In December 1996, Marvel Entertainment Group filed for Chapter 11 protection with roughly $600 million in debt sitting on top of a company that made most of its money from printing comic books nobody could afford to collect anymore. Toy Biz, Marvel’s own toy licensee, ended up buying the parent company out of bankruptcy two years later. Read that sentence again. The subsidiary bought its parent. That’s not a redemption arc. That’s a balance sheet getting rearranged by the people who understood the actual mechanics of what Marvel owned.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time this year looking at comeback stories for this column, and Marvel keeps getting flattened into a tidy version: scrappy comic company nearly dies, then Iron…