Here's something that never came to pass… but, for a while during the boom of the 1990s, did look like a genuine possibility: Marvel (who were busy expanding in every direction it could… something it would come to regret a few years later when the debts had to be paid) getting into retail.
Lou Bank briefly popped-up at MARVEL UK just as the bottom was falling out of the industry. The same month, the Annex of Ideas announced another raft of new launches (see here), only to cancel or curtail the bulk of them before they went to the printers. Within a couple of months, Marvel's British operation was dramatically scaled-back and Bank went back to the States.
Marvel never opened their own shops… but they did buy their own distributor, Heroes World, in the dying days of 1994. That proved to be an expensive disaster for Marvel and inadvertently triggered the consolidation in the industry that left Diamond as last-man-standing. Marvel shuttered the business in 1997 and returned to Diamond.
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