publishing

Whither the second printing?

filed under Categories dc comics, publishing, superman 5 Comments

I guess this post can be seen as an epilogue of sorts to my posts about the John Byrne reboot of the Superman titles in the mid-1980s. Essentially, I came across this 1988 issue of Superman from near the tail end of Byrne’s run:


…where you might see this oddly-formatted blurb in the corner:


Now around this time, DC Comics was making a big promotional push to let folks know the series was about to be released on a biweekly basis. To wit: Amazing Heroes #133 (the “Preview Special”) from earlier in the year contains this bit of information within its Superman coverage:


And just to gild the lily, here’s an excerpt from a house ad located right next to this entry, warning you of what’s to come:


As it turns out, the biweekly Superman plan is called off, as Byrne very publicly quits the Super-books around this time, He’s only involved in a couple more issues after this.

It’s my memory that the “Power Failure!” blurb you see on the cover of #19 had shown up in print ads and such prior to its release, containing instead an announcement of the title’s change in release schedule. However, try as I might, I couldn’t find one of those ads for today’s entry. Given how the lettering in the blurb leaves a lot of blank space, it is pretty clear that something else had been meant to be there.

But when I went to the Grand Comics Database to look up information on this issue (and, ahem, “borrow” a scan or two), much to my surprise I see this cover marked as a “Third Printing.”


And there it is, right in the corner, marked “Now Twice Monthly!” If you look at the entry for this cover specifically, it’s noted that the third printing came out quite a bit after the release of the first printing. Why the “Now Twice Monthly!” blurb is retained, I’m not sure, as the Superman title itself never goes biweekly. I suppose in combination with Adventures of Superman, maybe that counts as making Superman a twice-monthly title. However, I think Action is back to being a monthly title at this point, so it’s…three times a month?

Anyway, kind of an oddball thing I discovered. Maybe one of you has the answers! (Or at least where I can find a print ad showing the original version of that cover.)

Warning: lightly naughty covers ahead.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, publishing 4 Comments

Okay, a lot of business to attend to here:

First, there’s been a small influx of A.I.-generated comments on the site, with links to A.I.-related companies. It’s particularly insidious, signing themselves in with real-sounding names and generating comments from stuff either I or other commenters have said. A couple just sounded like they were agreeing with me, but more often than not they were just slightly rewording what we’ve said. Ugh. Look, I think A.I. can have its uses (once they solve the whole, you know, energy/water usage thing), like in dealing with and sorting data, but we don’t need Newer, Better Spam. So, I’ll try to nip these in the bud as I notice them.

Second, I’ve got medical stuff going on in the middle of the week, so Wednesday’s post is gonna be quite short. By which I mean “actually, really short,” not “I’m going to keep this short” and suddenly I’ve written an Alan Moore script.

Third, some of you had some good suggestions regarding the earliest regular cover/opaque-bagged naughty variants. Brian F sends me to this NSFW reference page that may require some digging.

Another likely suspect, provided by Matthew, is Hellina: Taking Back the Night did have a polybagged nude variant (NSFW again) according to advance publicity, with obscuring black bars. Here’s one I found on eBay:


Out in 1995, a year after the Perg comic I talked about last time, which was in an entirely clear bag.

Barring my finding something in that list of books Brian sent me, that may be the earliest example so far of “adult variant for a non-adult book in an obscuring bag.” Even if, you know, that “obscuring” is restricted to a couple of small black bars, and not covering the entire image like the newer variants that triggered this whole discussion.

Fourth, in this post discussing some X-rated comics of the ’90s that had merit, some of you brought up Phil Foglio’s XXXenophile, which is indeed one of the great filthy books of the period. Wonderful art (mostly Phil, with a parade of inkers/finishers), short and clever stories, and, yes, lots of, ahem, shenanigans. It’s all joyful and hilarious and will likely offend somebody at some point. Like, I’m not going to vouch for the political correctness of this cover, but it’s plenty silly:


Again, there were plenty of adult comics that were well worth your time and attention, and XXXenophile was among the best of them. Like I said before, I’m not sure what sort of coverage of them I can get away with here, but at the very least I can acknowledge them.

To the Grand Comics Database: that was me looking up all those weird titles last night, I apologize.

filed under Categories publishing, retailing, undergrounds 14 Comments

[NOTE: seriously, some of the links for those comics are Not Safe for Work. You’ve been warned…quit your job before clicking.]

Your pal Mike’s been burning the candle at both ends lately, so I’m going to try to keep it (relatively) short for today’s entry by finishing up some old business. Keef asked this of me a while back:

“The more I get into weirdo undergrounds and ‘adult’ comix, the more I want to know about their history and perspective. When I worked at a shop around the turn of the century, we didn’t really have any Undergrounds– or if we did, I was entirely unaware of them. It took a while for me to get into Undergrounds. I suspect that a lot of that was just because it wasn’t covered in the mainstream comics media that I followed when I got into the scene– Wizard didn’t do any cover stories about the bizarre pointillist nastiness of Jim Osborne, for example– but also because it just wasn’t around. I enjoy this stuff now because there are so many weird niche rabbitholes to climb down.

“At my relatively-small college town shop, we stocked Eros stuff, but I thought of it as the ‘dirty old man’ section, and so I didn’t pay much attention to it– except for a few exceptions, mostly by people I knew. It’s only in the past few years that I’ve gotten into the Eros stuff, mostly for entertainment value (the Tom Sutton stuff) but also because some of it is genuinely good.

“Historically, has there been a shift in the way that you sell undergrounds / adult stuff? Do you avoid blogging about it because this is a ‘family friendly’ blog?”

Well, it’s a fair cop, I don’t talk about any of this stuff nearly as much as I should, given the amount of it there is, and the impact much of it has had on the medium as a whole. I do have an “undergrounds” category (which I don’t think tags every discussion of the topic on here), so I haven’t dodged things entirely, but there is certainly more to say.

In terms of “how do I sell the stuff,” I actually wrote a post about this in 2014, which, to be fair, I didn’t expect anyone to immediately remember. In fact, I had to Google it up myself to recall when exactly I discussed this. Interestingly, this was in August of that year, a mere month before I announced to the world that I was opening my own store. So, in that post, where I was talking about how we dealt with adult comics at my previous place of employment, I was almost certainly thinking to myself about how I was going to handle them at my new shop. I’m a little…bemused at that.

At my “new” (now nearly 12 years old) store, I handle adult and underground comics somewhat differently, mostly because there aren’t quite the numbers of overtly “explicit” comics that there used to be. By which I mean, we’re no longer getting comics with titles like Pee Soup, accompanied by covers that make no bones about what’s going on inside. (That link is mightily Not Safe for Work, by the way.) Instead, we’re getting comics with the very adult content like Money Shot, a sci-fi adventure book with plenty of Tab A going into Slot B (and variations thereof) inside, but the covers (aside from the naughty bagged variants we were talking about a few days ago) are mostly innocuous, or at least not any more salacious than what you’d find on your typical issue of Vampirella. These would just get racked in with the general population on the shelves, maybe wrapped in a clear plastic comics bag to discourage casual nosiness by a young’un, if I thought maybe there’s a chance of improper exposure.

Anything that would be deemed too explicit, and perhaps too much — y’know — on the covers may be bagged and put up in a specific portion of the top new comics shelf, sort of like what we did at the old store. There hasn’t been a lot along those lines (Tarot Witch of the Black Rose would fit into this category, for example), but that’s what I’d do. Or there are cases where the actual title is a bit much, like Cat Shit One. That would get snuggled into the upper section as well, perhaps overlapped by the magazine next to it so I don’t have something called “CAT SHIT ONE” obviously blaring from my top shelf.

Now “undergrounds” as a category for any new comics is more an honorary designation than anything else, and not “Warning: This Comic Is Aggressively Countercultural or Whatever,” necessitating separation from the regular stock to avoid upsetting the squares. They’re just “independent comics,” now, and even when Robert Crumb, Mr. Undergrounds his own darn self, puts out a new pamphlet, it’s just up there on the new comics rack between Superman #32 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder #3. And it sold there just fine, thank you.

Older undergrounds have their own box behind the counter, as does older naughty stuff like Eros Comix, since I don’t necessarily want those out on the floor where Grandma can unknowingly pull one out and say “how about this one, Little Billy?” But really, that’s no big deal…I have a box full of Classics Illustrated behind the counter, too, because I don’t necessarily want these, in some cases, nearly 80-year-old comics being man-or-Grandma-handled without direct supervision. (In fact, a lot of my back issue stock is behind the counter, because I literally don’t have the floor space for everything to be within the customer’s reach.)

As to the actual quality of undergrounds and adult comics…well, that’s perhaps a subject for a more comprehensive post. Undergrounds probably don’t need the defending here so much as the more explicitly XXX-rated books that proliferated on shelves or behind the “18+” beaded curtains a few decades back. Yes, some were, like, “just go buy a copy of Hustler, why do you need a comic that’s tracing stuff from copies of Hustler,” but many were unique artistic expressions, too. Gilbert Hernandez’s Birdland, the inaugural title from Fantagraphics’ Eros line, is one that gets mentioned a lot. There’s the outrageousness of Don Simpson’s…excuse me, “Anton Drek’s” Wendy Whitebread Undercover Slut. There’s the relative cutesiness of Debbie Does Dallas (at least the early issues that were drawn by a former customer of mine!). There’s Ho Che Anderson’s early work I Want to Be Your Dog (about BDSM in the Black community), there’s Bill Willingham’s fantasy work Ironwood, there’s the just plain weirdness of Spank…I mean, there’s a lot of notable stuff happening under that “adult comics” label. And that’s not even talking about a lot of the European and Japanese material being rereleased under these imprints.

Anyway, it’s a rich mine to dig into, clearly. I’m not sure I want to spin off into a separate “Progressive Ruin…After Dark” site, so discussion of some of these may require some circumspection. I try to keep things mostly general audience friendly here…I mean, I’m assuming my readership is largely adult anyway, but I’m not putting up high-quality scans of anything unnecessarily Turgid or Sopping. I’m just not that kind of webpage. But reasoned discussion of adults-only material is not, and hasn’t been, out of the question. When I find I have something to say on the topic, I’ll be happy to write it up here. I just hope I won’t be forced to card any of you before doing so.

In which I ponder, weak and weary.

filed under Categories marvel, publishing 8 Comments

[Minor SPOILERS for Marvel’s Midnight comics ahead]

And so, the day has come. Marvel’s new Midnight imprint has been unleashed upon the world, and a lot of what I’ve been considering is about to pass. From the retailer perspective, I am curious if this will succeed in achieving at least a smidgen of the traction that DC’s Absoluteline of books has. From the reader perspective…are these any good?

Let’s take that first question first, even though I don’t quite have the data necessary based on the fact that I’m writing this the night before it’s on sale at my shop. Judging from the pull lists and the in-store requests, interest is reasonably high. However, once I knuckled down and started to process the pull lists, I received a lot of late orders for the variant covers, and usually the same specific variant covers. Everyone wanted the connecting covers, for example, which traditionally is not the sort of variant my clientele usually asks for, so naturally I did not have enough to go around. I’m hoping I can get a reorder on these, but we’ll see.

That’s all just sales stuff that I’ll know the answer to in just a few hours. The important part is, again, are they actually good comic books? I think the answer is “yes,” by and large. The stated purpose of Midnight is to bring Marvel’s superheroes into a more horror-tinged narrative, and overall I think they succeed to varying degrees. But the implicit purpose of this line is to duplicate DC’s creative success with the Absolute line, and its sales success in bringing new readers into comic shops. In this latter consideration, I think Marvel may be moving in the right direction here, mostly.


Midnight Fantastic Four #1 may be the best of the bunch, not just in terms of storytelling but in its emulation of the “Absolute” line’s “formula,” inasmuch as it has one. We begin at square one, where a disgraced Reed Richards’ scientific services are acquired by Susan Storm, who is accompanied by her bodyguard Ben Grimm and her brother Johnny. Like the Absolute books, we’re starting with our characters lacking their particular advantages, in this case specifically Reed not having his respected credentials, and in a larger sense, lacking his familial connection to the others in what would have been his team. There’s a definite tension to the proceedings, and while the horror elements are present, they aren’t necessarily overwhelming, though there is a bit of inferred body horror awaiting us, especially if you got a look at some of the variant covers.


Midnight Spider-Man reminds me a little of this Stephen King quote:

“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.”

There’s a lot of exploding bodies and blood ‘n’ such in this one, as Oscorp is experimenting on live human subjects who do not survive the process. Again, we’re starting from scratch, as young genius Peter Parker is recruited by the company, and from there…well, the body horror is more explicit in this one, so you can probably guess where things end up. It’s generally an interesting story, with a simplistic but effective conflict in Peter’s motivations. The art is…a little loose in places, where I’m not sure what I’m even looking at, but that may be my aging eyes more than anything else.


Midnight X-Men #1 is the odd man out, as we’re basically put in, as my old pal Dorian put it, a What If story. This isn’t a “ground floor” book, this is a world where the X-Men are already established, building a premise off old X-Men storylines, in which the mutants are mostly all vampires and we’re at war with them and so on. There’s nothing explicitly wrong with it — I mean, it’s all professionally told, though I tend to find writer Jonathan Hickman a bit dry at times — but of the three books, this one didn’t quite understand the assignment of “we need our own Absolute line.” To hear Midnight Spider-Man writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson tell it:

“…When people are making comparisons to Absolute and all that, but it’s really, I’m trying to think of a more apt comparison. I mean, the only similarity really to Absolute is that it is a reimagine. It’s like a Rebirth kind of a thing. And that way that it’s similar in that we’re completely burning the script and starting over. But we’re what we’re replacing it with is super different.”

Well, that’s not this book so much. Maybe we’ve got a lot of backstory in our future, and I imagine we do, but I don’t know if that will be as effective as an X-title that starts from the beginning rather than in medias res. If Midnight Spider-Man started with Peter Parker at around issue #100 of Amazing Spider-Man, and all that business where he had six arms, and continued from there…that’s basically Midnight X-Men #1.

…I don’t think it’s bad, I should emphasize. I’m actually interested to see where this is going, which is unusual for me since I’m not an X-Men guy. At least on that level, “does it keep a reader’s attention,” I think it’s managed that. That said, this isn’t really differentiated enough from the regular X-books to feel like it’s “new” and “different” enough to be its own thing. It leans hard on the “NEW IMPRINT FIRST ISSUE” status to make that hoped-for jump from “just another new Marvel #1” to “huge sales hit that’ll still be selling tenth printings of #1 two years from now,” and I don’t know that’ll be enough.

Look, I know I may sound hard on a couple of these. I don’t mean to. I want these comics to do well. DC hit that magic formula with their Absolute line, with comics that just continue to sell and sell and sell, printing after printing, with the trade paperback collections also selling, bringing new customers into comic book stores while also selling to the already converted. It’s great, and I’d be out of my mind if I, a comic store owner, didn’t want that again, but from Marvel.

So, we’ll see what happens. As a store owner, I hope it’s a hit. As a fan, I hope they continue to be enjoyable to read. As an observer of the industry, I’m sure they’ll give me plenty to write about in the near future.

Not being prurient in the slightest.

filed under Categories publishing 14 Comments

So I was chatting with Amy Chase (writer of Fixation, first issue currently available at your better comic shops, and at mine as well!) as I was ringing up her comic book purchase, when she pointed out the bagged copies of the Not Safe for Work cover of Gastronomique #2 that I had at the front counter. Why are they at the front counter? Because I’ve had problems with these particular types of variants…walking out the door without my knowledge, if you get my drift. Thus, I just keep them discreetly by the register, where the Normal Folks won’t pay attention but the Real Heads know what’s goin’ on.

Anyway, the reason Amy pointed out said bagged variant was to wonder aloud what the first “bagged adult variant” may have been. I mean, not the naughty comics, like Black Kiss (discussed here) where there was only one cover (oh, for those days again), but it was a bit rough for open display on the shelf, and the comic was polybagged with a card over that cover. She meant the comics where there were a handful of “all (appropriate) audiences” covers, along with one, or two, or five Not Safe for Work variants that were polybagged with boards or some other feature that hid the imagery.

I mentioned in that post I’ve already linked once that maybe the best known version of this particular publishing strategy was Sex Criminals where, say, issue #11 would have your wholesome cover suitable for Sunday schools:


…and you’d simultaneously have the Adults Only cover available in this opaque polybag:


…containing Godless filth distributed by Zdarsky and Fraction, Professional Pornographers.

Amy said that she thinks Sex Criminals was the first series to have a standard cover accompanied by a polybagged NSFW variant, which…I couldn’t dispute. At least, not without research (AKA Googling).

Sex Criminals #11 came out in 2015, and as far as I can tell, that was the first issue of the series to have the polybagged NSFW variants. (This is where I miss having access to Diamond Comics’ stock catalog, where I could look this up for sure.)

The first thing that came to mind was the 1989 Leather and Lace series, which came in a polybagged Adults Only version and a “general audiences” version (which I go into detail about here). But it’s not really the same thing, as these are, technically, two different comics: one with X-rated material and one with the X-rated material removed. Yeah, I know. The bagged adult edition did have slightly racier covers, but this wasn’t really the same thing as the Sex Criminals reg-vs.-NSFW covers, as in Leather and Lace‘s case, the adult comic is the main book, the “general” version is the weirdo variant. And oddly, I don’t think even the L&L adult covers featured any outright nudity.

Anyway, I thought about this question for a bit, dredging what’s left of my memory for any earlier examples of regular ol’ comics with bagged naughty variants. Ultimately, I turned to that aforementioned Googling, and turned up this:


Perg #6, published by Lightning Comics in 1994, came with a couple of Gold variants, both polybagged. One was just the same cover pictured here, just on a gold-foil paper. The nude gold polybagged edition had a similar but different image, this time with everyone in the altogether. (You can see all the covers here.)

This isn’t quite the same thing, as the polybag is clear and doesn’t hide the image (unless the included Certificate of Authenticity was put over the front of the cover). But so far this is the earliest comic that had a standard cover accompanied by a nude polybagged cover (obscured or not). But in terms of comics that had a Not Safe for That Workplace variant in an opaque bag, Amy may be correct that Sex Criminals was first out of the gate.

Now is the time where I’ll throw things out to crowdsourcing. Can you think of a comic with a main Safe for Work cover with a nude polybagged variant, either in a clear bag or not, that predates either of the comics above in either category? I promise not to call you a pervert if you have suggestions.

An elemental disagreement.

filed under Categories publishing 32 Comments

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I’ve certainly brought it up on Bluesky that I now have about 92% of the Elementals comics from the ’80s and ’90s, missing only a couple of the issues from the mini-series, and the very last couple of Elementals minis spit out by a dying Comico. (I’m only bothering with the first Elementals Sex Special since it’s the one with actual work from the series creator Bill Willingham.)

Anyway, I held off reading the Elementals Specials (not to be confused with the Sex ones) until after I finished the entire first series. I know Special #1 fits in somewhere during that first run, while #2 leads up to launch for Elementals #2. As such, as I was reading through the first series, I saw some letters page reactions to the first Special and it seems to be a fairly positive reaction.

I’d known for years Special #1 was a Very Important Issue, addressing the problem of child abuse, probably hinted at by that cover of haunted children’s faces (and one kid with glowy eyes, which is a thing from the story). Willingham draws the book with Rich Rankin inks, while Jack Herman scripts, and the story is…mmmm, not the greatest. A member of the Elementals, Tommy AKA Monolith has psychic visions of children being killed by some mysterious being, and we get a slew of dead kids in this issue, which is, needless to say, distressing. Which is the point, of course.

Spoilers for a 40-year-old comic, but the supernatural murderer turns out to have been the victim of abuse himself as a child, “repeating the cycle” as they say, and he’s talked down and neutralized.

Aside from that last little bit, we don’t really get too deep into the whys and wherefores of the topic at hand…it’s a lot of action and killing and Elementals lore and I don’t know what anyone would have taken from this, really. I mean, it’s fine as what is basically a solo Monolith adventure, but feels kinda shallow.

Of note, though, is the editorial page in this issue. Included is a letter where Comico’s rep reached out to an organization that was working against this sort of treatment of children, asking if they wanted to place an informational page in the comic as outreach.

The response that garnered was as follows, from the director of the organization:


Hoo boy, As it says in The Muppets (2011):


Now, I think she’s justified in saying no…the story is pretty violent, and I would imagine off-putting to someone I’m guessing hasn’t had much experience with comics. Willingham provides an editorial response, stating that this is a comic presented in the Elementals milieu, with supernatural beings and serial killers simply being just part of the context into which the topic of abuse has been slotted. Also, that “violent, upsetting” content should be used to get the point across to audiences. And here, in this case, I think I get what Willingham is saying

Not directly addressed is this accusation from the director’s letter:

“The graphic violence and physical abuse that occur probably will not help prevent child abuse and in fact may encourage it.”

Oh man, I think if I were Willingham that bit would have pissed me off the most. What a thing to say to someone, “your comic is so bad it may cause murders.” I mean, holy shit. Honestly, I can understand most of the points being made from both sides of this argument, but this add-on is just over the top.

This was the mid-1980s when all this was goin’ on. The general public’s increasing awareness of comic books was slowly creeping up. Watchmen wouldn’t come out until a few months after Elementals Special #1 was released, and thus hadn’t yet entered the conversation, but Batman: The Dark Knight had come out just the month before. Comics were on the verge of booming into enormous popularity, and with wider availability and access comes wider criticism.

At the time of this letter exchange, we weren’t quite there yet, but the stirrings of public unrest were there, as more “mature” content began to get mainstreamed (as much as a comic shop was “mainstream” then) into store racks. Discussions of violence in comics were increasing, like in this article from a 1985 Comics Journal: “The Ratings Debate – Violence and Sex in Comics: How Will Publishers Cope with It?” Or this article by Heidi MacDonald, which has lived rent-free in my head for nearly 40 years. And c’mon, X-Men fans had been long debating whether Wolverine was too violent…or not violent enough.

I don’t know that this director was exposed to any of this early tumult in the comics biz…well, actually, I’m pretty sure she wasn’t. This exchange, however, remains as a precursor to the debates and accusations and straight-up witch hunts that were to follow in the coming years.

Like I said, I didn’t think the Elementals Special was a great comic. I mean, kudos to the creators for using their platform to address an important topic, but it feels more exploitative than educational. That may just be the nature of the series’ overall tone, or the story in which it was expressed, or whatever. Just overall, the execution just didn’t work for me, but other folks wrote in and really liked it, so Your Mileage May Vary, as it always does.

EDIT: Lars recently did his own overview of this issue, with more visuals of the actual contents than I provided.

Letting it all hang out.

filed under Categories dc comics, marvel, publishing, retailing 9 Comments

So Marvel unleashed its “Ultimate” Universe in 2000/2001, starting with Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men, partially out of a need to have some “new reader friendly” material on the stands free of the deep continuity in the regular Marvel Universe. Also, a collapsed comics market and Marvel being on the verge of “going away” for good probably helped push along any desperate ideas to keep them afloat. Whatever the reason, the Ultimate books came out, giving fresh starts to their properties separate from the still-ongoing Marvel Universe proper…until they became just as convoluted as the mainline universe and purpose successfully defeated.

But it ran a long time, and made lots of money and had a strong readership, and “the sweet taste of success attracts many tongues,” as no one but me says, and DC was trying to figure out how to get some of that Ultimate scratch.

First they tried with their “All-Star” line in the mid-2000s, with All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder and All-Star Superman…both sold amazingly well, though one got a little more critical acclaim than the other. All-Star Superman was a mini and wrapped up after 12 issues, while the Batman title stopped mid-story with #10, and planned Batgirl and Wonder Woman titles for the line never appeared.

Then DC tried out the “Earth One” line of graphic novels, starting in 2009, again giving fresh starts to their major properties and hoping to catch a new bookstore audience with them. The Superman and Batman series for this imprint put out multiple volumes, but never really seemed to catch any traction. The Wonder Woman run of three books was generally well received, as was the Green Lantern run. But it looks like this effort was finally abandoned a few years ago (though a collection of the Wonder Woman books as part of DC’s Compact Line has done well for me!).

And then, finally, The Third Time’s the Charm, as they say, as just a couple years ago DC launched their Absolute line. Similar to the Ultimate Universe, the Absolute Universe gave fresh starts to their heavy hitters (Supes, Bats, and Wondy) in continuities separate from the mainstream DCU. Interestingly, the milieu spins out of one of DC’s Big Event titles, positing a reality centered around the Omega Energy of the seemingly fallen Darkseid. Sorry if that sounds a little inside-baseball for anyone coming onto this out of context, but the general idea is that this is not just a darker universe, but an existence where the heroes we know lack the advantages their regular counterparts have.

At any rate, this line (which quickly added a handful of new titles) is pretty much DC just printing money at this point. Absolute Batman is far and away the biggest hit. DC just keeps issuing reprint after reprint of the entire run of individual comics, and I keep putting them on my shelves, and they keep selling. They’re up to, like, a 12th printing on #1. This is almost unheard of for just a regular monthly title at DC, especially after the trade paperback collections started getting released.

And it’s not to speculators…it’s new readers, it’s teenagers, it’s adults who’d heard about this thing online somewhere. It’s the Holy Grail of what DC and Marvel have been looking for, A Title That Gets New Readers into Comic Shops Specifically for Their Thing.

The other Absolute titles also do well, if not at quite the extreme Absolute Batman does, but they’ve found their levels and move off the shelves.

Anyway, now that DC has found its Ultimate line, Marvel seems like it’s going to try to find its Absolute line, with this new Midnight publishing initiative they’re about to launch. I was going to say “I don’t know that this is directly a response to DC’s Absolute line,” but the headline of this article, “Marvel’s new Midnight universe makes DC’s Absolute comics look ‘pretty polite,’ says Spider-Man writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson,” seems to clear up any confusion.

The “Midnight” line is horror-centric, apparently, separate from the regular Marvel Universe, with darker versions of Marvel’s mainstays, which feels like a misread of the Absolute line, but, well, we’ll see what they do with it. The solicit for the first issue of Midnight: Fantastic Four #1 reads

“FIRST STEPS INTO DARKNESS! An obsessive scientist delves into the secrets of the universe perhaps best left unknown to humankind, leaving himself and three others warped in strange and horrifying ways. What horrible secrets lie in the new dimensions they have discovered? And can humanity survive the discovery? From the twisted minds of Benjamin Percy (WOLVERINE, PUNISHER) and Kev Walker (INFERNAL HULK, DOCTOR STRANGE) comes a tale of existential dread and secrets best kept…”

I can do without the “from the twisted minds of…” business, I mean c’mon, but I don’t know, Fantastic Four as a cosmic horror comic? Or even, dare I say, Lovecraftian? Yeah, I’d be all for that.

Just so we’re clear, I’m not criticizing anything they’re doing here. I obviously haven’t read any of these yet. They could be great! They have solid creative teams. But the question is, will these capture the same attention and sales as DC’s Absolute line?

This is something I had to ask myself when I was finalizing orders on the initial releases from this line. And while I tend to order conservatively on new titles, I did bump orders up quite a bit for these books. I think they will do very well, at least at first, as everyone tries to get in on the ground floor of what they think will be the Next Big Thing. And maybe they’ll be right, and it will be the Next Big Thing.

But I honestly think it will be at best a good selling new Marvel line to already established comic fans, and not the constantly-selling, new customer-attracting, phenomenon that Absolute has been. That niche is already filled, you see, and lightning striking again seems highly unlikely.

Again, just my feeling. I could be wrong, and maybe I’ll still be selling the 12th printing of Midnight: X-Men #1 off my shelves two years from now. And I’ll be cursing myself for not having ordered ten times the amount I did for the first printing of that issue.

We’ll all see soon enough how the Midnight line does. And whether I was on target with my orders. I’ve had strong interest from my regular clientele regarding these books, and I’ll be interested to see if there’s any demand beyond that.

Digesting some thoughts.

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Pictured above, Golden Comics Digest #45 from 1975, which I’m pretty sure I had back then.

Mark Evanier wrote an interesting article about the Gold Key Digests of the ’60s and ’70s. I don’t encounter these too often in the wild, unfortunately…I had a collection come in with some Boris Karloff digests, but it was so far back that I can’t remember if it was at my current store or at the shop at which I used to work.

Any, Mr. Evanier presents some surprising revelations about how these digests sold, depending on whether or not other regular-sized comics were available as well. I’m going to ask you to read his post first so I don’t spoil it — okay, have you read it?

Good. Basically, he says that Gold Key’s digests tended to sell poorly when the digests were available in the same retail space as regular-sized comics, or even if regular-sized comics happened to be in a nearby store. However, if the digests were the only comics game in town, they sold pretty well.

That surprises me a little, given that a money-conscious child should find that a relatively thick digest a better deal than a normal comic book…twice or three times the price for maybe four or five or more times the content?

Evanier believes that sales were poor in comparison to the typical comic book size as the digests looked “cheap and unimportant,” which could be possible. A problem with perceived value could have set in, with kids comparing the smaller, pricier format to the more familiar, less expensive, larger format and deciding “bigger is better,” I suppose. Even if the the digests were, page-to-penny, a better deal.

And perhaps there was the perceived nature of “newness” — the periodicals came in new every month or two. So did the digests (perhaps not as frequently) but they may have read as “books” and “non-periodicals” to a child’s eye, and did not seem as “fresh.”

Not that comic digests died with Gold Key/Western’s offerings. Archie had been selling digests for years, probably helped quite a bit by being grandfathered into those grocery store racks right near the registers in prime “impulse buy/kids begging their parents for one” spacing. I do wonder what their particular sell-throughs were on those, given that anything distributed through retail chains like that would be returnable. These sales numbers on Comichron can give you an idea of how Archies sold in general, and it includes the note that, eventually, the digests outsold the periodicals. (However, the digests are having their own issues at the moment.)

Personally, at my previous place of employment and my own store, the Archie digests sold…in bursts, actually. I’d order ’em, they’d sit on the shelf for a while, then someone would come in, exclaim “ARCHIE DIGESTS!” then buy an armload of them. So they weren’t consistent sellers so much as eventual ones.

One thing I did get reminded of with Mr. Evanier’s post was, of course, the DC Comics digest.


Starting in the late ’70s, not too long after the Gold Key digests took their final bow, these were primarily reprints of older comics, but the occasional new story would slip in here and there. You had Best of DC (which ran 71 issues from 1979 to 1986), and DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest (24 issues from 1980 to 1982) as the primary series, though the DC Special Series had a couple of digests in its run as well.

I have no idea if these suffered the same sales fate as what Mr. Evanier described for the Gold Key digests. Alas, I didn’t check with my former boss about how they sold for him at the time, so Watch This Space for updates once I ask him. But I’m guessing they didn’t…this was a slightly different target audience, and one (at least among your already-converted comic book fans) that may have had a stronger appeal. There’s a not-insignificant portion of that audience that wants reprints of material they might have missed.

I know I picked up just about every digest DC put out for a while…I was still relatively new to following the DC Universe, and these digests made for great catch-up tools. Origins were reprinted, interesting multi-issue storylines were gathered together (making for mini graphic novels, of sorts). Sometime some new editorial content was provided, like Bob Rozakis explaining how he scripted the heroes vs. villains baseball game in this “Strange Sports Stories” digest. Or sometimes there would be text pieces, usually by E. Nelson Bridwell, contextualizing the reprinted stories.

I would generally find these in locations like convenience stores tha talso carried your standard-sized periodical comics, so again, I’m guessing they didn’t take quite the same sales hit as the Gold Key digest line did. Regardless, by the mid-1980s, this format was essentially dead, replaced by the more costly, but probably more bookstore-friendly, trade paperbacks. (Marvel had its own short-lived line of digests in the mid-to-late 1980s, reprinting some of their licensed material like G.I. Joe, which may warrant its own post.)

The digest format is missed, I think, as it was a quick and easy and inexpensive way to catch people up on some classic comics. I always liked DC’s digests, particularly with some of the wild new covers some of them got. Unfortunately, my current eyeball status probably precludes enjoying the reprints therein, but for Young Mike, they were just the perfect size and format.

It’s not quite the same, but DC seems to be having some success with the current Compact format, which are essentially manga-sized paperbacks representing many of their classic books in a smaller format, at a flat $9.99 price point. At least, they sell well for me, and they keep making them, so DC must be making some money on them. Titles like Watchmen, New Frontier, Supergirl: World of Tomorrow…not quite the diverse and weird themes that would be collected in digests (like “here are all the weird secret identities Superman used!”) but it’s nice to have a lot of this work in more affordable formats.

Again, maybe just a little too small for easy readability by yours truly, but those of you with young, spritely peepers should be fine. However, I imagine even the sharpest of eyeballs will feel my pain once that Compact edition of Crisis on Infinite Earths comes out. Keep your magnifying glasses at the ready!

G.I. Joe and Mr. Monopoly versus the Transformers and the Pound Puppies.

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So on top of everything else going on this week in comics (like the release of Absolute Catwoman #1 and the second issue of Ben 10 — there’s demand for that second issue, but nowhere near the panic for #1), we got the neweset entry in Robert Kirkman’s “Energon Universe,” M.A.S.K. For those unfamiliar, the “Energon Universe” is Kirkman’s blanket label for the shared world in which the licensed Hasbro properties G.I. Joe and Transformers exist.

Anyhoo, not satisfied with just two Hasbro toy lines under one funnybook tent, Kirkman’s newest addition is the M.A.S.K. series based on the action figure/vehicle toyline of the mid-1980s (and the associated cartoon). Noe, I knew nothing about it specifically, other than it was indeed a toy line and cartoon that I never interacted with, and that there was a DC comic book that I never sold out of the back issue bins. But I figured, hey, this new series is tying into this other “Energon” stuff that’s selling reasonably well, maybe folks will pick it up.

Now as it turned out, this past New Comics Wednesday was a particularly busy one, with a large line waiting out the door prior to opening. And lo, did we sell a whole lot of comics that day, including a lot of demand for that M.A.S.K. book. As it turned out, I ordered kinda/sorta spot on, since as of Thursday evening I still had a couple of copies on the shelf. And I say “kinda/sorta” because I did have some demand for specific variants that I was unable to fill, and can’t get any reorders at this point. I even just got an email Thursday evening from someone asking me to put aside a couple of the blind bags for him, which, um, about 36 hours too late for that, my friend.

And speaking of those blind bags, where you pays your money and takes your chances on a comic wrapped up inside an opaque bag, in which you may find variants of varying rarity, or sketch covers, or something else entirely. And in the case of the M.A.S.K. blind bags, one of those somethings-else entirely was, well, a new ROM #1:


Yes, that’s right, “ROM” as in “ROM Space Knight,” the failed 1978 weirdo action figure that was too tall to play with your Star Wars figures:


…and yet lived on as a pretty successful comic book series from Marvel Comics:


…and was picked up years later by IDW for a series that faced bit of an uphill battle specifically because it wasn’t in the Marvel Universe:


and now, here we are, finding out basically NOW that ROM is the newest member of the Energon Universe, where he can finally team up with Snakes Eyes and Optimum Prime and presumably shake off the long shadow of the Marvel series. I mean, that’s the way to get readers excited about ROM again, tying him into a couple of other already popular comic books. I’m not joking about it needed to escape the Marvel influence if it’s gonna succeed…I really think that hurt the IDW run.

One of the things that surprised me when looking into this is the fact that ROM’s enemies from the Marvel Comics, the shape-changing Dire Wraiths, weren’t just a Marvel property. Apparently the name came from Parker Brothers (the original owners of ROM) as the bad guys, but presumably due to the failure of the initial toy, no Dire Wraith toys were ever made. So ’twas Marvel that made up what the backstory was for these enemies, and as such…the current owners, Hasbro, and the current licensee, Robert Kirkman, can use the name “Dire Wraiths” but they will have to be different from their Marvel progenitors. Huh, learn something new every day. Not something terribly important, mind you, but new nonetheless.

Anyway, if you want a copy of this new ROM #1, then it’s off to the eBays with ya, because the blind bags are probably all sold out from the shops, and you only had bit of a chance to get one that way anyway. I presume it’ll get reprinted eventually in an easier-to-acquire formet.

I believe it was the late Peter David who said he was once, during his days in Marvel Sales in the 1980s, taking questions from a convention crowd regarding the company, when the following exchange happened:

Person in crowd: “Hey, you guys publish G.I. Joe.”

Peter David: “Yes.”

PiC: “You also publish Transformers.”

PD: “Also correct.”

PiC: “They’re both owned by Hasbro.”

PD: “Indeed they are.”

PiC: “Why don’t you guys do a comic where G.I. Joe meets the Transformers?”

PD: [a picture of a giant mountain of money falling onto the Marvel offices forms in his head]

Okay, I’m using a little artistic license for that last line, but not much. But I only bring all that up to say…whoever that guy was in that convention crowd so long ago, you have a lot to answer for.
 
 

The ROM #1 (Image) picture and the ROM action figure pic are both “borrowed” from eBay. The two comic pics are equally borrowed from the Grand Comics Database.

Unless everyone’s speculating on the reprints.

filed under Categories batman, collecting, publishing, retailing 3 Comments

Thanks, pals, for being patient as my blogging batteries recharge. I plan to have another “My Fantastic Four-ay” post this week, and should have another installment of the Final ’90s Countdown coming along in short order.

In the meantime, let me address a question that came up in the last post, about the supposedly-damaged Absolute Batman #20s, from D:

“So are people buying 2 copies of AbBat every month, one to read & one to slab at 9.8 to flip? Or is no one actually reading the book at all and just having their issues encased?”

I’m reminded of that one creator, during the height of the pandemic-inspired comic speculation frenzy where every first appearance of anything was snapped up in desparation for making that big eBay killing, who was so excited at the huge jump in demand for their comic. “Wow! Sales are through the roof! Thanks everyone for your support!” and I just didn’t have the heart to tell ’em that this was only a speculation-fueled bump, that sales were going to drop right back down to where they were previously. And the book ended shortly thereafter (it was a Marvel book, so “ending shortly thereafter” is pretty much a given, what with current publishing stragegies).

I think the point I’m trying to make here is that if Absolute Batman was purely a title supported by speculators, I don’t think it would have lasted this long and at its current high sales volume. That said, speculation is part of the formula here, as most issues have something to generate that sort of interest (1st Absolute Catwoman! 1st Absolute Bane! 1st Absolute Robin(s)!), so that sort of investment behavior is certainly subsidizing the sales.

In general I order around the same numbers for each new issue of Absolute Batman, and I can tell the difference between the issues that have something Hot and Investable in them and those that do not, given on how many I have left over after the initial sales week. However, the amount of demand from people who seem to be actually interested in reading the comic is enough that even if the issue has extra remaining copies, they will continue to sell through the following weeks.

Here’s the thing…I haven’t back-issued any Absolute Batman. (Or any of the Absolute books, for that matter.) I keep every available issue up on the rack and for sale. DC seems intent on keeping the periodicals in print, even if they’ve been reprinted in hardcovers/trade paperbacks, which is unusual. But DC seems to recognize the strong continuing sales of the individual comics and their appeal to new readers, and keeping them in print is money in the bank for themselves and the retailers. I just placed a reorder for more reprints of the entire run, and expect to sell through those again. We’re up to an 11th printing on #1, if you can believe it.

I’m not a mind-reader, so I can’t say for certain that the majority of sales for Absolute Batman is by readers, and not by people immediately shipping them off to CGC to be slabbed and graded. But the general vibe that I’m getting is that they are being bought by readers, and said readers find the comics exciting and compelling. Nearly all my sales in the shop are single copies to customers. Only occasionally do I have someone picking up two or three copies for themselves.

Now, this is just my store. Maybe other stores that are more CGC-oriented than mine (which ain’t hard to achieve) are seeing people buy Absolute Batman by the handful for immediate flipping. I can’t deny that speculation isn’t rampant with this comic, because otherwise this recent controversy over the “damaged” copies of #20 wouldn’t have happened if a significant number of people weren’t upset about not being able to get their coveted “9.8s.” But my sense is that, given the continuing reprinting of the individual issues, given the sales patterns I see at the store, given the general buzz around the actual contents of the stories, this book is getting more reader-driven demand than speculator-driven.