Giving CrossGen's corpse a once-over ...

The St. Petersburg Times reports on Disney's $1 million purchase of CrossGen's assets, then provides a brief post-mortem of Mark Alessi's brainchild:

Investors sank millions of dollars into CrossGen before it failed. Alessi alone claims the company owes him $5.4-million; he made millions in the 1990s by selling a software company to Ross Perot. Upon filing for bankruptcy, CrossGen had just $2,000 in the bank and liabilities of $14.7-million.

The court will now decide how to divide the $1-million among the company's creditors, which include many former employees and contract workers who filed claims for unpaid wages.

Alessi had been harshly critical of the comic book industry, including its focus on spawning multimillion-dollar films, and that may have come back to haunt him. "Marvel (Comics) makes me want to puke," he said in a 2000 interview with the St. Petersburg Times . "It's basically, as far as I'm concerned, run by bankers."

By 2003, with bankruptcy looming, Alessi was asking Marvel and about 40 other comic book or movie industry kingpins for help.