Mike Sterling's Progressive RuinGod and sinners reconciling since 1969

Yes, “Bud Plant” is a real person, I’ve spoken to him on the phone.

§ August 19th, 2024 § Filed under byrne reboot, retailing, watchmen § 11 Comments

So I was going through some of my old boss Ralph’s distributor catalogs an’ such that he’d saved for all these years and found a new treasure trove of material. In particular, it’s the “recommended order numbers” type of thing that I absolutely adore. A while back I featured some tip sheets from a distributor published in the early ’80s (1 2 3), and on a mildly different note, remember this distributor’s suggestion for ordering future issues of Miracleman?

Anyhoo, I found a punch of mid-1980s Bud Plant catalogs with just pages and pages of ordering suggestions, and they are absolutely wonderful, a great mirror into a particular period of this ridiculous industry’s history. Like my fascination with fanzines (hopefully more on that in a future ProgRuin post), these bits of editorializing mixed in amongst the many listings of orderable products let’s us see kind of what people were thinking about comics at the time. And to my specific interest, what people were thinking from the sales/distribution side, versus the fan side (though in fairness, often the twain shall meet).

This selection of excerpts comes from the March 1986 Bud Plant catalog, under this amusing logo:

One thing I’d sorta forgotten about was that Dave Sim was trying to keep Cerebus to a very tight schedule, with the intent of the last issue, #300, coming out in a specific month and year. So, when he fell behind, he had to catch up, and he did so by just crankin’ out those issues Bill-Jemas-at-Marvel style with no regard to monthly release:

I’ll tell you, as someone super into Cerebus at the time, I wasn’t happy about those small publishing gaps, but sure liked it when a several issues came out right on top of each other.

You know, I was never quite sure what happened there. I think I figured this whole time “Eagle” and “Quality” were the same company, and just underwent a name change. At any rate, we filed their miscellaneous titles together at the previous place of employment. Just never looked into it, I suppose. I guess, despite my best efforts, I’ve learned something today.

Ooh boy, I do love me some Eclipse comics. Thought I’d just lump ’em all together here rather than doing the titles individually. Stuff like Scout and Mr. Monster are mostly forgotten today, which is a shame, but those are solid books worth seeking out. And the Mr. Monster title underwent many stylistic changes over its short run, but all were entertaining. I seem to recall that Giffen story mentioned there was pretty good.

“Hamsters 3-D #1″ is of course “Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters,” the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles knock-off out of the gate (the last one out of the gate being, I’m pretty sure, this title). This comic, flying in the face of all logic and reason, still has legs, and in fact sold some issues of it (including one of the 3-D mags!) on Sunday. It’s probably some residual effect of the Turtles’ continuing popularity, dragging the Hamsters along in its wake. And pretty much just the Hamsters…you don’t see the Geriatric Gangrene Jujitsu Gerbils or the Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos doing that, do you?

Champions I do not recall selling a lot of, to be honest. I mean, I started in comics retail a couple of years after this, so maybe I missed the title’s heyday, but it certainly didn’t sell a whole lot out of the back issue bins. I’ll have to ask my former boss if it did sell, and if it did get that crossover gamer audience.

And ah yes…the aforementioned Miracleman, and in fact the very issue discussed in the link I posted above. But I checked the order listing in this catalog, and it credits Alan Moore with Chuck Beckum (AKA Chuck Austen), and there’s a mention, both in this tip and in the solicitation, of the New Wave preview. This sounds like the contents of #8, as the actual published #9 is the “birth issue” by Moore and Rick Veitch. As the tip also notes, this is around the time of the flooding of Eclipse’s offices, so scheduling was a total mess at this point. Plus, unless I’m missing something, Miracleman never had a Frank Miller cover.

Okay, now here are a couple I should probably save for more discussion of the Superman reboot by John Byrne, but, eh, here they are anyway:

Now here’s the Thing: I actually have Ralph’s original order numbers for all these comics, handwritten in these catalogs. And it just so happens that I have the February 1986 catalog as well, and comparing numbers…yes, Ralph followed this advice, and ordered twice the number he did on issue #96 (with Blue Devil). Now further investigation will likely show what his average order numbers were on the title (he might have bumped it up a little for the Blue Devil issue, since folks liked that character).

What’s interesting here is the optimism for Byrne’s version of Superman, though the start of the tip almost reads like the opposite reaction. Byrne was hot hot hot at the time, so I suspect people were pretty excited for the Big Changes coming up. I mean, some people weren’t thrilled about the changes, I know, but given the Super-titles’ crap sales at the time (therefore necessitating the revamp), they weren’t reading those comics anyway. And they probably bought the Byrne issues. So there.

Okay, I love this one because of the “Better than The Shadow tag, which of course means “order more than you did on The Shadow” but for all the world looks like “hey, Watchmen might be a better comic than The Shadow, maybe check it out.”

Did Ralph follow this advice? I don’t know, I haven’t found his Shadow numbers yet. But this is referring to the Howard Chaykin Shadow mini-series, which, as I recall, was a very popular comic (even as it outraged the Shadow purists who were still alive at the time). Ralph’s Watchmen orders were high, the highest of any DC that month, but still it seems like they were lower than I expected, relative to all the other numbers I’m seeing. Then again, this was a new comic featuring new characters at a higher price point even if by admittedly a hot writer…and nobody had any idea this was going to turn into a phenomenon. Mostly just 20-20 hindsight surprise, is all.

Okay, those were just from the first page of that month’s tip sheet. Will I look at more of these in the near future? Probably! I’ve got at least two dozen or more of these catalogs here…I could probably just talk about this for the next few months. I’m sure you wouldn’t mind.