Comic Book Talk
And it's not just the quality of the stories (or the lack thereof) either. It's everything, down to the quality of the paper and ink they're using. I was reading an issue (perhaps it was ASM #801). The book was in my hands two minutes max and there's ink on my thumb and a fingerprint on the cover. I always wash my hands before reading to prevent oils and sweat from transferring, but the quality of the printing is just crap as well. I heard that Marvel doesn't do their printing but let the owners of Diamond Distributors print them with their crap presses to get major discounts and credits on crap. Everything about Steve Geppi, the owner, is just crap - from Diamond to the Overstreet Price Guide is just utterly horrible.
And the funny (or sad, I guess) thing about that is Marvel is entirely responsible for Diamond having the monopoly they do.
Up through the 90's you had a number of distributors in the game, with the major ones being Diamond, Capital City, and Heroes World, and then some other smaller regional players in the mix. Marvel buys Heroes World in the mid 90's and says "Screw everyone else, we're self-distributing from here on," which immediately took away about 40% of the market for everyone in the distribution biz.
DC responds by signing a deal to go exclusive with Diamond, which bolsters them but leaves Capital City out in the rain. Capital City makes a gambit to try and court the smaller and independent publishers (Dark Horse, Image, Valiant, etc.) but offers a bad deal and supposedly,depending on what off the record stories you believe, tries to strong arm them into signing, leading them to turn and join with Diamond as well. Capital City is toast a year later.
So that just leaves Diamond (Essentially everyone who isn't Marvel) and Heroes World (Marvel), and the Heroes World distribution was an absolute disaster for Marvel. Just a nightmare of incompetence all the way around, which literally ends up killing comic book stores and tanking the business, before Marvel shuts down Heroes World and joins up with Diamond. Had Marvel never purchased Heroes World and tried to self distribute, Diamond probably wouldn't be in the position it is today.
And you know, everyone talks about the speculators bubble and gimmick covers and insane print runs as being primarily responsible for the industry crash of the 90's, and while those are definitely primary driving factors, all the distributor drama was just as bad and rarely gets talked about. The stuff I outlined above killed more comics shops than too many copies of X-Men 2099 being bulk ordered could have ever hoped to. Marvel straight up put stores out of business with the incompetent Heroes World distribution.