Replies to post #32961 on POW! Entertainment Inc. (fka POWN)

[rickn23]

Marvel's debt was high enough to offset the value of the IP:

Between mid-1994 and early 1995, Marvel bought the Panini sticker company; two smaller publishers of comics, Malibu Comics Entertainment and Welsh Publishing Group, and Skybox, another trading card company. To improve its margins and to better market its comics at the retail level, Marvel also bought Heroes World, a regional distributor in the Northeast, in December 1994. The firm stumbled in trying to expand overnight into a national distributor, and Marvel later dismantled the venture.

By late 1995, Marvel's size had become a liability. Marvel reported its first annual loss under Mr. Perelman's watch: $48.4 million on sales of $829 million. Marvel Entertainment's debt load was $581.3 million, and it was losing market share in a shrinking industry, in part because many of Marvel's best writers and artists had left to start their own publishing companies.

Edit
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/24/business/pow-the-punches-that-left-marvel-reeling.html?_r=0