One of the things I did before starting SACRED and before “Agave Road Trip” was, I worked in comics. Like, comic books — not comedy. I started in my teens and worked in the field until my early thirties, and from 1987 through 1993, I worked at Marvel. During that time, I was responsible for the platinum printing of Spider-Man #1.

Okay, first, understand … all of this occurred more than half a lifetime ago for me. Spider-Man #1 was published June 1990, which means it would have been in our sales catalog in something like February 1990, which means we would have been planning the marketing for that comic around, maybe, October 1989. I was 23 years old. I certainly never expected anyone would be talking about this decades later. I mean, in hindsight, it seems obvious. But, even with the popularity of writer/artist Todd McFarlane, we truly didn’t expect Spider-Man #1 to set a sales record. We knew it would do well, but never imagined it was going to break even a million copies.

I say all of this to say, there are things I recall clearly and there are things that are a bit more vague.

What I remember clearly is, I pitched the idea of the platinum version of Spider-Man #1 to Rei Tanaka, who was one of a cohort of outsiders who had been brought in by Ron Perelman’s MacAndrews & Forbes after they’d purchased the company from Jim Galton. Rei was inserted into the sales side, wedged between Carol Kalish, head of direct-market sales, and Mike Hobson, publisher. Carol was my boss until they moved her into new product development. Vague memory: She had been moved by the time I pitched the platinum to Rei, which would have been June or early July 1990. But she may have still been there, still been my boss, and I circumvented her. I honestly don’t recall.

It’s documented fact that there were multiple versions of Spider-Man #1. A couple of initial cover variants, but also, a polybagged version. Clear memory: Carol wanted to release the polybagged version. She was more than a little enthusiastic about newsstand magazine and comics sales in the UK, which were often bagged to include a free gift of some type. But she had read a study that showed that even when there was no gift in the bag, consumers were some percent (I don’t remember what the percentage was) more likely to purchase the publication if it were bagged. She wanted to test that with Spider-Man #1.

Vague memory: I think I was the one who pitched the silver ink. Or maybe it was Allison Gill, in production. Or maybe it was Allison who told me that the folks at Ronalds Printing (the house that printed our offset books, the ones not on newsprint) had told her that we could play with metallic inks on our covers. I just remember being very excited about the idea of that “green” Spider-Man #1 cover highlighted with silver webs.

Clear memory: After being excited about that green cover with silver webs, Allison dashed my dreams by coming back, after a call with Ronalds, and telling me that the paper stock being used for the cover wouldn’t be a viable showcase for the silver against all that color. A cardstock cover could do it, but that would force us to increase the cover price, and no one was willing to do that. We were already nervous about a monthly Spider-Man comic at $1.75 when the other titles were only $1. Someone – not me – suggested that the silver ink could work on that thin cover stock if the rest of the colors replaced with black: just Spider-Man in Spider-Man colors, the webs in silver, and … black. That was okay, I guess, but not the image I’d bought into.

So when Spider-Man #1 broke sales records, I thought, Hey, maybe this is the opportunity to get that cover I did want. At the time, I was hanging out with Josh Sarubin from Columbia Records and Sean Fernald of Capitol Records. We’d trade comics for CDs and drinks for drinks. When I’d visit their offices, I’d see all these gold and platinum albums framed on the walls, marking their best-sellers. And I wanted something like that. Maybe with a cardstock cover and platinum ink.

The rest of the story was in an article I wrote for Comics Retailer in January 1997 — click here to read that.