[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TokuKnight89

Oh, I overlooked that "Marvel UK" aspect!

What was so "bad" about them though?

"Bad" was maybe a kneejerk for me. I don't... I don't have very fond memories of a lot of those kinds of comics. There was a point in the early-90s, when Image was hitting it big, that every company massively overproduced, and a lot of books that barely had a reason to exist got released. Marvel in particular...

So, Marvel was losing market share in the early-90s to Image and a bunch of smaller publishers. They were still dominant, but each month they were a little less dominant. Marvel decided that the way to compete was to basically pull the oxygen out of the room. They figured that retailers, when ordering their comics for the month, would order Marvel first, Image second, DC third, everyone else last. So if Marvel could eat up more of the stores' monthly budget, there'd be less orders for other companies' books. Since they couldn't necessarily get more sales for existing titles (that's really hard to do), the easiest thing would be to release a ton of new comics. Ghost Rider's popular? How about a whole line of Ghost Rider comics? How about some books full of random short stories for 4x the cover price? Marvel UK was another big push to get a ton of books on the shelves that didn't really have a strong reason to exist, and were only there because Marvel felt like retailers (and, to a lesser extent, fans) would order anything Marvel put out, and do it in huge numbers.

Basically, they're books that were only made to crowd other publishers off of the shelves. In a more content-driven marketplace, they'd probably never have been released.

That said! I'm sure there's some value to be had in the stories. Like I said, a bunch of really good artists cut their teeth on the Marvel UK characters, so that alone gives them some validation. The stories and characters aren't really to my taste (they're all a very 90s flavor of violent and intense that I find faintly embarrassing nowadays), but that's a totally subjective evaluation. I probably should'nt've said "bad"!