Yesterday, Tom Brevoort celebrated his birthday:

…I am 40.

It doesn’t feel like all that long a time, certainly no longer than it felt a week or a month ago. At the same time, it’s one of those supposed milestones that’s intended to be reflected on… Amazingly enough, most of [the 1967 Marvel] titles and characters are under my direct watch these days, except for the X-Men. So that’s pretty remarkable. Also, a buck-twenty bought you the entirety of the Marvel line in those days… Your twelve cents gets you 20 pages of story, plus a single page Bullpen Bulletins/Stan’s Soapbox/Marvel Checklist page and a two-page letters page. Oh, and a lot of cheesy ads.

The distribution is bad, downright terrible in some areas. The chances that any particular outlet will regularly receive every issue of a given title is slim. This has become more and more importnat as the Marvels have moved into telling longer serialized stories in the books, supr hero soap operas that continue from month to month, sometimes for years at a stretch.

Marvel was, at best, the number two comic book company in America, possibly number three. But the sales percentages were continuing to rise.

Many belated but happy returns, sir.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 9:03 am and is filed under Creators, Marvel, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.