ABSTRACT
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the intellectual property X-Men has supported multiple sites of content production across the comic, film, television, video game, and toy industries, much to the commercial satisfaction of Marvel Comics and its licensed partners. As a result of this flurry of industrial activity, X-Men may be recognized as an entertainment franchise-a perennially extensible network of content in the service of several wide-reaching culture industries. To focus on that result and not on the process that has produced it, however, obscures not only the historical struggles and negotiations by which franchises like X-Men have been established but also the nature of franchises themselves. Given ongoing interest in these properties by culture industries, franchises demand an historical approach that can grasp the various contexts and institutional formations they cut across over time. As enduring cultural products, franchises have been enduring cultural processes with their own historicity. To write the history of the media franchise, therefore, historians must account not for the singular result of its expansiveness but instead for the multiplicity of contexts and permutations contained within it. The historical development of a franchise like X-Men was a process of multiplication: intraindustrially, as the original comic book spun-off satellite titles, and interindustrially, as the property came to support production in several other markets. Franchises thus act as sites through which many diverse media contexts converge. The historiographic challenge that results, however, is to uncover the tensions within that convergence. Rather than considering the media franchise as the product of convergence (Jenkins 2006) or in terms of a defined set of production practices (Thompson 2007), media historians must conceptualize it as a process of convergence wherein a multiplicity of texts, institutions, practices, and historical contexts collide, leading to uneven experimentation, challenge, and failure. To actualize this historiographic approach, this chapter considers the fraught processes through which Marvel pitched X-Men as a franchise prior to 1995,
exploring how entry into a variety of contexts both enabled and stymied the multiplication of the property, leading to successively distinct forms of franchising. Drawing from Michele Hilmes’s examination of the contentious interactions between various culture industries in shaping broadcast forms, practices, and institutions, this investigation adopts a historiographic model that conceptualizes the entertainment franchise not as a site of consensus within and between media industries but instead as an embattled process of “conflict, compromise, and accommodation” (Hilmes 1990, 1). Rather than uniformly demonstrating how franchising has worked over time, this model “focuses on process rather than outcome, on conflict rather than consensus” (5) to consider just as frequently how the franchise has not worked. From this perspective, I first examine the period between 1963 and 1989, asking how imbalanced, incompatible exigencies in different industries lead to asymmetrical intra-and inter-industrial extensions of X-Men. Second, by examining the boom period between 1990 and 1995, I explore how Marvel responded at a corporate level to the collision of so many media systems within X-Men, reconfiguring the institutional infrastructure of franchise as a result. Perhaps more than anything, the ultimate failure of this reorientation demonstrates the conflicted, contingent, processual character of the franchise rather than its ideal realization. In its variable, uneven form, X-Men evinces the imperfect negotiation through which culture industries have managed collisions of institution and context through content. Through this process, many overlapping configurations of media franchising have emerged, a multiplicity for which media historians must take account. While this approach will provide detailed analysis of a single property based in the comic book industry, it will also provide insights applicable to the culture industries at large by demonstrating that cultural products extend between media contexts neither naturally nor without resistance.
