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Title: Comic Wars : How Two Tycoons Battled Over the Marvel Comics Empire--And Both Lost by Dan Raviv ISBN: 0-7679-0830-9 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 30 April, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Make Mine Marvel!
Comment: Dan Raviv's retelling of the Marvel Entertainment bankruptcy is one of the most riveting business books to come through the book publishers in a long time. I've been a fan of many of Marvel's characters and collected books throughout the seventies, eighties and early ninties. I was aware they had enjoyed a golden period in the mid nineties when the market value of Marvel grew to $3 billion. I knew they got into trouble right afterward. I never knew how close to the brink they came to non-existence.
Comic Wars tells the story of how a couple of billionaires saw value in a popular publisher, bought and fought over it, and nearly destroyed it. Like one of the books it published, Marvel was saved from extinction at the last moment by the wheeling and dealing head of a toy company. Many business books will tell you what happened, but never in the detail of this one. Comic Wars lets you get to know all the parties involved in intimate detail. These are a bunch of angry New Yorkers and the fight is very personal. Ron Perelman bought Marvel in 1989 for a mere $10 million of his own money and managed to grow the company through a series of acquisitions. Fleer, Skybox and Panini joined the company as subsidiaries, engorged the balance sheet, allowed Perelman to sell junk bonds against this inflated stock price, and the billionaire lined his pockets with the proceeds. The huge debtload of nearly $1 billion nearly sank the company when Carl Ichan joined the fray, at first looking like a white knight, but soon revealed his true colors in attempting to buy the company on the cheap by buying the distressed bank debt, bankrupting the company and wiping out the debt, converting his bonds to a controlling interest and selling the post-bankruptcy Marvel for a tidy profit.
In many ways this has numerous similarities to Barbarians at the Gate and the fight for RJR Nabisco between management and LBO legends KKR. The difference between that fight and this one is the interest in the business involved. RJR was a corporate behemoth and neither side was willing to wring so much money out of it that it was no longer viable as a going concern. Perelman and Ichan both wanted to generate as big a pile of cash as possilbe without any concern for the business itself. Neither had a concern about the people who worked for Marvel. Had Perelman remained in charge of Marvel, we would never have seen Spider Man the movie with a $700 million to date box office gross. Perelman was only interested in generating hype about a movie and cashing in on that. Generating interest and then generating intangible value, cashing in and not delivering seems unethical to extreme. Destroying a company for its present value seems unethical in the extreme.
Even Ike Perlmutter, Marvel's eventual savior had ulterior and selfish motives. His royalty free in perpetuity license to make toys based on Marvel characters was at stake. He saved (and absorbed) Marvel to preserve this. In the end, things turned out alright and Marvel is slowly climbing its way back to health, but Dan Raviv's account tells of unbridaled greed. The book is a page turner and worth every penny.
Rating: 3
Summary: Business for Comic Book Fans
Comment: Comic Wars is a sprightly, fast-paced book about the bankruptcy and hostile takeover troubles Marvel Comics faced in the mid-1990's, when billionaire financiers Ronald O. Perelman and Carl Icahn engaged in a tug-of-war for control of the company that almost killed it and eventually left it in the control of neither man. Instead, toy company owner Ike Perlmutter scooped them both. Comic Wars's main strengths are propulsive narration that makes it a fast and compelling read, and the simplicity with which author Dan Raviv explains the hideous complexities of the bankruptcy process. This is a book about business that a business dilettante can read and understand. Its descriptions of the way junk bond financing and overextension got Marvel into trouble and of the various types of deals the bankruptcy parties thought of to get it out of trouble contain useful general business knowledge. Its combination of simple narration and simple explanations made it an educational experience that I also enjoyed.
On the other side of the ledger, Raviv borrows from comic books a habit of making his characters larger than life and designating them good guys or bad guys. The good guy in Raviv's version of this true story is Isaac "Ike" Perlmutter, and we know we are supposed to identify best with him because, unlike the other major parties, Raviv always refers to Ike by his first name. Meanwhile, Perelman and Icahn are referred to by their last names, except in chapter titles, which refer to them by the names of Marvel Comics villains Dr. Doom and The Vulture. The good guy versus bad guy idea makes this a simple book to read, and that makes the business education go down more easily, but it undoubtedly grossly oversimplifies the true situation. Late in the book we see that good old Ike, who's worth half a billion dollars, won't spring twelve hundred bucks for an office Christmas party to improve Marvel's wounded morale -- he's no super-hero, and I imagine Perelman and Icahn aren't quite super-villains, either.
I still recommend the book. It's fun to read, and that's something it'd be hard to say about anything else that contains as much useful information on high finance and business bankruptcy. Given our present economy, it behooves us all to learn a bit about both.
Rating: 3
Summary: There were few winners in this battle
Comment: This book almost reads like a 400 page script for a daytime soap like As The World Turns or One Life to Live in that it's full of unexpected twists and turns in the story. That a lot of rich people in fancy suits battled over the future of a company and they kind of end up destroying themselves in the process and that ultimately the company was saved and is run by people who are more interested in doing good business for all, but a lot of good people lost their jobs in the battle itself. What this book does not cover is the stories of the people who had been with Marvel for over thrity years and had lost their jobs during the bankruptcy process. They were writers,artists, and editors who were told one day to clean out their desks and that was it. They have never worked again at Marvel or at any other company, and their loss was also a loss for comics in general. They were among the losses that Marvel went through as Avi Arad and his partners both at Toy Biz and in Hollywood saved the company. It is not clear just what role if any Stan Lee played in trying to save Marvel, many of the people who lost their jobs had known him for a long time. Wither he did anything to try and save their jobs is not clear. During the whole time that Marvel was going through this, Stan had been living in Hollywood and had been out of touch with the comics publishing end of the company for quite a few years. I think he was there at the Hollywood end of things trying to get people to invest in Marvel and do whatever they could to save the company, but that was about it. I don't think he was able in any way to save people's jobs from being fired. Some have accused him of not doing anything to help people he had known for thrity years, but there is no evidence of this at all. Today, Marvel is still around and they are being very successful at the movie studios, but their comic book publishing has never recovered, and it's really only a matter of time before Marvel will cease that all together and just stay with other forms of media to get their characters out to the general public.
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Title: Stan Lee: And the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book by Jordan Raphael, Tom Spurgeon ISBN: 1556525060 Publisher: Chicago Review Press Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Excelsior! : The Amazing Life of Stan Lee by Stan Lee ISBN: 0684873052 Publisher: Fireside Pub. Date: 07 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Comic Book Makers by Joe Simon, Jim Simon ISBN: 1887591354 Publisher: Watson-Guptill Pubns Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: How to Read Superhero Comics and Why by Geoff Klock ISBN: 0826414192 Publisher: Continuum Pub Group Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Writer's Guide to the Business of Comics by Lurene Haines ISBN: 0823058778 Publisher: Watson-Guptill Pubns Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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