and made the superhero an endangered species. Once again.

Of course, there's another one and strangely enough, it happened around the same period as the period that Alexander is re-living currently.

It wasn't that famous or well-known but it happened nonetheless.

Clearly, Alexander's booming and busting train of thought had merit to it.

Especially when his next example was the so-called Black-and-White Boom and Bust of the mid-1980s.

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Anyways...

Years before the cartoon, toy line, and movies turned them into a pop-culture phenomenon, the heroes in a half-shell debuted in an obscure, self-published black-and-white comic book that thrilled the comics market.

The success of their adventures in print sparked the establishment of a multitude of publishers looking to cash in on the TMNT craze with an array of bizarre imitators.

Then, just as quickly as it began, the revolution went awry and a wide swath of the industry was eradicated almost overnight.

The Turtles were inadvertently responsible for one of the most disastrous speculation bubbles in comics history...

So, TMNT. Which brings things up to the Mirage Studios story once again.

Yada yada... Under-employed art-school grads... parodying popular comics... turtles... Renaissance...

Boom... the iconic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Of course, Eastman and Laird couldn’t afford to release the comic in color, so they’d followed the lead of those other acclaimed indie comics.

Printing in black and white, which made it look more mature next to the childishly colorful titles from Marvel and DC Comics.

The creators pooled their cash and borrowed $1,300 from Eastman’s uncle to pay for a print run of 3,000 copies, then set up a deal with a distributor to ship them to comic shops.

They also sent out about 180 press releases to niche and mainstream news outlets.

There was something about the comic, perhaps its tapping of the Zeitgeist, perhaps its acrobatic action, perhaps its humor, or most likely all three.

It just resonated with readers.

Buyers scooped up the copies Eastman and Laird put out through comics shops and in individual sales at conventions.

In three weeks, they were sold out.

Word of mouth grew, and so did print runs and sales for subsequent issues.

In that crazy whirlwind of enthusiasm for this newly arrived hit, a booming bubble began to form.

First came the consumers.

The scarcity of that initial print run meant buyers lucky enough to have copies could sell them to collectors for as much as $100 in 1985, a price markup of more than 6,600 percent.

Comics speculators seeking similar ground-floor investments started snapping up other comics that could appreciate in value, and even non-speculators became interested in reading more stuff like the adventures in TMNT.

Thus, the demand for black-and-white, action-packed, somewhat-parodic series spiked.

It was a perfect recipe for quick wealth. Making something in black and white on flimsy paper was a cheap endeavor, so the potential profit margins were incredible.

Publishers proliferated at a rate no one had seen in decades.

According to the industry trade Comic Buyer’s Guide, there were ten independent publishers in early 1984 and 170 by the end of 1987.

Silverwolf Comics, Adventure Publications, Crystal Publications, ACE Comics, Solson Publications, Lodestone Comics, New Sirius Productions, the ironically titled Pied Piper Comics — the list went on and on.

Naturally, retailers were happy to act as middlemen, buying up the new products from fly-by-night publishers and serving it up to the consumers who craved them.

Since TMNT had been a parody of popular comics that, itself, became popular, the new publishers often decided to make their parodies of the Turtles.

Adult Thermonuclear Samurai Elephants.

Mildy Microwaved Pre-Pubescent Kung Fu Gophers.

Geriatric Gangrene Jujitsu Gerbils.

Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters.

There's even Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos.

There were more run-of-the-mill superhero and fantasy comics, too, most of them crudely drawn and poorly plotted.

That low quality was to be expected, as some publishers were debuting as many as 19 titles at a time, an insane burden for any wannabe publisher with no capital to hire top talent.

Then again, any potential profiteer who smelled a buck in comics crawled out from under the muck and started publishing like mad.

These thrown-together publishers greeted the market and the market was in danger because of it.

Although some shops were well-intentioned in their attempts to show off work from independent writers and artists, there were plenty of bad apples.

At the height of this craze, one businessman secretly financed four competing publishers.

Sales numbers from that era are hard to find, but a commonly cited statistic says a typical indie publisher before the boom would print only about 10,000 copies of a comic.

During this boom, the indie market was lucrative enough that a publisher could print up to 100,000-200,000 copies of a given issue.

Those huge print runs, of course, should have been a red flag for anyone watching the industry.

After all, what made TMNT successful was its uniqueness. Artistically, it stood out because there was nothing else like it in the market, and the value of issues resulted from those tiny print runs.

Once consumers were faced with hundreds of titles, each of them available in abundance, the idiosyncrasy and scarcity disappeared.

At this point, was the bust!

Americans are nothing if not bored easily.

At some point, guesstimated-ly around September or October of ‘86, the speculatively-crazed comic book community got bored.

In late 1986 and 1987, the bottom fell out. Hard!

Collectors stopped paying top dollar for new number-one issues.

Dissatisfied readers stopped buying the new wave of black-and-white comics.

Retailers, who’d over-ordered copies of the stuff, felt the financial burden of a glut of unsold comics they couldn’t return.

Publishers couldn’t convince retailers to get back on board and they started going under.

The shock to the market even hit the distributors. They and their channels had been handling all these new products and with the circulation being a drag, they went down.

Sales of books from the black-and-white publishing start-ups quickly fell by half and dwindled further.

Signifying that the era of black-and-white excitement was over.

Even non-black-and-white publishers like the Big Two were affected.

The crash just reverberated in comics shops and reader conversations.

Retailers, collectors, and publishers learned an important lesson about frenzied comic fads because of this... but they didn't exactly learn, did they?

Absurd speculation and collective insanity just have times when it really couldn't be stopped!

The poor comic book market was a poor victim. A victim for far too many times.

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That was the gist of it.

What's strange is that these turn of events seemed to be seeping through. Seeping through to this renewed timeline.

The Black-and-White Boom. The Black-and-White Bust.

A market calamity that served as a reminder that even the best, most lucrative entertainment ideas can get diluted and bastardized to the point of irrelevance and financial disaster.

As Alexander looked at Miss Marker's chart's once again... the history of old was clearly on its way to reverberating with this new one.

It wasn't the same but it has traces of being another boom-and-bust cycle already.

Of course, as he looked into it more, Alexander can't very well deny the fact that his very own Creed Comics is caught at the center of it.

Now, that was quite the concerning situation to be in, is it not?