And You Thought It Would Fail / Comic Books

• Jem and the Holograms (IDW) is an unusual concept. It takes a thirty years dead series and modernizes it. That in itself is risky however prior to release people were bickering about everything from the designs to Kimber being lesbian. It's also an extremely feminine comic and those tend to be niche. The series became a hit.
• Archie Comics has a specific reputation of being squeaky clean and cutesy, though it's not too true. So when there was news there was gonna be an Archie's comic set in a Zombie Apocalypse people laughed. Archie fans were skeptical about the Darker and Edgier take and others thought it was just another zombie story riding off The Walking Dead (2010)'s back. The first issue sold out twice in a row and is recognized as one of the best horror comics of the early 2010s. There are talks of a Live-Action Adaptation and the series made Archie experiment with other series like Archie vs. Predator and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
• Mark Millar recreated many characters successfully in the Ultimate Marvel line, and yet his proposal of gathering the heroes together was constantly shot down by the publisher, and once Marvel relented, they asked him not to call them The Avengers "because they thought Avengers was such a dead franchise that I had to call it 'Ultimates' instead." The Ultimates was a highly acclaimed best-seller that helped the Avengers finally become the premier Marvel team above the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, and was a major influence for The Avengers (2012).
• Ms. Marvel (2014) had a lot of factors working against it. Affirmative-Action Legacy characters tend to be very divisive as a general rule, and while some catch on, many end up being done away with so the original can return. The creative team wasn't exactly A-list. While a fan favorite, the previous Ms. Marvel — Carol Danvers, who is now Captain Marvel — had something of a spotty sales history. Many books starring female heroes still have a tough time finding an audience, as do books starring minority leads (the new Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, is both). Despite this, the book became a sales success, and Kamala has become one of Marvel's most successful new characters in years, to the point that she is often marketed alongside Marvel's flagship characters who feature in the MCU, even though she has no such counterpart until Marvel made an announcement that she would have her own series on Disney+. Even the author, G. Willow Wilson, said she thought the book would only make it to 7 issues before being cancelled.
• In the 15th-anniversary edition of Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, writer Grant Morrison notes that most of the people who looked at an earlier script thought their attempt at symbolism and psychological horror would fail. Their response to them 15 years later was "Who's laughing now, asshole?"
• The Marvel: A Fresh Start initiative was groaned at when first announced. The initiative was just the latest of Marvel's ridiculous relaunches since All-New, All-Different Marvel and it was quite obvious that this was being done as the previous relaunch, Marvel Legacy, was seen as a failure. However, to many people's surprise, the initiative proved to be a rousing success. The initiative saw Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso replaced with C.B. Cebulski (who survived a Never Live It Down moment when he was outed as a writer named "Akira Yoshida"), the departure of Brian Michael Bendis to DC Comics and the shuffling of various creative teams to other titles. In terms of titles, it lead to things like The Amazing Spider-Man (2018), which saw Spidey restored to a beloved status and lead to a number of spin-offs for some of the franchise's leading ladies, X-Men (2019), which saw the Marvel's Merry Mutants return to prominence after being co-oped by The Inhumans, and the return of the Fantastic Four, who was shuffled away after ANAD Marvel.
• Spider-Man:
  • At the time Stan Lee went to publish Spider-Man, teens were usually portrayed as sidekicks (i.e., Robin, Bucky) and weren't seen as solo heroes. An exec even commented on the concept because people have arachnophobia and would be turned off by the character. Marvel Comics even put Spidey's debut story in a title that was about to have its last issue. However, Spider-Man beat the odds and became Marvel's flagship hero as well as one of the most well-known superheroes of all time next to the likes of Batman and Superman (and teamed up with both of them at one point).
  • The Amazing Spider-Man (2018) was already on shaky ground when announced. The latest Amazing Spider-Man relaunch was on the heels of Dan Slott's decade-long run, divisive it may be, thus having a new writer had big shoes to fill. As well, Spencer had come off of the highly divisive Secret Empire event and the highly controversial decision to make Captain America a HYDRA agent. Though they knew Nick could handle Spidey since he wrote The Superior Foes of Spider-Man, many fans were afraid we would be getting the writer of the former two comics. His first five months acquitted him of everything, launching one Author's Saving Throw after the next and giving the title a massive breath of fresh air.
  • People raised eyebrows when Spider-Boy was announced despite the character being less than a year old publication-wise. Combined with Bailey's mixed reception, people expected the comic to bomb. Even C.B. Cebulski, Marvel's editor-in-chief, didn't expect the comic to be a particularly big hit. But Cebulski revealed in an interview that Spider-Boy wound up being Marvel's best-selling comic of 2023 with its first issue alone, leaving him as surprised as everyone else.
• Ultimate Spider-Man (2000): When Miles Morales first took over the mantle of Spider-Man he had many detractors due to replacing the iconic Peter Parker, as well as the fact that he was a biracial superhero. These same detractors thought he would have a very short time in Marvel comics. Miles ended up becoming one of the most popular superheroes over time, has starred in a number of animated TV shows, and was the central protagonist of his own movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which became a critical and commercial success.
• When it was announced that there would be a new, female Thor in Thor (2014) it caused a controversial stir in the Marvel community, as many thought it would be a failure because of the successor being a woman. After the comic series came out, it was met with both commercial and critical success.
• Vampire: The Masquerade: Winter's Teeth is a comic based on a tabletop gaming property that peaked in the 90s and has struggled to get a sequel out to its most popular spinoff. Instead, the comic was a hit with Tim Seeley, Tini Howard, and Blake Howard introducing the World of Darkness to a whole new audience.
• The creators of W.I.T.C.H. developed the series in secret at Disney Italia for three years before revealing it to higher-ups, at which point they were told that there was absolutely no way European readers would be interested in a Magical Girl series. Despite getting zero marketing, W.I.T.C.H. would see instant success regardless, turning what was meant to just be a nine-issue limited series into one of Disney's biggest European properties, with well over a hundred issues, several chapter books and novel spin-offs, a video game, an animated adaptation, and boatloads of merchandise.
• Hergé started with Tintin in 1929, at a time when Europe had no tradition in creating comic strips with text balloons. The comic strip was some filler material in Le Petit Vingtième, the youth section of newspaper Le Vingtième. After he had finished the first story the redaction proposed a publicity stunt in which an actor playing Tintin would arrive on the Brussels station, just like Tintin did at the end of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Hergé agreed, though he was sure that nobody would be around to witness it. To his surprise, the place was full of people! In an interview, he said: "From that moment on, I realized Tintin was on its way up!" And it did. By the end of Hergé's life Tintin had become and still is the most successful European comic strip in the world
• As astounding as it sounds today, even Superman got this treatment. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster spent five years attempting to sell the concept to newspaper syndicates and the fledgling comic book industry, though admittedly it wasn't until 1935 that they finalized the core concepts of the character such as the Clark Kent identity, the costume, and Lois Lane. Only in 1938 did they finally find a publisher willing to publish the character, Jack Liebowitz, who was looking for a character for his new book Action Comics. The first issue of Action Comics was, of course, a success thanks to Superman, and over eighty years later, Superman is the best-selling comic series of all time, remaining in continuous publication.

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