Marvel Comics Looks to Spider-Man for Rescue

Sure, he swings from building to building on his own web and smacks down evildoers with ease and elan. But a truer test of Spider-Man’s superhuman powers remains: Can he sell decades-old comic book storylines to Web-savvy Generation Y?

To fight against a decline in sales, Marvel Comics is asking Spidey and its other heroes--and villains--to change their look to appeal to younger readers.

The result is Ultimate Marvel, a new series of comic books taking place in updated settings with hyper-realistic computer graphics and recast characters.

“People who love, live and breathe comics enjoyed the continuity and complexity of the stories, but it had become very hard for new generations to read our comic books,” acknowledged Bill Jemas, president of publishing and new media at New York-based Marvel Enterprises.

Starting with “Ultimate Spider-Man,” Jemas hopes to draw 9- to 12-year-old readers into the adventures of Peter Parker, a shy, bookwormish teenager who accidentally acquires the agility, strength and senses of a spider.

In the Ultimate series, Parker gives up his job as a newspaper photographer to become a Webmaster for “eBugle,” the online version of the Daily Bugle. And he gets bitten by a genetically engineered spider rather than the radioactive one of yore.

“It’s a different Spider-Man, and you don’t need to read the 400th issue to understand what’s going on,” said Brian Michael Bendis, writer for Ultimate Spider-Man. “The tone, the theme and the characters stay the same, but the setting and the context take place in 2000, and the storytelling is more sophisticated, more cinematographic.”

Following the Ultimate Spider-Man will come the “Ultimate X-Men,” slated to hit newsstands in late November.

The effort hopes to hook onto the coattails of the hit movie “The X-Men,” which has made more than $150 million this year. A film version of Spider-Man is due out in 2002.

“Comics need more readers, and something needs to be done,” said Bendis, who worked on Ultimate Spider-Man with artist Mark Bagley. “Marvel has acknowledged it, and anything that can be done to make the medium fly, is worth it.”

But whether comic book characters can survive such a repackaging and save Marvel’s publishing division remains to be seen.

Despite a library of 4,700 characters--the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, the Fantastic Four and more--Marvel comic book sales have been stagnant for a decade.

In 1999 the company’s sales totaled $320 million, though only 10% came from the publishing branch. Far more revenue is generated by toys and games.

For the six months of 2000, Marvel sales fell from $136 million to $94 million. Last year the company posted a loss of $34 million, and things look worse this year--through June the loss stood at $27 million.

Marvel is not suffering alone. Over the past decade the number of publishers has plunged, and U.S. comic book stores are down from 10,000 to around 3,500. The mainstream readership has shrunk to a hard core of mostly male fans in their mid-20s and early 30s.

“In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, comics were read by everyone--children, teenagers, soldiers--because it was part of the pop culture scene,” said John Miller, editor of the Comics Retailer, a trade magazine based in Iola, Wis. “But today the entertainment market is becoming more and more fragmented.”

According to Miller, the industry sold around $275 million worth of comic books in 1999, about the same as 1989 and well below a peak of $850 million in 1993, during a boom driven by speculators.

As the industry started to cater to collectors, prices shot up.

“In 1989 comics were still a dollar or $1.50. Now they are $2.50 or $3.50 or sometimes even $5.00,” said Nick Mamatas, a longtime comic book reader from Jersey City, N.J. “Before, it made sense to go down to a store and buy a 50-cent soda and a 50-cent comic. It makes less sense to go down to a store and buy a 75-cent soda and a $4 comic.”

Distributed in both comics stores and newsstands, Ultimate Spider-Man--cover price $2.99--seems to be a success so far. Its debut issue in September was among the month’s bestsellers.

According to Marvel, the initial launch across all distribution channels--including free samples and promotion programs--is expected to be upward of 250,000 copies. That would exceed the monthly distribution of the “Uncanny X-Men,” the top-selling title in the industry.

Marvel’s plan for the new Spider-Man carries some risk--turning off the webslinger’s die-hard fans.

“Hard-core fans are a little reluctant because they are used to their old Spider-Man,” said Joseph Quesada, editor in chief of Marvel Comics.

But Bendis, the series writer, compared comics storylines to Shakespeare, saying, “If you take it from the context and play it today, it still works. We will win a lot of die-hard people who were in shock at the beginning.”

So far, purists and hard-core fans say they are skeptical about the Ultimate Spider-Man and at the same time want to see more of it.

“Characters have changed repeatedly over the past 40 years, and most of them remain reasonably consistent,” said Mamatas. “There has to be room for characters to grow, but not to be warped just for the sake of cashing in on trends.”

For Stan Lee, who created Spider-Man in 1962 but no longer has ties to Marvel, “the changes are in a way a mistake.

“It’s like taking Sherlock Holmes and saying ‘I don’t like him to be a detective anymore. Let’s make him a dentist,’ ” said Lee, 77, who lives in Encino and still creates comics.

“People feel comfortable with characters they loved and don’t like them to be changed, and yet I understand the problem the writers have--so many stories have been done that it must be difficult to come up with new ideas.”

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