James Galton, Former Marvel CEO, Dies at 92
James Galton, former CEO of Marvel Entertainment Group, died Tuesday at age 92.
A graduate of Antioch College, Galton joined Marvel in 1975 after being fired from his job as president of a publishing company that was bought by CBS. At the time, Marvel was struggling with declining comic book sales due to the collapse of the newsstand distribution system, and the company was losing money fast.
“They were losing at a rate of two million dollars a year,” Galton said in a 1983 interview with Comics Interview. “It was a total disaster. There was no semblance of good publishing.
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Galton turned the company’s fortunes around with a new distribution model that focused on comic book stores instead of newsstands. Next, Galton started new ventures that began Marvel’s transformation from just a comic book publisher into a multimedia empire.
The most important of those ventures was the creation of Marvel Productions, a new animation studio that would be managed by Stan Lee. The studio was responsible for creating several hit Saturday morning animated series in the 1980s, including “Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends,” “Transformers,” and “G.I. Joe.”
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Galton also moved global licensing for Marvel characters in-house, and in doing so exposed characters like Spider-Man and the Hulk to a global audience. He left the company in 1991, and though the company filed for bankruptcy protection five years later, it was purchased by the Walt Disney Company in 2009 for $4 billion.
“All of us at Marvel are saddened by the loss of Jim,” Marvel Entertainment Group President Dan Buckley wrote in a statement. “Jim was truly a Super Hero and we are greatly indebted to him for the leadership he provided our company, which served as a strong foundation on which today’s Marvel rests.”
“I personally had the pleasure of working briefly with Jim with him when I first joined the company. I will always appreciate how generous he was with his time and how thoughtful he was in all of his decisions. Our thoughts are with his family.”
Galton is survived by his wife, Lydia, four children and six grandchildren.
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