So I had a few Diamond Comics retailer informational thingies sitting around, back in the days when Diamond would produce a thick color monthly mag and a weekly black and white multipage newsletter.
One of the things you’d see in the newsletter, Diamond Dateline, are listings of the top reordered items. And this particular issue I’m looking at, from December 1st, 1999, includes the chart of the top reordered comic books that’s at the top of this post.
(And yes, there is a “top reorders by retail” that orders entries by the cumulative total cost of each reordered item.)
I don’t know that there are a lot of surprises on that list. Tomb Raider is kind of one, given the recent years spent as mostly a nostalgia brand, getting dragged back into the spotlight with new video games and media adaptations every once in a while. But one forgets that in 1999, the franchise was still a popular one, and thus retailers scrambling for more copies at the time begins to make sense.
The X-Men titles’ presence on the reorder list also comes as bit of a surprise, as I don’t recall sales fluctuating a whole lot on these then. The X-titles sell as the X-titles sell, with rarely much of a change. But looking at X-Men #96 we see it’s apparently part of some storyline involving the villain Apocalypse, and also Alan Davis drew it, so that may have goosed orders a bit. The Uncanny here is part of the storyline, so demand for that probably caught retailers off-guard a little as well. (Also applies to Cable #75 and X-Men Unlimited #25, the latter of which didn’t even note on the cover that it was a part of the crossover.)
That Batman: War on Crime book is one of those oversized Alex Ross productions. This is not a shock that demand for the book would have outstripped retailers’ initial orders, given the unusual format and how most retailers probably order conservatively on paperbacks. That said, the Superman one was just the year before, so maybe folks should’ve been able to estimate the number of needed books a little more clearly, but ah well….
I’d totally forgotten about M Rex, so it’s weird to see it here, at one point a Top Ten reordered comic book in the country. Probably stories putting all the Image Comics money into Tomb Raider #1 and forgetting about the other titles for the month.
Danger Girl is no surprise…mostly forgotten now, except by the occasional hopeful holdout, but it was red hot at the time and the cliché of “printing money” seemed to apply very thoroughly to this specific comic. I wonder if those reorders were even filled at the time…I imagine leftover stock didn’t last very long.
Steampunk: Catechism was a one-shot lead-in to the ongoing (at least for a bit) Steampunk series, a comic that I mostly recall for customers asking me “yeah, what’s all this about?” The art was nice, though, and based on the reorders on this initial installment there was a large amount of anticipation for what was to come.
Tomb Raider was absolutely a combination of a red hot brand that was also combined with a red hot artist in Michael Turner. One of those books Wizard was going absolutely nuts about.
Danger Girl being a massive success that was promptly forgotten has always been one of the more fascinating conversations in 2000s comics. It feels like people were just really in JSC’s art, and when he stop doing sequentials (which people today forget were superb), readers just stopped caring. It just had a hugely successful Artist’s Edition Kickstarter, though, so the fondness for that book still exists among a subset of readers.
I was buying comics at the time. I have memories of each of the titles listed, except I don’t remember seeing anything about M Rex. I looked it up, still don’t remember ever hearing about this comic, but see the solicitation copy bragging about how this “book will ship on time” and that “three issues are in the can before issue #1 even shipped”. Then, I see that the comic made it all the way up to issue #2. Ah, the ‘90s in comics (even in 1999).
I have NO idea what an “M. Rex” is.
But I know what a T REX is!
I was thinking of Re-Gex by Leifeld, having no memories at all about M-Rex, and probably even 25 years ago.
I think I should remember it, as I both read Wizard and Previews at the time…
Steampunk came hot at the heels of the fantastic Battle Chasers, along such titles like Soul Saga all of which I sampled but had to give up due to cancellation or mediocre writing. Warlands was the best of the bunch in my opinion.
And look at that 9.95$ price tag on WoC! Not even 9.99! Those things were huge. What does 9.99 get you today?
Ha! I did not buy any of the comics on the list. I think I was more into DC at the time, and I’ve never been the biggest Batfan.
Diamond? Never heard of it.
Was teaching English in Hiroshima throughout 1999. Doesn’t look like I missed much.
M. Rex lasted a lot longer as a cartoon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generator_Rex
I say this as a big fan of Chris Bachalo: Steampunk was unreadable. Pretty? Absolutely! There were some breathtaking splash pages and panels in the book. But I could not make heads or tails of the story. Joe Kelly’s scripting didn’t help much. To be fair, he might not have had a clue what was supposed to be going on either.
I bought M. Rex 1, and don’t remember much about it. It was ok, I guess?
I say this as a big fan of Alan Davis: the post-Seagle & Kelly, pre-Morrison period was a mess. It’s not Alan Davis’s fault, he was following editorial demands. It wasn’t all bad, either. Davis, Raney, Adam Kubert, Yu, and others did a good job on the art. The stories weren’t great, and having Terry Kavanaugh script most of them didn’t help.
Batman: War on Crime was beautifully illustrated. I remember coming away with a positive impression of the story, but haven’t reread it in 20 years. I think Bruce Wayne works on solving crime through charity or something. It might not hold up.
“Batman: War On Crime”
As opposed to most of his life, when he fights a War on Bad Grammar.