retailing

Maybe I can pay for the weekly comics shipment with toilet paper and bottled water.

filed under Categories cranius, pal plugging, retailing, swamp thing 4 Comments

So I expected some kind of dropoff in business this weekend due to the coronavirus, but surprisingly sales remained within their usual range, if not, perhaps, slightly above what I estimated. Now it could be people coming in and loading up on reading material for their sequestering, or that the full impact of what’s going on hasn’t quite settled in (though that’s hard to argue if you’ve seen the state of any grocery stores in the last couple of days), but so far, I’ve been doing okay.

Now whether that continues as everything continues to shut down and more people decide to stay home, I don’t know. Or it could be that folks are just in initial panic mode and that perhaps behavior will begin to normalize as the realization sets in that the world isn’t ending just yet. Again, don’t know.

It’s a level of uncertainty that I’m not particularly enjoying, as I’m sure most people out there are also experiencing. “How do I make money if I don’t work?” “How do I make money if no one is making money to spend at my store?” “How do I make money if people stop going out to shop?” It’s pretty rough. I have to worry about paying my rent, paying for the weekly Diamond invoices, paying myself so I can pay my regular expenses, oh, and saving up for a tax bill that I didn’t think I was going to have up until about two weeks ago. If money stops coming in, then I’ve got no money to go out, and that will be that.

Like I said, business has remained relatively steady, and it could be I’m worrying too much. Could be I’ll ride this out just fine, pinching pennies here and there, taking in few collections, while income is still coming in, even at slightly reduced levels. And I’m still doing mail order, and have offered my local customers the option to ship their books to them if they would rather not make the trip. But if things cut off entirely…well, my landlord and Diamond and my various utilities will hopefully be understanding.

Sigh. Anyway, so it’s not all doom and gloom, let me show you this pic that pal Matt Digges gave to me as a birthday present this weekend:


Heck yeah that’s Arcane and Cranius from Swamp Thing! And you guys know I loves me some Cranius.

Okay, let’s see what the week brings us. Hopefully things will get better, we’ll all start trying to lead normal (if health-conscious) lives, and panic rushes on grocery stores will subside. I mean, I certainly hope they do, I’m runnin’ short on paper towels.

Not to be confused with “Bad Idea Jeans.”

filed under Categories publishing, retailing 6 Comments

So you may have heard about this new comics company (comprised, I think, of several former Valiant Comics folks) called “Bad Idea,” which the more I talk about this publisher the more hilarious and clearly self-aware its name sounds to me. Anyway, their deal, which is admittedly a bit weird, is that they’re initially only going to be offering their comics to a limited number of retailers, and that said comics wouldn’t be reprinted, collected, digitized*, variant-ized, or spindled or mutilated too, I’m presuming. Originally they announced it was only going to be 20 retailers, then they upped the number to 100, and, well, clearly I’m talking about it here because I managed to get my store on that list.

When I first heard about this, I contacted the publisher, expecting, like, there was going be a $1000 buy-in or something in order to participate. But, nope, just had to fill out an application/agreement thing, and then after whatever selection process was completed, got the email that I was in. I’m not being forced to order more comics than I’m comfortable with, so, you know, I’m willing to give it a shot. And after I announced it on my site and social media outlets, and after the list of retailers showed up elsewhere, I started getting interest from my customers and requests to add their titles to pull lists, so let’s see how it goes.

It is a weird business model, contrary to most business strategies, or what passes for them, at most comic companies. Conventional wisdom is that collected edition sales is where the longterm profit is at, and that digital sales is what all the kids are into, or where the future of comics is at, or that sort of thing. Plus on top of everything else, putting a cap on the number of outlets allowed to even order the books…I mean, it certainly got everyone’s attention, but I hope they’ve figured out a way to make money on this. I’m sure they have, but it certainly seems odd. Which, I guess, is the point.

I don’t know how long these particular strategies are going to remain in place, or how long they’ll stand against general market forces, but I’m glad I’m in there on the ground floor and trying this company out. No idea how it’ll all do, but it has my interest. One thing I’m wondering about is just how to order on these. Like I said, I’ve already had a bit of demand for these from customers, so that gives me at least an idea on what to order. But I can see folks who aren’t near a shop carrying Bad Idea books going down the list of retailers and calling each one, looking for copies to mail order. I like mail order, I do a lot of mail order, so I wonder how many copies extra I should have on hand for this sort of demand? I do not know. Don’t want to go overboard on numbers, but don’t want to be stuck short either. But if any of you reading this want any of these comics, let me know, I’ll be happy to send it to you!

You can read more about the publisher on its site.

* At least officially…sigh.

“Welcome to Walt Disney’s Progressive Ruin.”

filed under Categories dc comics, retailing 8 Comments

So the follow-up to last week’s release of Batman #89, which nobody had enough of because everyone decided they needed it after orders were locked down, was this week’s Year of the Villain: Hell Arisen #3, which also experienced a huge amount of demand that wasn’t there prior to its orders being solidified.

And unlike Batman #89, which at least had a chance at being ordered in reasonably high quantities, Hell Arisen #3 was, at least in these quarters, ordered pretty close to the bone, for pull lists and to accommodate numbers sold on the shelf for issues #1 and #2. Probably not a lot of extras of those floatin’ around, I’d imagine. Batman‘s got a shelf life beyond its initial week of release, the presumably concluding mini-series to an event that, despite its title, was definitely around for like eight or nine years, ain’t going to be picking up a bunch of brand new readers, so I’m presuming orders were very conservative.

But it’s an early appearance of a new character, or characters, I’m not even entirely sure, so I don’t even have to check in on the eBays to see what usually happens when short supply meets high demand. (Remind me in about six months or so to check in there and see where values may have settled.)

The next big, well, milestone, I suppose, will be Batman #92…specifically, the “cardstock variant cover” illustrated by Artgerm, for which I’m already receiving requests. Finally, DC found a way to get people to want to pay a dollar more for these cardstock covers. It was supposed to be the variant for #94, but DC, smelling a buck anticipating current demand, pushed up its release. And I’m just going to post a picture of it here so I don’t have yet another giant wall of text on my site:


Okay, Joker’s new partner in crime, that’s all well and good, assuming 1) DC learned its lesson regarding the abusive relationship Harley Quinn was in with the Joker (and to be fair, it looks like they have, at least with HQ’s modern portrayal) and makes Punchline more of an equal, and 2) any issues with Orientalism can be avoided, making the character part of a commitment to diversity rather than surface level fetishism.

Okay, okay, bit early to be dumping this much heaviness onto a brand new character that’s barely shown up. I may be a bit soured on the whole thing because of the sales situation, so maybe I’ll feel a little more positive about the whole thing once there’s a little distance. At the very least, the comic market can use a little excitement once in a while just to keep things interesting, even if it makes my grey hair just slightly more grey.

And speaking of going more grey, it’s going to be tricky ordering this cover for #92. I’ve got preorders, which helps, but am I going to get much additional walk-in traffic for it? It’s far enough in advance that everyone can order as much as they want of it right now, but if there’s plenty of supply, the sort of demand that would come if copies weren’t plentiful may not materialize. I can see some stores getting stuck with piles of this issue, and I need to make darn sure I’m not one of them.

• • •

In other news, in the wake of former copublisher Dan DiDio’s departure, I’ve been seeing online, and hearing from the occasional customer, things like “Is Marvel buying DC?” or “is DC licensing their characters to Marvel?” or “is DC going to get shut down if their next event doesn’t pay off?” …And all I can think of is that long ago issue of Comic Shop News, either an April Fools issue or maybe their issue #50 or maybe both, that had a fake headline and story headlined “MARVEL BUYS DC.” I still have a copy around my house, somewhere…probably should have found it before writing this post, but oh well, you’ll just have to take my word for it. Anyway, that sort of rumor has been going on a long time, even long before that issue of CSN. And interestingly, I don’t recall such prevalence of the reverse rumor, DC buying Marvel, even when that seemed like an even greater possibility during Marvel’s lean years prior to the Disney buyout.

Anyway, it’s all horseshit. DC licensing characters to Marvel makes no sense, since Marvel has no publishing advantage over DC, really, and besides, Marvel’s already licensing out their own characters to somebody else to publish. The major thing Marvel has over DC is its movies, which all tend to be successful and have consistent cultural traction. Despite that, DC’s movies on the whole do make money, aside from a few underperformers, and it seems unlikely Warner Bros. would wish to endure “Marvel Studios Presents SUPERMAN.” I see WB continuing to try to make money with DC, rather than giving it up for someone else to make money, or canning it entirely.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that someday Disney won’t buy Warner Bros. and merge Marvel and DC together at some point, but Disney’s eventual acquisition of everything is inevitable. We shall all be one with The Mouse.

Oh, and my guess for who’s replacing Dan DiDio as co-publisher, assuming Jim Lee doesn’t become sole publisher or that someone at Warners installs someone in the position? …Brian Michael Bendis. Put me in the office pool for a dollar, please.

I purposely typed “Elf with a Gun” as much as I could in this post.

filed under Categories collecting, retailing 8 Comments

So there I was, pricing up a bunch of old issues of Defenders, as one does when one owns a comic book store with lots of back issues and also have at least temporarily working eyes, when I noticed something. The current Overstreet price guide, the 49th annual edition, has this as their listing for the latter part of the series:


What stood out for me were the notations for that classic weirdo Marvel character “Elf with a Gun.” I couldn’t recall seeing that particular information being in the “Defenders” guide listings before, so I went back to the 46th annual edition, which I happened to have sittin’ around the shop, and behold:


Yup, no mention of Elf with a Gun. When I first discovered this, I was quick to blame comic blogs and their fascination with funnybook esoterica bringing something like Elf with a Gun to slightly more widespread awareness (for which Dave-El willingly took the fall with his 2018 post on this very character).

But actually, if you compare the two scans, it’s clear that the newer guide has greatly expanded its content notation for many of the issues listed there, so it’s not just Elf wtih a Gun who gets special attention. And let’s be honest, it’s one of those bizarre things that deserves to be singled out, one of Steve Gerber’s stranger flights of whimsy to appear on the printed page. (And before anyone says anything…yes, I know the price guide listings excerpted above are for the later non-Gerber Elf with a Gun appearances…look, those just happened to be the issues I was pricing.)

Anyway, if you want to learn more about Elf with a Gun, and who wouldn’t, really, go read Dave-El’s post. He’s got it covered.

One other thing I noticed, aside from the whole Elf with a Gun thing, is th eapparent price drop from the 46th edition to the current 49th edition of the guide. Mostly $4 in Near Mint before, now only $3 a pop. One of my Twitter pals (whose tweets are protected, so I won’t directly quote him here) suggested the proliferation of digital availability bringing prices down, or even the possible negative impact of the Defenders TV show that had aired on Netflix. I mean, I have no idea…sure either of those situations could have been factors, or maybe there’s just less overall demand/trade in back issues from that period, causing a depression in reported sales from submitting retailers. When I have some free time (har har) maybe I’ll do a little spotchecking and see if there are any other examples of relatively cheap/small demand books getting similar price reductions.

Anyway, just a little something I noticed while doing my job. How many other jobs require investigating historical attention to, and pricing of, Elf with a Gun comic book appearances? Probably far more than you can imagine.

In conclusion:

Someone put out a video talking about how Man of Steel #2 (1986) is a hot collectible…I’ve got dozens of those to move.

filed under Categories retailing 2 Comments

So I had a work dream the other night, in which I was explaining to someone that the demand for a random issue of Amazing Mary Jane was so through the roof that they actually pulled back all the copies intended for newsstand distribution to meet the needs of retailers in the direct market.

Now 1) that’s not how any of that works, and 2) ha ha “newsstand distribution,” but I think that I had a dream like that at all tells me that trying to stay ahead of the almost seemingly arbitrary and unpredictable floods of requests for specific issues of comic series. Or specific variant covers. And almost always at the last second, long after the orders have been locked in and it’s too late to get in any reorders.

The latest example was just this week, when word got out that a new character (“Punchline,” a new Harley Quinn-esque lady partner for the Joker) was to appear in Batman #89. Now, it’s more of a cameo, really (like, half her face in one panel, if I saw correctly) but that was enough for the YouTube videos and the “hot comic” phone apps to push the comic into stratospheric demand.

Those of you who’ve been around these here bloggin’ parts a while may remember this post of mine, in which I try to explain why ordering for a limited series is different from ordering for an ongoing series, in terms of deciding how much back stock you’d want on hand for future sales to readers new to the series. An ongoing series would probably require slightly deeper backstock, as theoretically you could have people looking for the first, second, etc. issues for years on end. A mini-series you might want just enough back stock to meet needs for the duration of the series, and perhaps a little after. There are exceptions, of course, but in general that would be the respective cases.

When I wrote that back in 2007, we didn’t quite yet have the marketplace we do now, where titles end and relaunch with new #1s whenever, I don’t know, a character gets a new haircut and now suddenly everything is New and Different! In 2007, while relaunches had happened, of course, it wasn’t the norm it is today. Any title can stop and relaunch with a new #1 at any time, and when that new series starts, demand for back issues of preceding series will drop off. I can still sell plenty of the original Batman series, but New 52 Batman, once a hot commodity, barely moves now that it’s been supplanted by Rebirth Batman.

The end result: everything gets ordered as a mini-series. Just enough back stock, if any, to meet demand right now, and hopefully not be stuck with more than a copy or two, if any, of each issue when the eventual relaunch comes. Even something like the current Batman, which is nearing issue #100, which even somehow managed to change writers without a new #1, you kinda still feel the need to order close to the bone because you can no longer plan on the long term health of its sale of back issues.

And the end result of that end result: if something suddenly and without sufficient warning becomes “hot,” there’s not going to be an excess of stock floating around to meet that excess demand. I know this exact thing happened with Batman, judging by the increasing desperation of phone calls throughout my Wednesday from folks trying to locaste copies. Pretty sure most people were caught off guard. I had so many phone calls prior to that Wednesday from customers asking for that very issue that I opened my doors on New Comics Day with no copies of this issue for the rack. And I order a not-insignificant amount of Batman comics. Even at a limit of one per customer (sorry, you don’t get 10 copies, guy on phone I’ve never spoken to before) I was plain ol’ outie.

I realize I’ve typed about this sort of thing in the past. And I’ve said before…I’m glad to see some excitement in the direct market, and you can enjoy the hobby however you want to enjoy it. But things aren’t like they were back in the early ’90s, when you had to have reasonably deep stock for purt’near everything to meet current and future demand. “Surprise” titles like Batman #89 is usually met by stores who ordered just enough for their weekly pulls and the usual rack sales.

I mean, sure, I’ve been doing this a long time, I sometimes can properly anticipate higher than normal demand for certain comics. For example, I ordered extra copies of the J. Scott Campbell cover for Star #1 from Marvel, and was rewarded by a quick sellthrough. But then, I also ordered extra on the Gwen Stacy #1 with the Campbell cover and sold pretty much all of its variants except that one. Oh well.

You can also try following the same apps/sites/videos the customers do, assuming they give you enough lead time to adjust your orders. And assuming all their hot comic suggestions work out, which all of them won’t. And if you can stand watching a YouTube video with someone talking about what future comics will be investible without getting a nosebleed.

Or you can just order what you need to order, as trying to second guess what comic will be “hot” or “collectible” is a quick way to fill up your back room.

Unless the sign meant they were limiting the price to only $2.50.

filed under Categories found art, retailing 5 Comments


An artifact of a different time…found this in a collection of comics I acquired the other day. Mixed in with the random volumes of classic comic strip reprints and Lovecraft comics with price tags from my former place of employment (with my writing on them, no less) was the above, clearly a display item from some anonymous comic shop (or otherwise — see below) store.

It’s hard to recall now, in this time of belt-tightening and ordering comics as close to the bone as possible, when such overwrought demand for investible collectibles necessitated 1) placing limits of “copies per customer” and 2) ordering so many copies of a first issue, even from a small indie black and white publisher like this, to anticipate demand so great that you can have enough to go around at five per.

Now there are many possible reasons for this, beyond just keeping the first guy in the door from buying all your copies, leaving none for anyone else. When I posted a pic of this comic on Twitter, I had folks suggest maybe this was being sold in a sports card shop, where demand could be relatively greater (possible, since card shops and everyone else were trying to sell comics for a time there), or maybe this came from a story in Nolan Ryan’s hometown, where folks could be more eager to get this baseball mitts on a funnybook featuring the local-boy-made-good. Or as I suggested, maybe the retailer in question accidentally ordered too many copies and put the “five per” sign on it to attract attention and maybe make it sell more quickly to the sorts of consumers anxious to get in on what would appear to be the new, hot thing.

I don’t recall if there was ever any secondary market demand for this particular book…enough so that anyone saw a significant return on their $2.50 per-unit investment. I know that the copy pictured above, after I took this photo, went straight to the dollar bins.

BEHOLD THE AQUARING.

filed under Categories gelatinous cube, legion of super-heroes, retailing 10 Comments


“So what’s the deal with this ring?” asked the customer, gesturing at the little pile of plastic Legion of Super-Heroes rings I had laid out on the counter, a promotional giveaway for the new Legion series that debuted last week. “Are they for Aquaman?”

Um, Aquaman? How do you get “Aquaman” from a ring that very clearly has an “L” on it? I didn’t say that to the customer, but I did let him know what the rings were actually for, and that seemed to satisfy him.

What struck me, though, is that he knew enough about comics to mention to the people he was with that the Flash used to have a ring in which he would keep his super-compressed costume. But he didn’t know enough about the Legion to be able to identify one of the flight rings, which is a fairly integral element of the series. …Which is fine, of course, just because you like superhero comics doesn’t mean you have to know Every. Single. Detail. of each and every one.

But he wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what the flight ring was. I had a number of people certainly identify what it was supposed to be, but had just as many other folks, comic reading folks, coming-in-every-Wednesday-for-the-new-goodies customers, who did not know what that ring was supposed to represent.

There was once a time when Legion fandom was a thing…like, it was one of the franchise’s defining elements was its active, involved fanbase. And that fanbase eroded over the years for various reasons (discussed both by me and pal Andrew a while back) to the point where DC no longer found it profitable to even attempt at keeping an ongoing Legion book on the stands for the last several years.

Of course, that absence has changed now, with DC’s much-ballyhooed Legion relaunch last week (preceded by an entertaining two-part mini bridging the current DC Universe to the Legion’s future), brought about by DC’s equally-ballyhooed acquiring of one of Marvel’s Big Name comic writers Brian Michael Bendis. Whether that rebuilding of what was once the formidable Legion Fandom will follow is…well, okay, it won’t, it’s a different time, and the natural, organic evolution of that fandom over years and decades isn’t suddenly going to repeat itself with the latest revival, however long it manages to last without yet another reboot.

I remember the last time DC Comics provided plastic Legion ring giveaways to tie into some new Legion thing or ‘nother, it seemed like everyone was in on it. They all knew the Legion, knew what the flight ring was and what it represented, and so on…but then, Legion was still an ongoing, if not entirely what it once was, concern at the time, a couple of decades back. Now…after being basically gone, or generally off the average comic fan’s radar, for about a decade or even more, one can’t depend on a shared fan nostalgia that will remember some piece of a franchise that was dead, or might as well have been, when several of today’s fans first got into the comic collecting hoohar.

Now, the good news is that despite some of my customer base not recognizing the Legion ring, there is still enough of the rest of that base to have either recognized the Legion, or are new to it but have been intrigued enough by the advertising/guest-appearances, to pick up the book. In fact, it was a near sell-out for me, and I have a box of restocked copies heading my way…well, today, hopefully…and even then about half of those restocks are already spoken for. I haven’t even got one for myself yet, since I was saving copies for the shelf.

I spoke with a friend who has a comic shop a few hundred miles away and says he can’t give them away, so I guess Your Store’s Mileage Will Vary. I’ve experienced this before…even back in the ’90s, I was comparing notes with a retailer in L.A. and he was all like “you sell how many Legion!?” But I hope this series is an overall success (in whatever meets “success” levels in today’s diminished market)…I do like the Legion, and I would like to have a new comic of theirs I can read. It won’t be the same, with the characters all cut off from their long history that brought me to these comics in the first place, but I can still enjoy a good comic regardless. I mean, assuming it’s good.

Oh, and I figured out why that customer thought this was an Aquaman ring:


…because he probably saw one turned on its side. An easy enough mistake to make, I guess.

No, not that Red Tornado.

filed under Categories eyeball, retailing 4 Comments

So that’s customer Mark, dressed as the second-scariest Michael Myers in Hollywood, visting my store and picking up a copy of what would of course be the Halloween star’s favorite comic book. “GOTTA CATCH ‘EM ALL [creepy Halloween suspense music plays].” Now, Mark’s come by the shop on previous Halloweens in this outfit, and since he’s “in character,” he doesn’t say a word. At all. An I know it’s Mark, a friendly, affable guy, and he’s just foolin’ around, but it still very much has the affect of being…very unnerving. Doesn’t help that Mark’s a pretty tall guy.

Anyway, go check out his Instagram for more cosplay goodness, as well as a pic of the two of us where you can get a good look at my bloody right eye…not makeup, but very Halloween-y just the same.

Speaking of Halloweenies, I certainly was one, spreading the spooky cheer at my store with this year’s assortment of the Halloween ComicFest comic book giveaways. Again, it’s not quite Free Comic Book Day levels yet, with wall to wall people all day, but it’s a comfortable level of travel ebbing and flowing throughout opening hours. I had several people waiting outside my door when I did open, including many children, which is always good to see. In fact, there was a family with a lot of children waiting outside not for my shop but for the Chinese restaurant next door…so I did what any good neighbor would do, and told them “HEY COME INTO MY SHOP, I’M GIVING AWAY COMIC BOOKS” and lo, they did that very thing and I fulfilled that very promise.

So, I gave away lots, and more still on Sunday, because I didn’t feel like breaking down the table where I had them all laid out and I always order more than I immediately need to have them around for future giveaways and donations and such. And, this year, I had more people preordering the ComicFest freebies in bulk for their own Trick-or-Treat giveaways on the actual night of Halloween, so that was nice.

And on that topic…yes, like my Free Comic Book Days, I easily made my costs back for the event, so, you know, success all around.

One of the tricky issues I had was that there was a lot of work to be done the Friday before, only part of which was prep for the event. Now, over the last week or two, I acquired and/or completed the processing on multiple boxes of old comics…more, in fact, than I could file into the current configuration of back issue boxes. So instead of waiting ’til after the event (probably ’til close to the following weekend, which would be the only time I’d have clear to attempt the project) I decided to get as much of it done as I could this Friday so I’d have everything out and ready for sale.

Needless to say, I did my best to get everything rearranged and comics sorted and resorted and fit into new places…I often refer to this as “playing Tetris with the store,” trying to get everything properly squared away in the areas I have available. And I managed to mostly get everything back together into mostly working order…still in the process of relabeling the boxes so the customers (and me!) know what’s in them, and I did have to leave a few empty spaces for boxes on some shelves as I’m awaiting a new shipment of short boxes to come in. I didn’t want to use up the few I had in stock for sale because, well, I want to sell them. And I used up all my spare used short boxes that I already had on hand.

Or I could have just said “I rearranged lots of comics and boxes and got everything mostly squared away before ComicFest,” which is probably easier on your eyes to read.

And about eyes…right when I got to the shop, I noticed another little swirl of blood in my right eye, which meant I had to make a quick emergency trip to the doctor for treatment (read: INJECTION IN THE EYE) to keep that little swirl from turning into a red tornado. So, on top of rearranging the store for back issues and prepping for the Halloween giveaway the next day, I had to take an hour-something out of the middle of the afternoon to go get that taken care of. As such, your pal Mike had himself a very long Friday. It all worked out in the end, though.

Except for all these back issues. I’d be happy to sell you some! You need a mostly-complete run of the Marvel/Epic Hellraiser, surely.

Whatever else you might think about these comics, Spitfire and the Troubleshooters was actually a pretty good name.

filed under Categories retailing 4 Comments

Just a quick follow-up to the recent New Universe post…I did indeed talk to my old boss Ralph about how things transpired regarding the sales of Marvel’s 1986 publishing initiative. I told him I had to ask him about it since I hadn’t yet entered the world of comics retail at that point. “You weren’t around for that?” he asked, and I replied “no, but I was around for its ending…I’m sure there’s a connection.”

Anyway, yes, when the New Universe started it sold great…but tapered off fairly quickly at the shop. Some titles maintained reasonable sales…Star Brand probably being the strongest, with Justice and D.P. 7 following, which likely probably doesn’t surprise too many of you, since those seemed to be the most traditional, or traditional-seeming, of the bunch. The others settled at sales levels that were…not so great. They had their fans, but it was pretty clear, at least at this one retail outlet, the New Universe wasn’t the overwhelming success Marvel was hoping for. Oh, and apparently of the bunch Kickers Inc. was a non-starter…maybe the first issue sold, but folks decided right away that’s not the comic they wanted. Again, probably not a surprise to most of you.

As the initiative dragged along to its eventual demise in 1989, there were a couple of upward bumps in sales. As expected, John Byrne taking over Star Brand did increase sales on the title at the shop…not a lot, but, you know, not nothing. And then when the retooling of the New Universe began with everyone’s destruction-of-Pittsburgh comic The Pitt, sales were pretty good on that one-shot special as well, spurred on by curiosity about what exactly they were going to do to the New Universe, as well as, Ralph recalls, actual media coverage because they were, you know, blowing up Pittsburgh.

The Pitt‘s sales, unfortunately, didn’t transfer over into the follow-ups The Draft™ and The War™, which didn’t sell very well at all.

And shortly after that, the New Universe died, never to be seen again except for several more times in various comics over the next couple of decades.

So there you go, straight from Ralph’s beard and onto my webpage. Try as I might, I can’t really remember any specific memories about the New Universe from that period, where my first couple of years behind the counter overlapped with the last couple of years of that imprint’s lifespan. Probably too busy fielding endless phone calls about Batman stuff to pay attention to much else. Ah well.

Yes, I know Shatterstar was in the movie too.

filed under Categories collecting, retailing 4 Comments

So I got a set of these in a collection the other day:


…and by “set,” for those of you who weren’t around in the early 1990s to experience this particuliar phenomenon, I mean “all five initially released versions of X-Force #1, each prepacked with one of five different trading cards sealed within the polybag.”

Now your pal Old Man Mike was there manning the comic shop front lines when this comic was unleashed. We had tons of them, and as I recall we set up a table near the front of the store to put them all out for easy access, divided up by inserted card. Which means, yes, we had to go through the cases and divvy ’em up.

The point is, we ordered a lot, and we sold a lot. And yes, I know you bought them. Yes, you, right there, reading this blog post right now. I saw you do it. We caught it on camera. WE HAVE EVIDENCE. Anyway, plenty of copies got circulated out there, and we had a reasonable, and surprisingly not overwhelming, stock of copies of that first issue stashed away for future back issue sales.

Well, things go as they go, and what was eventually became not, and X-Force and its ilk fell out of favor…as, well, did most comics as the ’90s wore on, in favor of pogs and Magic: The Gathering. And back issue demand for that particuliar first issue of X-Force did trail off, even as the series kept on keeping on.

It never fell entirely out of awareness, of course…X-Force #1 remained a notable artifact of the excesses of comic collecting in the 1990s, a cautionary tale along with the 5 covers for X-Men #1 and the “bagged” editions of Spider-Man #1 and thankfully the industry has learned its lesson and no longer depends on multiple variant editions of its publications to shore up sales.

The end result was that, for many years, X-Force #1 was not generally traded in the aftermarket for premium prices. If anything, it was slash-priced, marked down to move, for the love of God please take these off our hands…dollar boxes aplenty were fed by copies of this book across this great nation of ours, and that’s just how things were. Not to say that some venues didn’t keep copies in the bins marked at ye olde Overstreet prices, and they did sell occasionally, but its star had long since faded.

CUT TO: your pal Mike, getting a collection of comics over the weekend…some good stuff, some stuff basically dumped on me, but most of it still usable. Within was that set of X-Force #1s that I mentioned about 4 or 5 thousand words ago. I’d been literally turning these down as they showed up in the hands of hopeful sellers coming through my door, but, eh, here they in this box of stuff I got, might as well price ’em up and put them out.

And evidently it’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity of price this issue, because imagine my surprise to find out the guide has the version with the Deadpool card priced at $18. The one with the Cable card is priced the same. The other three card variations are a somewhat more reasonable, but still seemingly optimistic $6.

I feel like, at some point during one of the three or four previous times that Deadpool’s popularity peaked, that I did check our price guide and/or online sales to see if there was any increased demand for the Deadpool-card version of X-Force #1, and at that point it was big ol’ “nobody cares.”

But, obviously, things have changed. My initial thought was my pet theory about things that used to be common and in deep stock at stores through the ’90s boom period have suddenly become harder to come by, as shops from that era die out and, sometimes, take their stock with them. Or that copies that did make it into the hands of collectors were either damaged due to poor storage (a not-infrequent problem, even with the hardcore collectors at the time) or just discarded outright (after losing interest and/or failed attempts at recouping their money via resale back to shops that either didn’t want them, or offered only a pittance).

Mentioning this on Twitter, I received this response from Tony:

“They are everywhere and people will drop $5-10 easy on them. Its shocking. It’s a mix of the age of the book, new fandom from the popularization of Marvel movies, and those early 90s fans that are now wanting to rebuild their collection.”

And yes, those are factors as well. I know “age” doesn’t always equate with “price,” but I’ve seen demand for the novelty publications (bagged, like this X-Force, or foil/chrome/die-cut covers) from customers who hadn’t even been born yet when these items were in their heyday. And, like Tony mentioned, I’ve had customers who did collect these as they were new, who had since lost or discarded their collections and now want to reconstruct them. Never underestimate the power of nostalgia, friends.

The actual pricing seems pretty…extreme, and my response to Tony that it might be a case of “hot because it’s hot.” Not priced according to any supply/demand thing, but because “Deadpool is in a movie and these should be hot now.” The X-Force #1 with the Deadpool card is priced a little higher than normal, people notice, start picking them up, which encourages more up-pricing, a self-fulfilling prophecy that cycles on and on.

This is not to ignore that variation with the Cable card, also priced at $18 in the guide, which surely must solely be the fault of the character’s appearance in the Deadpool movie. That they’re both $18 makes me think it was specifically the movie causing the price bump, since in comics alone Cable isn’t nearly as popular as Deadpool, unless I’m about to hear from the International Cable Fan Club in my comments here.

So anyway, that was quite the shock, mostly because I’d expected this to happen a while back, it didn’t, I figured that was that, then suddenly IT HAPPENED. Don’t know how many people are actually successfully selling these for nearly $20 a pop. A quick look at the eBay shows it trading for far less than that…there seems to be more interest in issue #11 of the series (the “first appearance” of the real Domino, as it had been an imposter Domino in the comics prior to that…um, SPOILER, I guess).

Still not sure what I’m going to price my copy at. Maybe $100, really screw the curve there. But while I think about that, here’s a picture of me holding that bountiful treasure of X-Force #1s, as taken by the Mighty Matt Digges:


Hey, if you buy all these from me, maybe I can afford a razor to shave my face!

(PREVIOUSLY ON PROGRESSIVE RUIN: would you believe I’ve written about X-Force and the Deadpool card before? Here and here? I can’t believe it either. Look for my next post about this in 2022!)