Marvel Comics Characters By Andy Jones

Marvel also created new imprints, such as MAX (a line intended for mature readers) and Marvel Age (developed for younger audiences). In addition, the company created an alternate universe imprint, Ultimate Marvel, that allowed the company to reboot their major titles by deconstructing and updating its characters to introduce to a new generation. The company has also revamped its graphic-novel division, establishing a bigger presence in the bookstore market. As of 2010, Marvel remains a key comics publisher, even as the industry has dwindled to a fraction of its peak size decades earlier. Some of its characters have been turned into successful film franchises, the highest-grossing being the X-Men movie series, starting in 2000, and the Spider-Man series, beginning in 2002.
In 2002, Stan Lee sued successfully for a share of income related to movies and merchandising of Marvel characters, based on a contract between Lee and Marvel from the late 1990s; according to court documents, Marvel had used "Hollywood accounting" to claim that those projects' "earnings" were not profits.
In a cross-promotion, the November 1, 2006, episode of the CBS soap opera The Guiding Light, titled "She's a Marvel", featured the character Harley Davidson Cooper (played by Beth Ehlers) as a superheroine named the Guiding Light. The character's story continued in an eight-page backup feature, "A New Light", that appeared in several Marvel titles published November 1 and 8. Also that year, Marvel created a wiki on its Web site.
In late 2007 the company launched an online initiative, announcing Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, a digital archive of over 2,500 back issues available for viewing, for a monthly or annual subscription fee.