A Heated Rivalry

0:04Speaker 1:Welcome to Aaron Nke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. In August of nineteen ninety one, Marvel Comics released a reboot of their X Men comics series, bringing the full cast together for the first time with stylish new nineties costumes.

0:47Speaker 1:The comic quickly became the best selling comic of all time and still is to this day. This should have ushered in a new golden era for the company, but curiously it was the beginning of their descent into bankruptcy. X Men number one sold over eight million copies. Part of this was because the product was genuinely creative. It served as a climax to legendary writer Chris Claremont's sixteen year, one hundred and thirty seven issue run on the comic, which is one of the longest runs any comic book creator has ever had. It also had him passing the torch to popular new writer and artist Jim Lee, whose characters with bulging muscles and multiple pouches on their costumes came to define superhero comic book arts for the next decade and a half. But it also sold well because it had not one, not two, but five different covers.

1:40Speaker 1:These were marketed as valuable collector's items that fans would want to get a hold of. Who knew how valuable they might be one day. But soon Marvel was expanding this practice to their other biggest comic, Spider Man and various X Men spinoffs. They were raking in the money. Now. This business model was the brainchild of Marvel owner Ron Pearlman. No, not the hell Boy actor. This Ron Pearlman was a businessman who had spent over eighty million dollars acquiring the company in nineteen eighty nine, and Ron wanted to recoup his investment, so he kept milking the fans for more and more of their cash. He even started including trading cards bagged with the comics, So now a fan wasn't just supposedly buying multiple copies of the different covers, They were also buying multiple copies just to get all the trading cards. Some fans might buy as many as twenty copies of a single issue. Ron Peerlman was forgetting a fairly basic economic principle. If you produce a high quantity of something that's supposed to be rare, its value is going to plummet. Comic books aren't food or oil. They're a luxury good. They're only valuable if people believe that

2:52Speaker 1:they are. And the idea that comics are valuable comes from the comic books of the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and even the seven This was before superheroes became box office stars. Their comics were seen as cheap, disposable entertainment, literally like any other magazine, and so people threw them away. I'm sure you've seen the occasional headline where a rare Superman number one from nineteen thirty nine sells for millions of dollars today, and that's because it actually is rare.

3:23Speaker 1:There are only a few hundred copies left out there out of the original nine hundred thousand copy print run. Marvel, on the other hand, was printing millions of copies of X Men number one and their other comics, and since they were selling them as collectibles, they were being carefully preserved, not rolled up and thrown away. By nineteen ninety six, Marvel's revenues fell drastically as fans realized these comics weren't worth anything. Marvel was still making all of these variant covers in trading cards, and no one was buying them anymore.

3:54Speaker 1:To solve this problem, Ron Perlman hatched a crazy scheme, filing for bankruptcy so that he could re organized the company without permission from its shareholders. He was going to then spend even more buying toy Biz, a toy company that he thought could be used to increase Marvel's profits, and the shareholders actually liked that part of the plan, but they had no use for Ron Perlman's shortsighted business practices. They simply fired him and went ahead with the acquisition in nineteen ninety eight. The new leaders of the company, toy Biz, executives like Ike Perlmutter and Avia Rod, would lead Marvel into an even more curious history. As fast as the company had gone from a record high to a record low, it would just as quickly reach new heights when Pearl, Mutter and Arod made major film deals to lead movies like Sam Raimis spider Man and Brian Singer's X Men, and of course this was just the beginning of the company's legendary film history. It's a curious case of a company that went from so big it failed to too big to fail in only a few years of time. Marvel seems to be a company that

4:57Speaker 1:always bounces back. With that in mind, if you have a copy of X Men number one, maybe hold on to it. It might actually be worth something someday. Just kidding. Millions of people would have to suddenly destroy their copies for your copy of the comic to be worth anything. And if you're curious about getting into comic books, get them because you want to have fun reading them, and not because you think that they'll make you a millionaire. You may think that sports team rivalries and post championship riots are modern inventions, but sports mania is actually a tail as old as time. The Roman Empire had no Super Bowl or World Series, but there was chariot racing.

5:50Speaker 1:People from all over Constantinople would flock to a one hundred thousand seat stadium called the Hippodrome to watch the two top teams, the Blues and the Greens, race to see who would win, and just like today's sports fans, the rivalry between the two teams supporters sometimes turned violent. In the year five point thirty two AD, a group of Blues and Greens fans were convicted of murder after a deadly riot. They were sentenced to be hanged, and a crowd of chariot racing fans from both sides gathered to watch the execution. The convicts took their turns going up to the gallows, and the first five men were swiftly executed. Finally, the last two, one Blue and one Green, were led up to the platform, but while they were being hanged, the gallows suddenly collapsed. They survived, and the crowd went wild to them. This was a sign that these two men were not supposed to die, and as the executioners led the men away to await another execution date, the two teams were finally united against a common enemy, the government of Emperor Justinian, which was trying to execute their divinely anointed heroes. A few days later, at the

7:01Speaker 1:next chariot race, rather than fighting each other, the Blues and the Greens in the hippodrome appeared to be on the same side as usual. While the charioteers were circling around the track, all of the fans chanted Nika nika, the Greek word for victory. But they weren't just talking about the race. They were also talking about victory over Emperor Justinian. Gradually, the anger reached a boiling point. United with one will, the crowd streamed out of the stadium and into the streets, and they rioted, setting every building on the street on fire. The riot spread throughout the city and it lasted for days, only gaining momentum as time went on. After burning most of Constantinople, they converged again on the Hippodrome, turning it into the headquarters of their anti government insurrection. Meanwhile, Emperor Justinian panicked inside the Imperial Palace, which just so happened to be directly connected to the Hippodrome. He was only a matter of time before the rioters would breach the palace, and if they did, they would likely kill him. Justinian tried and failed to appease them by firing several of his least popular officials. Eventually,

8:09Speaker 1:he gave into their demands and he freed the two prisoners who narrowly escaped execution but by that point even this wasn't enough to quell the fury that had taken over the city. On the fifth day, the rioters appointed a new emperor and seated him on a throne inside the Hippodrome, and this was the last straw for Justinian. He directed his military to launch a counter attack to restore order. Justinian's generals descended upon the Hippodrome and barricaded the exits, trapping tens of thousands of Rioters inside. What happened next was a complete bloodbath. Within a day, the Emperor's soldiers had killed thirty thousand people and the insurrection was finally put down. To this day, the Nico Riot remains the most deadly riot in all of sports history.

9:03Speaker 1:I hope you enjoyed today's guided tour through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show was created by me Aaron Manke in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched and written by the Grim and Mild team, and produced by Jesse Funk. Learn more about the show and the people who make it over at Grimandmild dot com slash Curiosities. You'll also find a link to the official Cabinet of Curiosity's hardcover book available in bookstores and online, as well as ebook and audiobook.

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