Just looked this up and it’s consistent with my experience.
I think that data might be a bit misleading since it's market share, it doesn't account for market size. I'm not sure the comic book industry has ever fully recovered from the crash. Yeah it bounced back since the mid-90s but it's still a far smaller market than it used to be. Although I do love how whoever made this just went
"fuck knows" during the period between 94-97. That's accurate.
While comics peaked as a format in terms of gross sales during gen x being kids/young adults, nearly zero of that is due to gen X & marvel.
Well there's 2 possible reasons for this: 1. It's possible that you and your friend group were actually productive kids who were going outside and snogging girls and shit (which considering you're on RPGCodex is fairly unlikely but it is possible) because comics were still reasonably popular with kids/teens in the early 90s. Maybe it's just that you and no one in your friend group was into them? And again it also probably depends on where you lived as well.
But the second possible reason is because you're kinda referring to the speculator market that popped up around that time. There's a lot of reasons for the crash but a big one is that at the tail end of the 80s comic books started going up for auction and were making record breaking sales of hundreds of thousands of dollars for mint/near-mint condition issues. Keep in mind that comic books were essentially worthless before then, sold for pennies and then usually thrown away by your mum or treated terribly. Turns out if you had a near-mint copy of Action Comics #1 (the first Superman comic) which you'd bought back in 1938 for 2c you might now be sitting on a fucking fortune. Investor types got wind of this and started buying up new comics on the assumption that 20-40 years from then they could be sitting on a fortune too. They usually concentrated on the stuff that was making bank at auctions so that's number #1 issues, first appearances of new characters, famous character deaths, rare or limited edition variant covers and so on. They'd often buy multiple copies of the same issue too and immediately seal it in a mylar bag to keep it in mint condition forever.
Problem is that the publishers realized that this was making them serious bank and leaned hard into it, especially Marvel, relaunching series with brand new #1 issues, introducing new characters every other month, killing well-known characters every few months, releasing issues with multiple different cover variants (like holofoil and lenticular variants) and so on and on. This briefly lead to higher sales but unfortunately at some point someone must've realized that the reason why Action Comics #1 or Detective Comics #27 (the first Batman) or Amazing Fantasy #15 (first Spider-Man) were worth so much money is that no one ever thought they were going to be worth anything so most of them got binned or lost or were eaten by the fucking dog and they were now incredibly rare. None of these new comics were rare since tons of people had bought them up and many were keeping them in mint condition. As a result you can go on Ebay right now and find copies of #1 or big issues from the 90s and get them for less than the price they were sold for back then. That's how worthless they are.
Or to put it more succinctly:
To be clear that's not the only reason for the crash. There's a ton of others including problems including issues with the direct market, the 'Distributor Wars,' a lot of other dumb shit Marvel did, fuck me I haven't even mentioned Image comics... And the final big problem which is that a lot of the stuff being written during this period was just utter trash. Like, really badly written, edgy to the point of self-parody, faux-gritty nonsense. Which might be another reason why you didn't bother with comics.
At any rate, the commercial activity lapse license explanation makes sense to me. That language is not unique to marvel deals though.
Every license I’ve ever secured and game production deal I’ve ever signed has included a commercial activity reversion clause, it’s a universal clause (different names) for licensing and production (screenplay options also usually have a similar clause, for example).
Sure, I was just trying to explain why for a few years there were multiple Marvel movies competing with each other at the box office, particularly during the early to mid 2010s. You had Amazing Spider-Man 2 (a Marvel character owned by Sony) competing against Fantastic 4 (Marvel characters owned by 20th Century Fox) competing with whatever Marvel proper was putting out at the time. You asked about the proliferation of Marvel movies - competing studios shitting out terrible superhero movies that were rushed into production in order to hold on to the rights is one of the big reasons.
EDIT: Jesus fuck, you re-edited your comment while I wrote this with fucking 563 extra goddamn words. I might reply to that later... if I'm bothered. This is just a reply to everything from that sales chart onwards since that's what you originally wrote and what I was replying to
Not thinking of the fact that there's probably no way for his zoomer ass to get hold of the original BG's, and that he'll have to play the Enhanced Editions. Anyway, I'm very curious if he'll try and like it (I told him to at least play BG2) or if I should just give up hope in this generation.
