Saturday, August 27, 2011

Did You Know that Marvel almost owned DC Comics?




Comic book writer and legend Jim Shooter put some interesting news on his blog the other day. Back in 1984, Marvel almost owned DC Comics.

Bill Sarnoff was the Big Cheese, I forget his exact title, of the publishing arm of Warner Communications. Among the operations under his purview was DC Comics.

Bill introduced himself, as if that was necessary. What he wanted to talk about was licensing the publishing rights for all DC characters to Marvel Comics.

Holy hegemony, Billman!

Bill said, more or less, that Marvel seemed to be able to turn a substantial profit on publishing comics, as opposed to DC, which consistently lost money, a lot of money, and had for a long time. On the other hand, LCA (Licensing Corporation of America), Warner’s licensing arm did very well with the DC properties, while Marvel “didn’t seem to do much licensing.”

I guess the few million a year we made from licensing, mostly from Spider-Man, seemed paltry to him, what with the fortune that just their big four, Superman, Batman, Robin and Wonder Woman brought in. 

Jim had a memo about this idea





 Now, I can't help but to wonder what Superman or Wonder Woman would be like under the Marvel Universe.


source

1 comment:

WilsonW said...

Batman and Wonder Woman would have fared much better under Marvel than Supes. I think Wonder Woman would have a much nicer fit. A lot more Greek and Roman heroes at Marvel. Marvel doesn't really have too many main characters as powerful as Superman running around. Not on Earth anyway. So they'd either power him down a great deal, make him more of a cosmic level player(think herald of Galactus) or have him turn evil and the entire Marvel universe has to take him down(see Sentry).

The Stuff

My photo
Viktor is a small town southern boy living in Los Angeles. You can find him on Twitter, writing about pop culture, politics, and comics. He’s the creator of the graphic novel StrangeLore and currently getting back into screenwriting.