414 MERCHANDISING AND LICENSING
the 21st century brought considerable new licensing income to Marvel, and in 2005
Marvel Studios began producing its own fi lms, rather then licensing characters or doing
co-productions.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, DC and Marvel were the industry leaders in
licensing, just as they were in comic book publishing. Other companies also licensed
their characters, but they were less successful, partially because their characters were
less valuable. By the late 1980s merchandising and licensing were the driving force
behind the American comic book industry. In 1989, the Batman license alone contrib-
uted some $390 million to Time-Warner’s bottom line. Th is was more money than
was generated by the gross sales of the entire comic book industry.
In addition to the licensing success of the Batman fi lm, two other developments in
the 1980s brought new attention to the role of licensing in the industry. Th e fi rst was
the success of Dark Horse Comics , which began as a small independent publisher that
published both creator-owned and company-owned titles. Th e success of some of these
early titles gave the company enough capital to buy licenses from Hollywood fi lms,
initially Aliens , then Predator and Terminator. Dark Horse employed these licenses
in all sorts of titles and combinations. Dark Horse’s new connections in Hollywood
also allowed the company to work licensing the other way; several Dark Horse comics,
notably Th e Mask and Timecop , became feature fi lms. By creating close connections
with Hollywood, Dark Horse carved out a profi table niche doing both types of licens-
ing. By the 1990s, much of the company’s revenue came from publishing licensed Star
Wa r s comics.
Th e second big development in comic book licensing and merchandising in the 1980s
was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Created by Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman in
1984 as a black and white independent comic, the turtles became a licensing goldmine.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, over $2 billion worth of turtle-related merchan-
dise was sold. Th e runaway success of the turtles meant that the comic book industry
began to be seen as a cheap way to develop profi table licenses.
Many of the comic book publishers that started up after 1990 were explicitly more
interested in license creation than in publishing comic books. Video game publisher
Acclaim video games purchased Valiant Comics in 1994 for $65 million and developed
videogames such Turok: Dinosaur Hunter , based on their comics’ properties. Between
1990 and 1996, comic book publishers were founded by a number of media companies.
Th e clearest attempt at developing licenses was Tekno Comics, which hired celebri-
ties and fan favorite comics creators to develop concepts for comics such as Leonard
Nimoy’s Primortals. Tekno lost money and got out of comic book publishing in 1997,
but not before developing some minor licensing agreements. Like Tekno, most of the
other companies were short-lived in comics publishing.
While the possibility of a big licensing hit like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
was slim, most comic book publishers actively pursued opportunities to sell their
characters outside the medium in the 1990s, particularly for toys, feature fi lms, and
animated television. To d d M c F a r l a n e , one of the founders of Image Comics , licensed
