Every week, I will spotlight strange but ultimately endearing comic stories (basically, we're talking lots and lots of Silver Age comic books). Here is the archive of all the installments of this feature. Feel free to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com if you have a suggestion for a future installment!

Today, we take a look at Marvel's 1993 Financial Report, which they cleverly put out in the form of a comic book. I will be spotlighting Wolverine's role in the comic because, well, he's more popular than the other characters in the book.

Every year, publicly traded corporations have to issue financial reports for the previous fiscal year. They can come in all sorts of different forms. I've personally worked on a few over the years and they tend to be glossy affairs designed to accentuate the positives about their company (while, of course, still including the negatives). When a company is in the midst of a boom period, like Marvel was in the early 1990s, they can get away with being more unconventional in their presentation, since no one is going to begrudge you your delivery system when you're giving them good news. Marvel's 1993 Financial Report was based around Doctor Doom trying to inquire why Marvel had such an improved 1992...

Doctor Strange puts together a group of Secret Defenders (which also served to promote that then-new series) to investigate. The next few pages were drawn by John Hebert and Bill Anderson....

Hilarious stuff.

The individual spotlights in the report are awesome. I am just going to pick Wolverine's, where he spotlights Marvel's consumer products division (art by Andrew Wildman and Stephen Baskerville)...

I love how insistent Wolverine is. "I have to find out, dammit!"

While all but Black Panther and Black Widow eventually DID have films (in a recent Movie Legends Revealed, I discussed how Black Widow almost DID have her own film!), I think only the Blade project and the Spider-Man animated series are actually the same projects being discussed at the time.

Finally, when all the other heroes return from their various spotlight missions, (the Fantastic Four one with Herb Trimpe art is particularly trippy, as is Thunderstrike's trip to a comic book store with Tom Morgan art) Doctor Strange informs Doctor Doom that Marvel is in great shape and there's nothing Doom can do to stop it.

But that is not a surprise to Doom...

Awesome.