Article 10: Mouse Of Ideas

Marvel continues its efforts to refocus on a younger audience with the apparent demise of Max, its mature readers imprint. So was there ever a market for mature-reader superheroes, and where does this leave Icon?
09 May 2005

Well, so much for the Max imprint. With the announcement that SUPREME POWER is being relaunched under the Marvel Knights imprint, another hangover from the Quesada/Jemas era is finally kicked into touch.

Okay, technically it's not quite dead yet. It still has PUNISHER. But Garth Ennis has been writing that book for five years now, and it surely can't be that long before he calls it a day. After which, it'll be time for another relaunch - well, assuming Marvel can still be bothered with the character after the underwhelming performance of his movie, anyway.

So to all intents and purposes, the Max imprint is over and done with. This won't come as much of a surprise to anyone. It's precisely the sort of Bill Jemas initiative that the current management would never have approved in the first place, and which they've never shown any real enthusiasm for. After all, today's Marvel is primarily a licensing factory, and they're interested in the mass market wherever possible.

In a Newsarama interview, Joe Quesada justifies moving SUPREME POWER on the classic argument that's always used for chasing lower ratings. Self-evidently, if kids can buy it, then you have a potentially larger market. The adults-only aspects of the title are fairly minimal, so it doesn't compromise the work too much. Brian Bendis made basically the same argument for ending ALIAS in favour of THE PULSE.

It's not an unreasonable argument for these two books. How much difference it'll make to SUPREME POWER is difficult to judge; the relaunch with a new issue #1 would have boosted sales anyway, and equally, younger readers are effectively being invited to join an ongoing narrative halfway through, even though they won't legally be able to get their hands on the first act. SUPREME POWER is perfectly capable of being done as a Marvel Knights book with minimal compromise, but the time to take that decision was when it was first launched. The real reason it's moving now is because of a lack of commitment to the Max line.

Marvel aren't interested in chasing the over-18s. From the look of it, Marvel have a dream of what they'd like to be. Ideally, they'd be something like an action-oriented counterpart to Disney - a family-friendly, household name with well-known characters suitable for films. Marvel's new film production division promises to focus on PG13 movies, and when you consider the sort of material that's worked for them in the past, and the sort of characters they're intending to film, that's hardly an unreasonable attitude. You could do an R-rated BLADE movie if you really wanted to, but Marvel went down the other route with that character and it worked out great for them.

Moreover, Max was never an all-purpose mature readers imprint. It's not Vertigo and it never was. Much of Vertigo's output is there because of adult themes more than adult content - there's nothing desperately offensive or controversial about TRIGGER or MNEMOVORE, to take two recent examples. Max, on the other hand, existed to publish the same sort of thing that Marvel already published, only without the content restrictions. This made reasonable sense for characters like the Punisher, who really belong in that sort of environment, but was ultimately rather limiting.

Effectively, Max is an imprint for mature-readers superhero comics. The success of SUPREME POWER notwithstanding, the audience for that sort of thing is limited. DC have tried persistently to launch something in that area of the market, and it's never happened. Many of the books in question were critically well received and reasonably well promoted, such as SLEEPER. One could be forgiven for concluding that these books failed simply because there just isn't a very big market for mature readers superhero comics.

So the Max imprint, in its current form, serves only a very limited market. The appeal of its titles probably wouldn't be affected too much by a move to the Marvel Knights imprint. The other alternative, of expanding the Max imprint's activities and making it into a Vertigo-style book, seems to hold no appeal for Marvel at all. Marvel don't do art for art's sake.

Well, not under their own name, anyway. Because, tucked away in another corner of the catalogue, there's the Icon imprint. Icon publishes POWERS and KABUKI, and is set to publish other books from creators under Marvel exclusive deals. Both of the current Icon titles, of course, are mature readers books. If mature readers comics have a future at Marvel, it's through Icon, not Max. In fact, by publishing KABUKI, Icon is demonstrating broader tastes than Max ever did.

Even though the imprint seems to be expanding, Icon's place in Marvel's business plan is a little obscure. It's certainly not there to make money - or it wouldn't be publishing KABUKI. Nor is it there to build a reputation for Marvel in a new segment of the market - Icon books don't even carry the Marvel logo. Presumably, its function is to let favoured creators publish their pet projects within the ambit of their exclusive Marvel contract, thus encouraging them to sign up in the first place. Although even that begs the question of quite why Marvel would be so desperate to sign David Mack, who's not exactly raking in the money for them on any other books.

But despite its uncertain status, Icon is the future for mature-readers comics at Marvel. If only by default. As a whole, the business is looking elsewhere. It's about mass market superheroes and PG13 films. And perhaps Marvel can't be blamed for taking that view. Mature readers superhero books have a proven track record of failure (even if Marvel's own titles were the exceptions). Genuine adult comics just aren't marketable enough to fit with the business plan.

And the big area of expansion in the industry over the last few years has been the manga digest market in the bookstores. Marvel's expansion strategy seems to be to publish digests aimed at that audience, and flipbooks aimed at getting them back onto newsstands and mainstream retail outlets. These are reasonable priorities. Adult comics just don't figure into that strategy, because they don't appeal to the audiences being targeted.

Marvel simply doesn't need the Max imprint. And without publisher support, the Max imprint doesn't have much to offer creators. PUNISHER will meander onwards until it reaches a natural endpoint when Garth Ennis calls it a day - which, after five years, surely can't be far off. And that will be the end of that.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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