A recent Usenet post from a Marvel staffer shocked me. It said that the last four Marvel Masterworks volumes, published in the mid-1990s, were all money losers. Among them was a volume reprinting part of Chris Claremont and John Byrne's Uncanny X-Men run. A Marvel staffer claimed in the rec.arts.comics.marvel.universe newsgroup that the failure of the final four volumes, including that Claremont/Byrne one, led to the cancellation of the line.
The reason I was so surprised to learn that volume lost money is simple; those Claremont/Byrne issues are some of the best superhero comics ever published. Claremont and Byrne made reputations on that run it took nearly two decades to undo. I think most fans are aware how good those X-Men issues were, though, despite the landfill full of bad comics they inspired for the next twenty years.
Neither Claremont or Byrne has ever really recaptured the energy and skill they used to create those issues. Claremont's Sovereign Seven was widely seen as a failure (having read two annuals I bought out of the quarter bins, I heartily concur), and most of Byrne's recent work has been as mind-numbingly boring as it is arrogantly overblown.
Their Uncanny X-Men run came at one of the most wonderful times in comics history, the early 1980s. My best friend in high school and I would pore over Miller's Daredevil, Claremont and Byrne's X-Men and Wolfman and Perez's New Teen Titans every month, and we were completely aware how lucky we were to be able to buy such great stuff on the racks each month. These days, the only comics I get a vibe like that off of are Busiek and Perez's Avengers and Millar and Quitely's (and previously Ellis, Hitch and Neary's) the Authority.
Warren Ellis is an interesting case, too--a friend of mine decries the cult of personality that has built up around Ellis, saying he doesn't deserve the hype. I disagree--I think Ellis is a singular talent, and his skill at crafting offbeat comics almost never ceases to amaze me.
But I'm not blind, even when it comes to my heroes.
I've read 90 percent of Frank Miller's Sin City comics, but I finally stopped buying them, because I wasn't really enjoying them. Despite the flash and skill with which Miller creates his stories, I find them distant and uninvolving. Only That Yellow Bastard even came close to involving me the way Daredevil or Batman: Year One did.
And as far as Ellis goes, as much as I've enjoyed the Authority and Transmetropolitan, I found the first Ellis "Counter X" issue of X-Force utterly worthless. I blame most of that on the utter incompetence of "artist" Whilce Portacio, but I'm disappointed too in Ellis for allowing his name to be associated with such utter junk. And this week's debut issue of City of Silence from Image...well, the less said the better.
All my heroes have let me down sooner or later--in comics and out of them. Here's a tip...never meet your heroes, because the shine quickly fades once you spend a few moments with most of them. Don't get me started on the time I was scarred for life after watching William Shatner devour two enormous meals in the hour he was supposed to be signing autographs for charity at the Saratoga Race Course back in the 1980s. I wasn't looking for an autograph myself, but up until that time I had never seen such a display of arrogant disregard for fans on the part of such a dubious talent. And my poor friend Joe, who did want his autograph--he was scarred for life by the fact that Shatner finally signed his book, on the wrong page. I don't even know what that was all about.
My point, really, is that even the greatest superstars can, and almost invariably will, disappoint sooner or later. It would have been unthinkable in 1981 to say Claremont and Byrne could create subpar work like Sovereign Seven (which Claremont says he is proud of) or Spider-Man Chapter One (which Byrne is arrogant enough to probably also be proud of, as astonishing a thought as that is).
Warren Ellis may never again create as wonderful a run as his Stormwatch/Authority magnum opus. Claremont and Byrne almost certainly don't have another Uncanny X-Men in them, separately or together. Frank Miller's Dark Knight II will almost certainly be disregarded in some quarters as inferior to the original (although I dearly hope that doesn't happen). But despite the stumbles of these and other talents, their greatest works for the most part remain in print, and are there to be enjoyed by new generations of readers.
So I hope Marvel finds a way to market those Claremont/Byrne X-Men issues that failed to make money in a Masterworks edition. I hope they always keep Miller and Mazzucchelli's Born Again in print in some form, and I hope they find a format with which they can create new generations of readers to appreciate the works of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
Because owning the rights to those terrific comics should be like having a license to print money.