What was up with the Marvel Booth This Year?

This was the major buzz of the con. Where was Marvel? First thing we noticed on Preview Night was that the Marvel booth was not in it’s usual place on the floor. Mind you, I am not a fan of the usual Marvel booth, it reminds me too much of a cattle guard, shipping folks through in a line. However, it’s absence was conspicuous. We got back to the hotel room, and started looking at the locator in the program booth. Where did we find Marvel? In a little bitty corner of the Diamond booth. The next day we went over to get a load of the booth. A little tiny thing, with a few posters of Marvel characters tacked up on the board behind the booth. That was it. A lot of the smaller comic companies were happily telling each other "Our booth is bigger than the Marvel booth!" The Collector Times went investigating. According to unnamed sources, Marvel attempted to put a squeeze play on the convention. The word is, they wanted a large booth on center stage for a cut rate discount price. They felt that with the success of the Spiderman Movie, they could ask for and get this deal. The Convention people felt otherwise, and initially, Marvel was going to boycott the con. At the last minute, Diamond (who evidently was interested in selling comics,) offered Marvel part of their booth, which Marvel took. Some creators say they were told they were going at the last minute. The first official word we heard from Joe Quesada was during one of the panels. He stated that Marvel had such a small booth this year so they could fly out more creators. We did some simple math, using the program book as our guide. There were few comic panels, so we decided to count how many folks were working for DC on them, and how many were working on Marvel. We decided to give the folks that worked for both companies credit for Marvel. We only went through Saturday panels, because it was obvious that DC brought in a lot more people. I think we could credit 14 creators for Marvel versus something like 40+ for DC. We decided to go directly to the source of all things Marvel. We interviewed Joe Quesada. For the Official Marvel Word, read it here.