I woke up this morn to a mess o' e-mails asking me for my take on the news that Disney is buying Marvel for four billion bucks…and some are also asking me to speculate on how Jack Kirby would have felt about this.
Jack, I think it's safe to say, would have been unsurprised at the pricetag. One of the many ways in which he was a visionary is that in the sixties when Marvel was catching on, he was utterly alone in his belief that the stuff he and the others were creating for chump change had that kind of lasting value. Many of his monetary frustrations flowed from the fact that he was trying to negotiate with people who thought the material was a passing fad…so they personally had to grab as much money as possible before the whole thing went the way of the old Doc Savage pulps…and that when he spoke of the future in Disney-sized terms, that was just Ol' Jack being looney again. Marvel's original owner Martin Goodman sold out pretty darned cheap in 1968 to the firm's first corporate overlords. He never imagined his company would be worth twenty million smackers, let alone four billion…but Kirby did.
So Jack would have nodded at the amount and recalled unfulfilled promises of financial participation…and he would not have been a happy man. Then again, I think if Jack had been with us these last fifteen years, Marvel would have long since cut him in with what would to them have been a microscopic reward — and to him, all the money in the world.
As for what I think: I think I don't know. I don't even know what this means for me. I own four shares of Disney stock and two of Marvel stock. I may clear like eight, nine dollars on all this.
I doubt Disney has a lot of firm plans for the X-Men and the rest of the Marvel properties at this time. Most of the biggies are encumbered with existing deals. Sony has the movie rights to this one, Fox has the film rights to that one, etc. Everything the Disney folks might want to do for a while will be subject to current contracts, though they'll find some ways to begin intermingling the characters in the public mind…photo-ops with a guy in a Spider-Man suit posing with a guy in a Mickey Mouse suit. Stuff like that. Down the line, I suspect the word "Marvel" will become about as unimportant to the Fantastic Four as "Hanna-Barbera" is now to Scooby Doo.
And though we won't see evidence of this for a while, the publishing of comic books (those things on paper with staples in them) at that company is a few notches less important than it was last week. And it wasn't all that important last week.