Mike Sterling's Progressive RuinWhere legends live since 1969

In which I kept typing “Infinity Man” as “Infinity Watch” when writing this post.

§ September 12th, 2014 § Filed under retailing § 1 Comment

So in response to yesterday’s post, Adam says

“I would think 2 copies of Infinity Man and the Forever People would have covered your demand and left you with a spare stock copy.”

…and then Jer says

“Did you have high hopes for Forever People based on the bust-out sales success of OMAC? Or was it Didio’s run on Phantom Stranger that convinced you to go big?”

Har har, you cut-ups. But no, you’re probably not wrong…based on how sales of the regular Infinity Man issues have been, erring on the side of “barely ordered” would likely have worked out okay. But as I ordered the 3D cover version, I had no idea how it was going to sell…to use the examples cited by Jer, OMAC actually did reasonably well for us, though apparently not everywhere since it was one of the New 52’s early casualties. And Phantom Stranger…okay, to be honest, I didn’t make the connection between DiDio’s involvement in its early issues with his involvement with Infinity Man, since I was going more by the properties than the creative teams in my ordering strategies.

Now, with Phantom Stranger, the sales on the regular series were pretty much in the toilet. I mean, I liked it, but I also liked Frank Miller’s Spirit movie and I think we all know how that worked out. But I ended up selling about eight times as many of the Futures End 3D cover than I did of the last issue of the regular series. I mean, relatively speaking that was one of the titles I ordered the least numbers on for this Futures End hoohar, but octupling my sales is nothing to sneeze at, either.

When it comes to Infinity Man…well, I didn’t order a lot of the first issue, but I ordered based on my hope that some of the local OMAC sales would follow through to this new series. They didn’t, at least not entirely, and I ended up having to cut orders right quick. But when I ordered the Futures End tie-in way back when, I suppose my thinking was “okay, the series probably isn’t going to be a gangbuster, but people may pick it up because of the novelty cover, and what if there’s a rush on the covers again? WHAT IF?” and I ended up picking a number to order and hoping for the best.

It’s not as bad as all that…I didn’t order a lot of them, and it’s in the lower range of numbers I’ve ordered on the Futures End books. But it’s not moving quite as quickly as its 3D brethren, though I’ll see exactly how well or not well it’s been going when I go over stock numbers in the next week or so. Without having an exact count on hand, my feeling is that it sold more than the regular series has so far, but not enough to be in any danger of selling out anytime soon.

Greg says

“I’m pretty shocked because they’re selling terribly at my store here in AZ. It’s a very heavy superhero crowd, but they have plenty from last week and it looks like they’ll have plenty from this week. Can I claim DC Fatigue based on two anecdotal examples?!?!?”

…and then Corey says

“Yeah, they’re not exactly flying off the stands at the shop I work at. I think the Death of Wolverine series has stolen DC’s thunder, because people are going nuts for that instead.”

I am curious about how orders and related sales on the Futures End event are overall. If fairly moribund sales are the case generally, then the next time DC does this (if they do it again) everyone will under-order and we may have a repeat of the panicked buying from the first year. Or nobody will care. I am throwing my money down on one of those two extremes…don’t tell me I can’t make the hard choices. I do believe that these will be okay sellers in the long run, even if they don’t fly off the shelves right this very moment. They are neat looking covers, and sometimes that’s enough to get people to yank them out of the back issue bins weeks or months down the road.

Corey’s reference to Death of Wolverine reminds me that I let myself get suckered into buying enough of the regular cover in order to match the sales plateaus required for the Skottie Young and Deadpool variants (more on that sort of thing here). However, in this case, it paid off…I sold those 1/100 and 1/75 variants for pretty good money, which helped pay for all the regular covers I thought I was getting stuck with…but the regular covers are selling really well, too, so I’m not going to be stuck with as many as I thought. Or, perhaps, any at all, ultimately. If anything, I’m wishing now I ordered more of #2, which is also flying off the shelf. Of course, everybody is sort of half-mocking the gimmick of the character’s supposed “death,” and yeah, we all know he’s coming back in another big ol’ event series down the road, but that’s not getting in the way of people being excited about the “Death of Wolverine” story itself. And, you know, that’s great. It’s been a while since people have been excited about Wolverine, based on how the fourteen recent different monthly series have been selling, so it’s nice to have a reminder of the days when Wolvie could appear in a comic, and by God, that comic sold.