Article 10: Done Too Much

As Elektra joins the ULTIMATE line and two more X-Men characters are launched into solo series, Paul O'Brien looks at the risks of pushing a franchise too far. Can the ULTIMATE line succeed where other franchises have failed?
30 August 2004

"Well of course too much is bad for you. That's what 'too much' means, you blithering twat. If you had too much water it would be bad for you, wouldn't it? 'Too much' precisely means that quantity which is excessive, that's what it means. Could you ever say 'too much water is good for you'? I mean if it's too much it's too much. Too much of anything is too much. Obviously. Jesus."
- Fry & Laurie.

Wise words indeed. But how much is too much?

When Bill Jemas was in charge at Marvel, there was a certain erratic discipline to the way the company worked. They talked about streamlining major franchises such as the X-books. And in a minor way, they did. Some profitable books were cancelled because they were diluting the franchise; a few new ones were created, but the overall number still went down. John Byrne's X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS was one of the profitable titles to be axed at that point, prompting a monumental sulk that appears to be enduring to the present day.

They could have gone further, but at least there was some sign that Marvel recognised the issue. There is such a thing as too many X-books, when the flurry of titles begins to undermine the strength of the franchise.

Of course, things are different now, and as Marvel continues its headlong plunge into the 1990s, the line is once again spreading like mould under time-lapse photography. This week, Marvel launches two more new titles - GAMBIT and JUBILEE. The numbers are becoming silly. Depending on what you define as an X-book, there are over twenty of the damn things solicited for November. Last week alone, Marvel shipped eight. It is difficult to decipher much in the way of logic to the company's approach, beyond, "Ooh, money!" Will the book make more money, now? Then let's publish it! We'll worry about everything else later on.

The problem with this approach is that it dilutes the value of the franchise. Both Marvel and DC have their pet franchises - Spider-Man, the X-Men, Batman, Superman - and both seem more than content to churn out enormous numbers of books based on them. There are three Spider-Man titles shipping next week, and another three books from the Batman family. The result is that most of the titles just get lost in the shuffle and end up padding out the middling ranks on the sales charts. The launch of a new X-Men or Batman spin-off book is no longer an event of any sort. The launch of a miniseries in any of these families probably won't even attract attention from anyone besides completists.

There was a time when the X-books could deliver sales with pretty much anything, because they did so sparingly. The franchise crawled up to four books a month by 1991, which seems positively conservative in retrospect. And then it exploded. The turning point, for my money, was MAVERICK - a competent but unexceptional title about a Wolverine supporting character, which managed to get cancelled inside a year. For an X-book to fail that quickly was previously unheard of.

On the other hand, compare the Ultimate books - one of the few imprints that has been diligently protected over the last few years. Marvel can release pretty much anything under the Ultimate imprint and be guaranteed that it will be received as an event. ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR was big news. ULTIMATE ELEKTRA will doubtless do respectably, despite having no connection with the other Ultimate books, featuring a lead character whose solo title was recently axed due to low sales, and having a writer unfamiliar to many superhero fanboys. True, it's got Salvador Larocca, and he's certainly a selling point. But the strength of the Ultimate brand name will play a huge part in delivering sales to this book. If the same creators had done a miniseries about the mainstream Marvel Universe Elektra, called simply ELEKTRA, I suspect it would sell rather worse.

With the notable and extremely ill advised exception of Ron Zimmerman's ULTIMATE ADVENTURES miniseries, Marvel have protected the value of the Ultimate name extremely well. A small number of books (if anything, helped by the regular non-existence of ULTIMATES), and creators who can generally live up to the hype. The occasional miniseries, which usually sell deliriously well. Almost the entire line places in the top ten on the charts.

It's a hugely successful brand, far more powerful than any of the traditional character groupings. True, BATMAN and SUPERMAN have performed very well for DC of late, but that's on the strength of top name creators on those individual titles. They didn't drag the other titles up, and once the big names left, the titles began to slide again. You can't launch a Batman miniseries and expect people to take that as an event of some sort. It's just too commonplace.

To be fair, the sprawling X-Men line does include some titles that are genuinely different from anything Marvel is publishing, and which can make a compelling case for their own existence quite aside from milking the franchise. EMMA FROST, horrific early covers aside, is a reasonably successful stab at teen drama, and aside from the lead character's telepathy, entirely free of superhero trappings. DISTRICT X is a police procedural in a district full of mutants. Both genuinely offer something different from the rest of Marvel's output. But it's hard to seriously argue that the world needs five ongoing X-Men titles (X-MEN, UNCANNY, ASTONISHING, ULTIMATE and UNLIMITED), or that the untapped potential in Wolverine is so great as to justify having him as a lead character in six books every month. Beyond a certain point, this simply becomes a cash grab.

Not that there's anything wrong with cash. But by taking this approach, publishers leave problems for themselves in the longer term. Essentially, such a policy cashes in the established goodwill that attaches to the franchise, while eroding it for the future. At the same time, it smothers the market with familiar names and makes it harder for any new franchises to emerge. Both major publishers have a ropey track record for creating new properties (since 1975, when the Punisher and Wolverine were created, pickings have been very thin). Strip-mining the existing franchises when there's nothing there to replace them is not the brightest of moves.

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

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