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Mark Alessi is an American businessman who has been the CEO of a number of companies, most notably as founder of comic publisher CrossGen where he created a number of the titles.

Biography

Alessi's first major company was Technical Resource Connection, Inc, which he founded in 1986. He was CEO of this company until 1996, at which time the company was sold to Perot Systems Corporation. He later, in 1998, became founder and publisher of CrossGen comics, which subsequently liquidated in 2004 and the company and its assets were sold to Disney. He is now the CEO of TOA Solutions, Inc, a company that he founded in 2004.

Controversy

Though Alessi rapidly built CrossGen into a major player in the comic book field, former CrossGen editor Mark Waid, now editor-in-chief of Boom! Studios, was scathing in his indictment of Alessi's management style in a 2009 interview with Ain't It Cool News. He described his tenure as a CrossGen editor as akin to being "first mate on the Pequod" , and described Alessi as a "spoiled eight year old with a checkbook" and "the biggest bully I've ever met in my life--and, coming from a lifelong comic book geek, that's one hell of an indictment." According to Waid, Alessi would scream at illustrators "till he was red in the face" if some minor detail displeased him, and often went so far as to make "grown men stand in a corner" or "send them home for the day." Waid summed up the company's existence by claiming that though CrossGen produced some "good books... none of them were issued by CrossGen so much as escaped FROM CrossGen."^[1]

References

External links

• TOA Solutions, Inc- official webpage
• Interview: Mark Alessi of Crossgen: Running Comics Like A Business, The Trades, January 1, 2001
• Swapping Technology for Comics
• Mark Alessi on CrossGen Unleashed, Comicon, January 17, 2003
• CrossGen CEO Mark Alessi addresses company financial issues, Comic Book Resources, August 20, 2003
• Interview with CrossGen CEO Mark Alessi, icv2, August 25, 2003