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Rating: 
Summary: Hardball Business Tale Colorfully Told
Review: At first glance, Dan Raviv's book might seem irrelevant to readers of intrigue novels. Despite the flashy title and cool cover, reading about two rich businessmen fighting for the control of a publishing company might not seem all that exciting.It is exciting. Like in any theatrical drama, Raviv begins his book with an annotated list of players. Most names will be unknowns outside of the industry. Stan Lee is here, as you might expect, but so is Isaac Perlmutter and numerous lesser executives. Their parts in this drama are crucial and understanding who they are from the beginning will help keep the plot clear. This is, in some ways, a history of Marvel Comics, beginning in 1939 with Captain America, the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch. Raviv walks us through Marvel's troubled times under various owners. We get the play-by-play debacle hindering the X-Men and Spiderman from the silver screen, and the intense personalities behind it all. The cynicism of loyal comic readers is told, as Marvel aimed for the financial speculator and played games with collectors (remember the many covers and bags of certain Spiderman issues?). When the quality of the Marvel Universe stunk up the magazine racks in the 1990s, it seemed if Spiderman would weave his last web. Letters, trial notes and other details fill in this adventurous tale of the struggle for power, money and egos. We find out how Spiderman was finally able to make the bigtime. I fully recommend "Comic Wars: How Two Tycoons Battled over the Marvel Comics Empire--And Both Lost" by Dan Raviv. Anthony Trendl
Rating: 
Summary: Business for Comic Book Fans
Review: Comic Wars is a sprightly, fast-paced book about the bankruptcy and hostile takeover troubles Marvel Comics faced in the mid-1990's, when billionaire financiers Ronald O. Perelman and Carl Icahn engaged in a tug-of-war for control of the company that almost killed it and eventually left it in the control of neither man. Instead, toy company owner Ike Perlmutter scooped them both. Comic Wars's main strengths are propulsive narration that makes it a fast and compelling read, and the simplicity with which author Dan Raviv explains the hideous complexities of the bankruptcy process. This is a book about business that a business dilettante can read and understand. Its descriptions of the way junk bond financing and overextension got Marvel into trouble and of the various types of deals the bankruptcy parties thought of to get it out of trouble contain useful general business knowledge. Its combination of simple narration and simple explanations made it an educational experience that I also enjoyed. On the other side of the ledger, Raviv borrows from comic books a habit of making his characters larger than life and designating them good guys or bad guys. The good guy in Raviv's version of this true story is Isaac "Ike" Perlmutter, and we know we are supposed to identify best with him because, unlike the other major parties, Raviv always refers to Ike by his first name. Meanwhile, Perelman and Icahn are referred to by their last names, except in chapter titles, which refer to them by the names of Marvel Comics villains Dr. Doom and The Vulture. The good guy versus bad guy idea makes this a simple book to read, and that makes the business education go down more easily, but it undoubtedly grossly oversimplifies the true situation. Late in the book we see that good old Ike, who's worth half a billion dollars, won't spring twelve hundred bucks for an office Christmas party to improve Marvel's wounded morale -- he's no super-hero, and I imagine Perelman and Icahn aren't quite super-villains, either. I still recommend the book. It's fun to read, and that's something it'd be hard to say about anything else that contains as much useful information on high finance and business bankruptcy. Given our present economy, it behooves us all to learn a bit about both.
Rating:
Summary: Make Mine Marvel!
Review: Dan Raviv's retelling of the Marvel Entertainment bankruptcy is one of the most riveting business books to come through the book publishers in a long time. I've been a fan of many of Marvel's characters and collected books throughout the seventies, eighties and early ninties. I was aware they had enjoyed a golden period in the mid nineties when the market value of Marvel grew to $3 billion. I knew they got into trouble right afterward. I never knew how close to the brink they came to non-existence. Comic Wars tells the story of how a couple of billionaires saw value in a popular publisher, bought and fought over it, and nearly destroyed it. Like one of the books it published, Marvel was saved from extinction at the last moment by the wheeling and dealing head of a toy company. Many business books will tell you what happened, but never in the detail of this one. Comic Wars lets you get to know all the parties involved in intimate detail. These are a bunch of angry New Yorkers and the fight is very personal. Ron Perelman bought Marvel in 1989 for a mere $10 million of his own money and managed to grow the company through a series of acquisitions. Fleer, Skybox and Panini joined the company as subsidiaries, engorged the balance sheet, allowed Perelman to sell junk bonds against this inflated stock price, and the billionaire lined his pockets with the proceeds. The huge debtload of nearly $1 billion nearly sank the company when Carl Ichan joined the fray, at first looking like a white knight, but soon revealed his true colors in attempting to buy the company on the cheap by buying the distressed bank debt, bankrupting the company and wiping out the debt, converting his bonds to a controlling interest and selling the post-bankruptcy Marvel for a tidy profit. In many ways this has numerous similarities to Barbarians at the Gate and the fight for RJR Nabisco between management and LBO legends KKR. The difference between that fight and this one is the interest in the business involved. RJR was a corporate behemoth and neither side was willing to wring so much money out of it that it was no longer viable as a going concern. Perelman and Ichan both wanted to generate as big a pile of cash as possilbe without any concern for the business itself. Neither had a concern about the people who worked for Marvel. Had Perelman remained in charge of Marvel, we would never have seen Spider Man the movie with a $700 million to date box office gross. Perelman was only interested in generating hype about a movie and cashing in on that. Generating interest and then generating intangible value, cashing in and not delivering seems unethical to extreme. Destroying a company for its present value seems unethical in the extreme. Even Ike Perlmutter, Marvel's eventual savior had ulterior and selfish motives. His royalty free in perpetuity license to make toys based on Marvel characters was at stake. He saved (and absorbed) Marvel to preserve this. In the end, things turned out alright and Marvel is slowly climbing its way back to health, but Dan Raviv's account tells of unbridaled greed. The book is a page turner and worth every penny.
Rating: 
Summary: How To Make Bankruptcy Law Interesting
Review: How do you entice non-lawyers into reading a book about a bankruptcy case? Take up as your subject the notorious case of the bankruptcy case of America's favorite comic book publisher. Dan Raviv serves up a surprisingly interesting look at one of the more prominent bankruptcy cases of recent times, the corporate reorganization of Marvel Entertainment. Raviv draws interesting, though not very flattering, pictures of all the principals involved in the case. Ultimately this book confirms my view that the rich are different from us ordinary folks in only one respect: They have lots more money than we do. Also, you will walk away from this book having learned one lesson: in a corporate bankruptcy case, there's only one group of winners: the lawyers.
Rating:
Summary: Comic Wars is a must for any comic book fan
Review: I have been involved in the comic book industry for a long time and lived through this whole ordeal. Dan Raviv was right on the money in his recounts of what happened. When these events were going on, you really didn't know what was going on behind the scenes, but the book really brings you in and lets you see how these titans of finance operate. I'm certainly glad these events are in the past and now we have a great book that captures this whirlwind time in the comic book industry. I definitely recommend it to anyone who has ever picked up a comic book before - there's more action than any comic I've ever read!
Rating:
Summary: The Adventures of Greedman and Bankruptcyboy
Review: The struggles of Marvel Comics, both historically and financially are given the "epic" treatment in this throughly enjoyable book. Dan Raviv has taken a corporate story of greed and powerlust and created a hot pageturner, where supervillians come straight from the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The battle for control of Marvel, fought in backrooms and ultimately decided in Bankrputcy Court has a cast of characters that are riveting (Carl Ichan, Ron Perelman), primarily in the fact that they feel compelled to destroy an American cultural phenomenon for the sake of personal gain.
As you read this book, you are amazed by the arrogance and ignorance of most of the major players. Marvel remains loaded with franchise players, and the potential for (financial) exploitation of its cast of comic superheroes (X-men, Spiderman...) seems obvious to everyone but the money men and the lawyers (the true evildoers in this story).
This is a great summertime read for both MBAs and comic fans.
The only shortcoming that I can point out is a lack of a rich development of the history of comic books - it would have placed this courtroom battle with the significance it deserves. Allthough the book itself is fiction, I strongly reccomend Michael Chabon's "Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" as a companion read to this book, for Chabon delivers incredible insight into the comic book industry's origins and struggles.
Rating:
Summary: The Adventures of Greedman and Bankruptcyboy
Review: The struggles of Marvel Comics, both historically and financially are given the "epic" treatment in this throughly enjoyable book. Dan Raviv has taken a corporate story of greed and powerlust and created a hot pageturner, where supervillians come straight from the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The battle for control of Marvel, fought in backrooms and ultimately decided in Bankrputcy Court has a cast of characters that are riveting (Carl Ichan, Ron Perelman), primarily in the fact that they feel compelled to destroy an American cultural phenomenon for the sake of personal gain.
As you read this book, you are amazed by the arrogance and ignorance of most of the major players. Marvel remains loaded with franchise players, and the potential for (financial) exploitation of its cast of comic superheroes (X-men, Spiderman...) seems obvious to everyone but the money men and the lawyers (the true evildoers in this story).
This is a great summertime read for both MBAs and comic fans.
The only shortcoming that I can point out is a lack of a rich development of the history of comic books - it would have placed this courtroom battle with the significance it deserves. Allthough the book itself is fiction, I strongly reccomend Michael Chabon's "Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" as a companion read to this book, for Chabon delivers incredible insight into the comic book industry's origins and struggles.
Rating:
Summary: There were few winners in this battle
Review: This book almost reads like a 400 page script for a daytime soap like As The World Turns or One Life to Live in that it's full of unexpected twists and turns in the story. That a lot of rich people in fancy suits battled over the future of a company and they kind of end up destroying themselves in the process and that ultimately the company was saved and is run by people who are more interested in doing good business for all, but a lot of good people lost their jobs in the battle itself. What this book does not cover is the stories of the people who had been with Marvel for over thrity years and had lost their jobs during the bankruptcy process. They were writers,artists, and editors who were told one day to clean out their desks and that was it. They have never worked again at Marvel or at any other company, and their loss was also a loss for comics in general. They were among the losses that Marvel went through as Avi Arad and his partners both at Toy Biz and in Hollywood saved the company. It is not clear just what role if any Stan Lee played in trying to save Marvel, many of the people who lost their jobs had known him for a long time. Wither he did anything to try and save their jobs is not clear. During the whole time that Marvel was going through this, Stan had been living in Hollywood and had been out of touch with the comics publishing end of the company for quite a few years. I think he was there at the Hollywood end of things trying to get people to invest in Marvel and do whatever they could to save the company, but that was about it. I don't think he was able in any way to save people's jobs from being fired. Some have accused him of not doing anything to help people he had known for thrity years, but there is no evidence of this at all. Today, Marvel is still around and they are being very successful at the movie studios, but their comic book publishing has never recovered, and it's really only a matter of time before Marvel will cease that all together and just stay with other forms of media to get their characters out to the general public.
Rating:
Summary: There were few winners in this battle
Review: This book almost reads like a 400 page script for a daytime soap like As The World Turns or One Life to Live in that it's full of unexpected twists and turns in the story. That a lot of rich people in fancy suits battled over the future of a company and they kind of end up destroying themselves in the process and that ultimately the company was saved and is run by people who are more interested in doing good business for all, but a lot of good people lost their jobs in the battle itself. What this book does not cover is the stories of the people who had been with Marvel for over thrity years and had lost their jobs during the bankruptcy process. They were writers,artists, and editors who were told one day to clean out their desks and that was it. They have never worked again at Marvel or at any other company, and their loss was also a loss for comics in general. They were among the losses that Marvel went through as Avi Arad and his partners both at Toy Biz and in Hollywood saved the company. It is not clear just what role if any Stan Lee played in trying to save Marvel, many of the people who lost their jobs had known him for a long time. Wither he did anything to try and save their jobs is not clear. During the whole time that Marvel was going through this, Stan had been living in Hollywood and had been out of touch with the comics publishing end of the company for quite a few years. I think he was there at the Hollywood end of things trying to get people to invest in Marvel and do whatever they could to save the company, but that was about it. I don't think he was able in any way to save people's jobs from being fired. Some have accused him of not doing anything to help people he had known for thrity years, but there is no evidence of this at all. Today, Marvel is still around and they are being very successful at the movie studios, but their comic book publishing has never recovered, and it's really only a matter of time before Marvel will cease that all together and just stay with other forms of media to get their characters out to the general public.
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