The SkyBox acquisition baffled everyone in the business press. Marvel had Fleer. SkyBox was quite new — it had been Impel shortly before, spinning off of (!) a tobacco company. And the trading card market was collapsing.

But for a time, Marvel got to publish DC's trading cards.
I wrote at the time that Marvel's comics sales were not the cause of its 1990s bankruptcy; the debt piled up by its ownership was many times what its comics earned. I wrote much the same here regarding AT&T and DC's recent concerns.

"Who owns and who owes" often explains a lot.
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