A correction.
So a long time ago on this site, during one of my several discussions of Valiant’s Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and how it tied into the 1990s comics crash, I opined that one of the reasons for its relative sales failure (relative to its massively excessive orders, I mean) was that the promised fancy cover wasn’t exactly what people were expecting. To be fair to myself, I did admit that I wasn’t sure that a full chromium cover was promised, but at the time of my writing that particular blog entry, I had no access to the original solicitation information.
I did try to track it down, here and there…some random Googling, that sort of thing. And I did try checking Diamond Comic Distributor’s own database, but “early to mid-ish 1990s” was an ask too great for any digital information on the title to be retained there.
Anyway, I took some grief over my assertion that Turok #1 may have been originally solicited with a full chromium cover, and not the cover we eventually did get, as shown here with a brand new scan of my actual personal copy obtained back in 1993:
…which has a chromium “card” glued to the front of an embossed cover.
Now, I’d brought this up again in 2016, where I was a little more willing to admit that I wasn’t sure. And that’s where things had remained, until the other day when I had my box of Turoks out (both the Dell/Gold Key series and the Valiant series), which got me to thinking about it again. But this time, I knew folks who might have access to the solicitations from the period.
For a while now, I’ve been listening to the Longbox Heroes podcast, by Twitter pals Todd and Joe. In their spinoff podcast “Previewing the Past,” available on via their very-affordable Patreon — I joined, won’t you? — they examine Diamond Previews catalogues of yesteryear. They’re up to early 1992, but after a quick inquiry to these fine gentlemen, they were good enough to jump ahead and find that very Turok #1 solicit I’d been seeking all these years.
So here it is, page 164 of the February 1993 Diamond Previews, with the item of interest:
No, no, not The Pearl: Lady Pokingham:
…but Turok: Dinosaur Hunter #1:
Well, okay, fine I was wrong. The ad does explicitly mention that the Turok cover would the same as the Bloodshot #1:
…which also had the chromium card pasted on. But for anyone reading the solicit cold, not knowing what the then-new Bloodshot #1 looked like (possible, given thatBloodshot was out the same month orders for Turok #1 were due), it’s very possible some customers were at least somewhat anticipating a full-size chromium image, as I mentioned in that long-ago post.
Yes, I’m trying to soften the blow a bit for myself. “I didn’t screw up that badly!”
What I do find interesting in the text of the solicit is the warning that “this issue will be printed to order — it will not be allocated….” As we all know, there didn’t seem to be any problem with stores gettin’ enough.. If there was allocation, given the numbers in which this comic was ordered it would have been probably something like “ordered 3,000; allocated only 2,750.” That allocation warning probably also contributed to the vast overordering of this comic…retailers bumping up their initial numbers just in case they did get allocated…shades of the recent JLA/Avengers TPB hoohar.
So there we go, a longtime itch finally scratched, thanks to the good folks over at Longbox Heroes.
Funnily enough I just sold a Turok & Bloodshot no. 1’s last week $6.99 for the pair. They keep showing up in those 10 for $10 packs at Ollie’s. These looked to be going overseas somewhere so I guess someone still wants them.
“Well-known actress whose identity shall remain nameless,” huh? I wonder both who the actress could have been and what the publisher’s definition of “well-known” was.
I never realized that Turok was considered a sales failure. I was always under the impression that it sold really well. I didn’t buy the comic at the time. It would explain why I was able to find the back-issues of the early numbers so easily and for relatively cheap around ten years ago. Although, that was so far removed from the original release year that I figured it was similar to the situation with X-Force.
The Tim Truman issues of Turok were a surprisingly well-written comic. Not because one would expect anything else from Truman, but I always assumed it would read as a typical early-1990s comic. I was pleased when I sampled the first couple of Truman stories and decided to collect more of the series.
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