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As was mentioned before, my former boss Ralph had moved from the back room of a thrift store in downtown Ventura, CA, to a small storefront midtown, in the early 1980s. To help grab some attention for the shop, in 1984 Ralph’s friend Tom Foxmarnick (a cartoonist and animator, graduate of the Joe Kubert School) painted this sign for him:
If you look closely, you can see this sign is now sitting in my store, brought to me by Ralph after the closure of Seth’s Games and Anime (the shop Ralph’s eventually became). It’s wood, pretty good size…the exact measurements I meant to get prior to making this post but like a dummy, I forgot. I’ll try to edit them in later. But it’s up against the side of one of my comic tables there, so that should give you an idea.
Anyway, the sign would rest in the front of Ralph’s 1984-1990 location, sitting on a large brick step that was just to the side of the shop’s door. When we (yes, we, I started working there in ’88) moved to larger digs across the street, the sign was put in the front window. And in ’97, when we moved again to the larger space next door, the sign also came with us and, at least for a while, put in one of the windows there.
Eventually, when Seth took over the majority of the store, the sign went to the back room, where it stayed, well, pretty much until earlier this week when Ralph hauled it through my front door.
A little worn, clearly had seen some use — I’m talking about the sign, not Ralph, to be clear — but it’s a nice memento of a shop that meant a lot to a whole bunch of people, myself included. A big chunk of my past, now on display in my store, reminded me of where I came from and what I hope to continue.
From the “About Us” page on the old Ralph’s Comic Corner website:
“In the late 1970s, Ralph Holt joined forces with a friend of his and began selling comic books and baseball cards at the Santa Barbara swap meet and conventions all over California. Eventually they opened up the Andromeda Bookshop, a store specializing in science fiction books and comic books, in Santa Barbara, CA. After a couple of years, Ralph decided to head out on his own. He made his way about 40 miles down the coast to Ventura, CA, and, in May of 1980, opened up the very first incarnation of Ralph’s Comic Corner. Originally located in the back of a thrift store (where it literally was just a corner), he carried only new and used comics. Ralph moved to a larger location, with his very own storefront, down the road in 1984. In 1990 Ralph moved the shop across the street to an even larger store. In 1997, the store doubled in size again, having moved next door to its current location of 2379 E. Main Street, becoming the Cultural Hub of Ventura County. Along the way, the store added trading cards (both sport and non-sport), role-playing games, science fiction paperbacks, card games, trade paperbacks, T-shirts, posters, board games, Japanese animation and manga, Pogs, and everything else you might expect to find at a Giant Pop Art Emporium.”
Not mentioned in that history I wrote for that site way back when:
1. My hiring in 1988 to replace departing employee Ray.
2. Seth, who’d been working at a comic shop north of us, coming down and buying out the gaming half of the store in the mid-ish 2000s, thus launching his own store “Seth’s Games and Anime.” Which means, yes, there were two stores operating side by side in the same location. Even, for a while, with different hours, which took some doing, let me tell you.
3. A number of years later, Seth would take over pretty much the entire shop save for Ralph’s own back issues. And eventually Ralph would stop being an active participant in the shop, meaning the entire store became Seth’s Games and Anime. (Ralph would continue to have an office there, and sell comics independently of the shop…does this all sound complicated? It is. At one point between Points 2 and 3 I was getting two paychecks, one from Ralph, one from Seth, which meant I have to keep track of what hours I worked for whom.)
So anyway, as of Point 3 “Ralph’s Comic Corner” pretty much stopped being its own storefront, and while there was a continuity of existence between Ralph’s store and Seth’s, the Comic Corner as we knew it was over.
Which takes me to the current sad news: Seth’s Games and Anime will be closing its doors for good at the end of this month.
As anyone who’s been following my social media probably knows, I’ve had some feelings about this. Now I’m at my own shop, a few towns over, and have been for years. This closing doesn’t directly impact me. But nonetheless, it’s left me somewhat discombobulated since I’d heard the news.
Part of it is that continuity of existence I mentioned before. Yes, it’s no longer Ralph’s Comic Corner, nor has it been in a while, but it’s still where I worked for many years, learning the trade and creating relationships, several of which I still maintain at my current shop. I moved the contents of this store twice, I built shelves and arranged stock, created displays and tried hard to make it a friendly, accessible place. Working for Ralph’s and later Seth’s represents well over a quarter century of my life.
As pal Andrew put it on Twitter:
“It was the apprenticeship and booster rocket that helped get you where you are now.”
Ralph’s Comic Corner, and the shop it became later, loom large in my history and development. And I guess I always sort of took for granted that they’d always be there. But as I was there the other night, picking up some stock for my own store at Seth’s urging, I knew this would be the last time I’d be seeing the inside of this building. It definitely wasn’t the comic shop I remember, but I could look around and see where it had been, beneath the new arrangement of fixtures and varieties of stock that existed there now. When I come back and the building’s been rented out to, I don’t know, the Screen Doors for Submarines store, even that connection to my past will be gone.
So, it’s been a pretty sad day for a lot of us, whether we were old-timey Ralph’s customers or folks who just started popping into Seth’s recently. I of course wish everyone there the best.
Ralph will still be around…I’m still doing business with him, and I’m sure he’ll turn up filling in for me at the shop once in a while.
Speaking of Ralph, pal (and also former Ralph’s employee) Cully sent me a scan of a panel that appeared in Gilbert Hernandez’s Luba #6 (2002)…warning, dirty words, don’t look kids:
In case you didn’t know, Ralph’s Comic Corner was the first comic shop anywhere that carried Love and Rockets, the original black and white covered one they self-published. Ralph often said “I told them to send it to Fantagraphics, that was the kind of thing they’d publish!” (Also, Jaime noted that Ralph’s was the first comic shop he and his brothers had ever been to.)
Ralph did make an appearance in an early Love and Rockets…#4 (1983), to be exact, in a story by Mario:
Mario would sneak Ralph into the mag again in issue #50.
Here’s one of Ralph’s appearances in Groo the Wanderer #28 (1987) by Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragones…Sergio was just over the hill from us in Ojai, and would pop in on a regular basis:
And here’s Ralph in Tom Foxmarnick’s story for Taboo #2 (1989)…Tom’s an old friend of Ralph, and in fact drew Ralph’s business cards and various flyers and even that logo at the beginning of this post (a very pixelated GIF from the website…I’m sure I’ve got a good black and white scan of the original art somewhere):
By the way, the photo references Tom took of Ralph for this story are pretty great, but I haven’t seen them in 30 years. Hopefully Ralph can turn them up again.
Ralph’s shown up in other places here and there as well…both Ralph and I have a “thank you” in Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics, as well as the recent Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures omnibus collecting Evan Dorkin’s work on the title. And at one point whoever was putting together the “Death of Gwen Stacy” paperback for Marvel inexplicably didn’t have a good scan of Amazing Spider-Man #122’s cover, and called us for one in exchange for a credit in the book. Sure enough, when said book was released there was a “thanks to Ralph’s Comic Corner” inside…at least for the first printing. For all I know Marvel’s still using our scan for things.
It’s fun stuff like this that I’ll try to hang onto, the memories and occasionally weird experiences I had in my 2 1/2 decades of working for Ralph’s and Seth’s. The stores may no longer be with us, but everything I learned there is still with me now, and informs how I approach this business. As the cliché goes, so long as someone remembers, they’ll never really be gone.
So I recently found out that the Roku Channel, which is a free streaming service available on, of all things, the Roku streaming device, features a series called Slugfest. It’s a number of short episodes devoted to the back-and-forth between DC and Marvel Comics over the last eight decades or so. (Yes, I know it wasn’t technically “Marvel Comics” early on, nor was DC technically “DC,” but you know what I mean.) Each episode is only a few minutes long, with a mix of vintage video/images and actor reenactments. (Most interesting is Brandon Routh playing a young Jack Kirby…I mean, he’s got the eyebrows, but he’s gotta be at least a foot taller than Kirby ever was; and Ray Wise as older Jack Kirby is about as perfect a casting as you can imagine.)
I bring it up because Episode 8 of the series, “World Without a Superman,” brings us back to our old friend, Superman #75:
Yes, longtime readers of this site have heard me go on and on about this particular event, from my experiencing the madness from behind the counter at the comic shop I worked at back then, to the aftermarket life the book enjoyed (for varying values of “enjoyed”) in the decades since. Well, if you’re new around here, this here link will catch you up on all those ramblings.
And of course I have touched upon the Death of Superman madness in this very series of Variant Cover-age posts, mostly just talking about the “platinum editions.” But it occurs to me, I haven’t really talked much about the more common black-bagged version in this context. Not that I haven’t spoken about it at length in the past, but I feel like it should at least be brought up, especially in reference to that Slugfest episode.
To give you a little context, the Superman family of books (Action, Superman, Adventures of Superman, and Superman: The Man of Steel) were selling relatively well, at least for us, at the time. They effectively functioned as a weekly Superman comic, with each issue of each series coming out on separate weeks, storylines and subplots flowing from one to the other. It was very effective serialized storytelling. Also, keep in mind we were still riding the wave of the comics book of the late 1980s/early 1990s, so lots of comics were selling very well.
When it came time to order Superman #75, the actual Death of Superman issue, we ordered high. We’d already bumped up numbers on the preceding issues featuring the story leading up to the Big One, but on #75 itself, we ordered something like ten times what we’d normally order on the Superman comic. We were, we thought, taking something of a chance on this event book. It would do well, surely, but well enough to sell us out of 10x normal Superman orders? We’ll see.
Oh, and by the way, when I’m saying “we ordered” and “we thought,” I mean “Ralph ordered,” as my former boss was placing all the numbers, and I was but a lowly employee.
Anyway, as you all know, it came out, lines around the block, stores could’ve sold lots more than they ordered, et cetera et cetera so on and so forth. And the variant sealed in the black bag with all the goodies, the one we ordered the heaviest numbers, was the one in primary demand. Not to say the “standard” edition:
…didn’t also sell, because it sure did. And when the reprints hit, we sold lots of those, too. Needless to say, there were tons of copies of this sold. About 3 million copies altogether, according to the Slugfest episode.
And yes, here we come to the reason for this post. There’s a scene, a reenactment with actors portraying Superman writer Louise Simonson and a friend of hers, just hanging out at home. It had been noted that the Superman creative team were under a Non-Disclosure Agreement regarding the eventual resolution of the Death of Superman storyline (spoiler: he comes back). The scene, going entirely from my memory, was something like this:
FRIEND: “My son is buying lots of copies of this comic. When he gets more money, he’s going to buy more. These are going to put him through college someday.”
LOUISE SIMONSON: [coughs]
And the narrator (Kevin Smith, naturally) makes sure to tell us “the comic only goes for about five bucks now.”
Mmmmm…I beg to differ.
A while back I wrote about the fact that most people who bought the Death of Superman books were not comic collectors, were mostly folks from outside the hobby who picked up an issue out of curiosity or “investment,” who had literally no idea how to properly store or care for a comic book. The vast majority of comic collections I see from around this period, even from folks who bought the bags and boards and Mylar™ and such, are not in Near Mint, or even Fine or better, condition.
In the nearly 30 years since Superman #75 came out, I’d imagine most copies held by non-collectors were not stored well, or even just straight-up discarded once their passing interest in the comic faded. Plus, I suspect attempts to sell the book later to recoup on their investment resulted in some disappointing offers. “Wait, it’s not worth thousands?” It’s probably even worse for the folks who bought copies from opportunistic scalpers, selling them for a hundred dollars a pop the weekend after release (as I heard about locally, and probably wasn’t uncommon elsewhere).
End result: probably not as many minty-mint copies of any version of Superman #75 out there as you may think. It’s not uncommon, but it’s less likely now that you’ll walk into a store with a ready stack of them for sale.
I only ever see one or two at a time of the black-bagged version, and almost never see copies of the standard #75, or even its many reprints. And while I’ll buy the mint copies (or at least cleanly-opened copies with the extras perserved) from collections, I have seen plenty of copies that are just trashed and that I’ve passed on purchasing. As such, it is my belief that a nice copy can still fetch a premium price…and actually does, as I’ve sold more than a few in my shop. And by “premium” I definitely mean more than five bucks.
A quick look at the eBays shows copies of the black-bagged edition selling for, on average, between $10 and $30. Yes, to be fair, I did see a sealed copy sell for $5, but that seemed like an outlier. A couple of the standard editions did sell for about $6 to $8, so that’s a little closer to the show’s assertion. A check of currently-offered copies at Hipcomic don’t show much variation, though they do seem to have a lot more of the reprints than eBay did. (I’m not bringing up “professionally graded” sales, as that’s its own super-distorted marketplace.)
I also did a quick search of a couple of the larger online stores and didn’t even spot any (except for one store that had it for over $150, which is probably why they still have it). Hardly a scientifically thorough search, and for all I know they just had it and sold it before I looked.
The end result is…no, Superman #75, in either its black-bagged or standard edition, isn’t going to pay for anyone’s college. Even the platinum edition might only net you enough to pay for a couple of textbooks. But, I think the “five bucks” descriptor was bit of an underestimation. There’s still a market for these, just that the market value has normalized to meet actual demand, long after that initial rush and immediate scarcity drove some panic buying.
Now that white covered Adventures of Superman #500…if I got five bucks a pop on those, I’d be ecstatic.
Let me know if you’d seen any of those Superman #75s out for sale in your area. Are they going for premium pricing? Are stores stuck with a bunch and trying to unload them? (I’d rather you didn’t mention store names, in case they take offense to being held up as an example of “charging too much” or something.) I’d be interested to hear what’s going on with these across the marketplace now.
Thelonious_Nick asked, in reference to Wednesday’s post
“How do you go about determining if these signature are authentic? Do you up the price for a signature? How much would you bump up Roy Thomas vs. Jack Kirby?”
Another reader, Chris V, gave his answer and I don’t think there’s anything there I’d disagree with. In this particular case, with this collection, my personal answer as to whether or not these autographs are real is “context.”
This was a largish collection, held by a private collector for many decades, kept in some pretty crummy plastic bags but were in consecutive order and very clearly part of an acquired run of books. It looked like a collection where someone bought each issue as it came out (or filled holes in their runs with back issue purchases), read ’em, bagged them up, then kept them in boxes. And that’s where they stayed until they were brought to me.
As such, finding the occasional issue with a signature inside very likely had that signature in it for many, many years. Could someone in the 1970s been going around forging signatures of comic book professionals? Sure, but it seemed like a pretty low-stakes crime for someone to have been pursuing. And nothing about these comics really seemed to make them stand out from the rest of the collection…they were just in there numerically with the other issues in whatever series from which the signed comic hailed. It just looks like a fan took a comic or two to a signing, had it signed, then dropped it back in the collection.
In short, it just feels like the signatures are authentic. Nothing about the collection or how the comics were kept make me suspect otherwise. I realize that when removed from this context, it may be harder to convince buyers of their authenticity, but I’m sure they’re exactly what they appear to be.
Like, I’m totally sure that’s Steve Ditko’s signature on this issue of Speedball. “Hang loose, and have a crazy summer!” it reads. Boy, if anything ever sounds like Ditko….
As for pricing them? Eh, maybe I’ll bump up the price half again, maybe twice. There’s no hard and fast rule on what to price these. Bigger the name, bigger the jump in cost, I guess? Just kinda winging it.
Okay, that’s it for 2021! Come back to my site in 2022 where I’ll ask the quesion “boy, remember how good we had it last year?” And speaking of next year, don’t forget to contribute to the 2022 comic industry predictions post! I’ll be starting to look back at the 2021 predictions in a week or so, so get ready for that!
Happy New Year, pals, and thanks for reading! Stay safe, and we’ll all meet back here on Monday!
Okay, sorry, the Variant Cover-Age post you’ve come to expect purt’near every Monday ain’t happening today, as I was surprised Sunday afternoon at the shop with quite the sizeable collection of 1960s/1970s comics…heavy on the Marvels.
After shucking the yellowing plastic cling-wrap bags that surrounded each comic (terrible, but better than no bags) and getting them halfway organized, the collection looked a little something…like this:
Two and a half short boxes of comics may not seem like a lot of work to buy or process, but when they’re all older comics, and many of them are specifically premium comics with quite a bit of demand, well, the processing time increases a bit. More thorough checking of conditions, more researching prices beyond just using the price guide, etc.
Anyway, the need to get these processed relatively quickly had me actually bring the boxes home with me to start that particular job, even if it’s just to get comic bags and price stickers on everything. Which, okay, I mostly did but at least it’s a head start. And it definitely bit into my writing/research time for another variant cover post. Hence, what you’re reading now.
I did already sell a couple items, which I’ll show you here and will give you an idea of what I’ve working with. Like, for example, a Giant-Size X-Men #1:
…in a pic that’s a tad glare-y on purpose, as to show that long crease down the right hand side of the front cover. Thus continues my streak of not having a copy of this comic available for sale longer than about a few hours.
The other surprise was a beat-to-the-dickens copy of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #1:
…that still has an amazing cover image, despite the wear. And alas, the centerspread of the comic is missing, but I still managed to find a buyer for the comic anyway!
The dominant feature of the rest of the collection is the majority of Amazing Spider-Man issues from 10 to about 160 or around there. Missing issues around the 100 mark, but still has the first Punisher, the whole original Spider-Clone thing, first appearances of many of the Spider-Man rogues gallery (Green Goblin, Rhino, Kingpin, Scorpion, like that) and, of course, the first Spider-Mobile.
Other highlights of the collection include more ’60s X-Men, a bunch of late ’60s/early ’70s Avengers (including a #100 signed by Roy Thomas!), a bunch of ’70s Captain America (with what seems to be almost all the Cap/Falcon stories, including the first Falcon), about 2/3rds of the Silver Surfer run, and other scattered books (such as the Neal Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow with the first John Stewart and, yes, that one).
I already have a buyer interested in most of this stuff, so we’ll see what’s left over. But I gotta get the darned things priced first. One thing I’ll say is that this is the most I’ve ever paid for a collection, and I was willing to pay that price because I knew nearly everything here would sell quickly. I mean, ’60s Spider-Man, duh. This was not a risky purchase.
I’ll try to get more pictures taken of what’s come in as I find the time, even if just for posterity and not, like, a “for sale” listing as the time could very well already be spoken for.
And here’s the thing: the fella that sold me the comics says he still needs to bring in the really good stuff. Egads. I’ll let you know if that happens.
In the meantime, don’t forget to give me your 2022 comic industry predictions! Thanks for reading, pals, and I’ll try to be back on schedule next week with another variant cover we can gaze upon.
So I’ll hopefully be back to business as usual on the site next week, when I will have a new variant cover-age post and get back to answering more of your questions. In the meantime, though, lookit this thing I found in my stack of old CD-ROMs:
This is a disc, provided by Diamond Comic Distributors in 1999, featuring thousands of images of products then in their Star System reorder catalog.
I don’t recall why I have it in my evil clutches specifically, other than perhaps to use some of the pics on the website for my previous place of employment. Which is, I think, one of the reasons why the disc was made in the first place. Also, I think it was to provide easy reference to the items available back in those pre-broadband days for anyone not wanting to dial up their internets and wait for the pixels to gradually load.
Some of the files are pretty good size…this is the actual size of the largest file on the disc (324kb):
And this is the smallest-sized file of an actual product, at 14kb (there is one smaller file at 13kb, but it’s for retailer cycle sheets):
While probably fine for whatever purposes they were put to at the time, most of the images on the disc are too small for modern purposes, beyond perhaps just providing tiny thumbnail pics for an online catalogue or some such.
It is kinda neat just to open some of the images at random to see what products they reveal. I remember most of what I’ve found, even some of the old gaming and anime stuff, but I’ll occasionally come across some item forgotten in the mists of time:
Or some book I wish was still in print:
Or some book I really wish was still in print:
Anyway, I’ll poke through it some more and see if I can find any surprises. Like this Sandman statue:
Boy, I bet I could still sell those.
As you probably heard, the computer system for Diamond Comic Distributors was taken down by a ransomware attack over the weekend. Diamond’s various online presences started popping back up in various levels of capacity Sunday and Monday, though I was having a problem accessing the retailer site.
Basically, after I heard it was supposed back up, I’d click my menu bar bookmark for the retailer site, only to have the browser think for a bit before sending back this message:
I’d confer with other retailers, in state and out, asking them if the website was coming up for them. “Oh sure,” they said. Confounding me further was that I could call up the site on my phone, which is how I ended up doing the weekly final order adjustments before the deadline. And believe me, filling out the online order forms on the phone was no fun…and with the monthly order due in a couple of weeks, there’s no way I wanted to have to repeat the process with that.
So I tried multiple browsers, clearing caches again and again. I tried multiple operating systems, Windows at work, Mac at home. No dice. I fiddled with DNS settings, and no go. I was beginning to wonder if my internet provided (the same in both locations) had noticed something fishy was going on at Diamond and just shut off access to them completely as a safety measure.
It wasn’t until Monday morning, when I called the Diamond service number to find out if there was any way to fix my lack of access, when I heard something the recorded message said. It told me their retailer website “retailerservices.diamondcomics.com” was back up.
Wait, hold on. “Retailerservices?”
For…well, I don’t know how long it’s been, a couple of decades at least. Sometime after we stopped calling into the Diamond Comics BBS to download order forms and stuff. (Remember the Diamond BBS? You do? Hello fellow olds.) The address I always accessed was “retailer.diamondcomics.com.” That was the address I’d been trying to log into for a couple of days now. Always getting that message in the pic I posted above.
Well, Diamond’s phone message said the “retailerservices” site…and lo and behold, I logged in there just fine. And when I double-checked my phone…yes, sure enough, that was the site I was accessing there.
In conclusion, I felt pretty stupid. Apparently Diamond set up “retailerservices.etc” somewhere along the line, but still supported the “retailer.etc” domain. At least, until this ransomware attack hit, and “retailerservices” was restored and the other wasn’t. Sigh.
Poking around the retailer site…some functionality has been restored. I was able to do my final order adjustments as I’d said, and the damge/shortage report form was working as well (y’know, good thing, considering). I placed a reorder, which seemed to have been confirmed (though may take a little longer to ship, more on that in a second). I saw that UPS tracking numbers for shipments hadn’t been updated, and that some data files were unavailable, like the list of the week’s new releases.
But, that’s better than nothing. Plus, Diamond’s “back up” website is up, specifically for news about their operations post-computer disaster. Noted there is that delays have struck shipping to a number of areas due to the hack…my area was not one of them, so all my boxes showed up on time.
I am expecting, though, that without computers and access to invoices and such, next week’s shipment may be an entirely different issue. Since I get my Marvels and DCs from other distributors now, I’ll at least have them on time, but I expect everything else to be late. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if Diamond just skipped a week to get everything back in order. Says on that backup site we’ll find out “later in the week,” so I’ll keep my eyes peeled. I’m also sort of wondering if the invoices for next week will be automatically generated sometime thjs Wednesday morning…probably not is my guess.
It’s a good thing we have multiple distributors now, as this could have easily taken down the industry for a while if everyone’s eggs were in the same basket. We’ll just see how things go next week…may just have to settle for a new DC Tuesday, new Marvel Wednesday, and a new Everything Else…whenever they can get it to me.
So in Monday’s post, where I was talking about variant covers in the “real” non-comics world, I brought up the multiple foil covers used for the Raiders of the Lost Ark novelization. I did say at the end of the post I didn’t think many people were actually buying all the different covers to be completists, but I’m sure it’s not nobody.
Well, Turan swooped in with some bookstore-sellin’ experience, to inform that book publishers weren’t producing multiple covers for their titles as a means of encouraging multiple sales. It was more for encouraging displays from sellers, or for offering more options possibly to attract different demographics by using different cover images/designs.
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and my comics retailing hammer may have been aimed at those old Raiders books. To be fair to me, I didn’t necessarily say that book publishers were doing multiple covers for the same reasons comic publishers seem to do so…at least, maybe not back then. But discussing those books in close proximity to comics probably implied as such, for which I apologize. But I’m sure there are still book collectors out there snapping up all variations of a new book’s release. C’mon, have you met book collectors?
Anyway, back to the comics…while I’ve been hitting the “variants are there to get multiple sales from the same customer” nail fairly hard around these parts, Turan does bring up other possibilities that I haven’t really considered. There is always the possibility of a comic publisher trying to attract a buyer that may not care for one cover, but definitely like another. I have over the years had customers walk up to the counter buying a comic they wouldn’t normally because of a specific image used on one of the many variants. In fact, a certain still-extant comics blogger of some note may have bought a variant cover or two simply because it had an unnamed swampy gentleman thereupon. So, basically, I should’ve pointed out this reason for variants long ago.
As for variants being issued to inspire creation of in-store displays…well, sure, comic stores could do, and have done, that. I don’t know if that was the explicit intent of comic publishers, but more a natural extrapolation by more clever shops to take advantage of the material offered. I mean, who knows. And again, this is something I’ve sort of done in the past…I mean, I try to display all covers on my racks anyway, but I haven’t gone out of the way to make a specific separate display of just variants in a long time (we did way back when with the 1990s X-Men and Spider-Man #1s). I don’t know if my racking these books like this counts:
…but boy, it almost got me to buy both covers. I do have to admit I was very tempted to display these covers on opposite sides just to annoy everyone, but cooler heads prevailed.
• • •
To follow up on some other previous posts, I received my newest shipment of weekly Marvel comics from their new distributor Penguin Random House. As I’d expected from how some replacement damages were shipped to me last week, PRH has responded to widespread criticism of their piss-poor packaging and the excessive damages of comics that resulted.
Like Lunar (DC’s distributor) PRH is now packaging their books inside a cardboard box, surrounded by bubble wrap inside another cardboard box. Frankly, the outer box isn’t quite sturdy enough (or large enough to allow for more wrap) to my tastes, but it’s definitely a step up from the last couple of weeks. I did experience some damages, but they were fairly minor dings on six comics, and to be honest I don’t know if these came from their time in transit or before (or as) they were packed in the boxes.
Also, replacements for all of my damages from last week (and there were a lot) arrived early this week. (I initially thought I was missing one, but that’s only because I didn’t recognize the variant cover as being a certain title. AGAIN WITH THE VARIANT COVERS.)
Here’s hoping things continue to improve, and that a certain other distributor who shall go unnamed here will begin to feel at least some pressure to step up their own game. To be fair, I only received two damaged books from them this week, but in the past that just meant I was due for a real problem the following week. We’ll see.
Now I hadn’t heard about this, but on this week’s episode of the Longbox Heroes podcast (being listened to even as I type this), apparently there have been other odd problems with PRH…such as filling an entire order of a book, not with the regular cover, but with the 1/25 or 1/100 ratio variants, which is pretty wild (and possibly quite the windfall for the less scrupulous retailers). I haven’t experienced that particular problem yet, thankfully.
• • •
And now, some good news…the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers is finally g
oing to series, airing on the free TV app Tubi:
As has been noted, the styles of “Characters Created by Gilbert Shelton” and “Characters Not Created by Gilbert Shelton” do, um, clash quite a bit, but given the premise of the series (the Freak Bros. are spirited away from their ’60s/’70s stomping grounds into the world of today) that seems only fitting. I’ve seen a few of the shorts they did with this voice cast (which is great, by the way) on YouTube, so I’m looking forward to some full-length episodes.
So in answering Alan’s question about what the comic industry might have been like with the success of superhero (read: Marvel) movies, I completely missed the forest for all them cut-down-to-print-Unstoppable Wasp trees. Chris V points out
“I’m pretty sure that if the superhero movie craze was a flop, Disney would have never bought Marvel and Marvel Comics may be on the verge of bankruptcy by 2020, if not already bankrupt before 2020.”
Er, yeah. Marvel was pretty much selling office furniture to keep the lights on in the mid-1990s. There was a very good chance they would have been dead and gone without income from films, and as has been said, “as goes Marvel, so goes the comics industry.” The comics market as we know it might have survived, but almost certainly it would have changed drastically. Well, drastic for people like me working in direct market retail, not so much for all the manga being sold through regular bookstores I’d imagine. At the very least, I wouldn’t have that giant cardboard Groot standup in my store’s front window.
There was also a lot of talk in Wednesday’s comments about what Disney could and should do in regards to helping direct people going to their Avengers movies into stores to find Avengers comics.
There are a couple of things to note about that. First, there’s the thing I said in Wednesday’s post, and that I’ve said plenty of times before: reading serialized comics is pretty much a lifestyle choice. It requires coming to a shop on a regular basis to pick up each new installment. (Or, heaven forfend, if you’re getting them digitally, it requires accessing them on your tablet/phone/whatever and keeping up with them.) That’s not necessarily a habit that comes naturally to people who aren’t already in a comic book reading mindset.
The other issue is another I’ve pointed out from time to time, that for most folks, all the superheroin’ they need is about one movie every few months. They don’t need a regular print diet of of Thor when a Thor movie every few years does ’em fine. They might enjoy paging through a single comic as a novelty, but they’re not going to set up a pull list or anything.
THAT SAID
…there is a non-zero percentage of folks introduced to comics via the movies who do become comic fans. I know. I sell comics to some. We’re not going to get an influx of millions into comic shops because people liked Ant-Man, but we’ll get a few people. And a few is better than none. Maybe some fraction of those will become weekly regular funnybook fans. Maybe some will just pop in to try out a graphic novel or two on occasion (or maybe even once). Or maybe they’ll just become aware there is such a thing as comic book stores, and they’ll know where to go when they need comic-related stuff (for gifts or whatnot).
Disney itself doing anything to directly help comic shops beyond not shuttering Marvel’s publishing division entirely and giving the IP to the merchandising department is, well, unlikely. Like I said in a comment in Wednesday’s post, they’d be more likely to open their own Marvel-exclusive comic stores. And by “more likely” I mean “when pigs fly above a frozen-over Hell.” Any cross promotion between theaters showing superhero movies and comic shops will have to be done on their own. I’m sure some folks have had success giving away comics at theaters, but I’m just imagining that much more stuff for those poor theater employees to clean up off the floors between showings.
A couple things Marvel tried to do to get some of that Marvel movie audience to pay attention to the comics: one was a short X-Men comic in the July 2000 issue of TV Guide:
…and I gotta be honest, I don’t recall that working very well, mostly just being derided a bit. And though I know I read it, I don’t remember anything about the comic itself beyond thinking “this probably isn’t a good introduction to the X-Men.” Ah, well.
The other thing Marvel did was create the “Ultimate” line of books, basically giving fresh starts (and the occasional goatee) to their mainline characters for anyone new to the medium.
I don’t know how many new-to-comics readers they acquired, or if they just gave already-committed Marvel fans more books to read per month.
This all sounds sorta bitter and negative, and…well, okay, maybe I am being so. But all this isn’t to say outreach via movies and such does no good…just probably not as much good as you think it would.
So a bit of a follow-up on Wednesday’s post:
First, if you read it first thing Wednesday morning, and wondered why it felt like a chunk of it was missing, that’s because a chunk of it was missing. A small HTML error wiped out a paragraph or two, which is now fixed. So please, go back and read my now-unexpurgated words of unsurpassed wisdom and be enlightened.
Second, in regards to the shipping woes faced by retailers during Penguin Random House’s first week of handling Marvel’s comics: as I noted, I only had four comics damaged enough to where I didn’t feel comfortable selling them. I reported them to the distributor Monday, and received replacements on Thursday. Via Next Day Air UPS. In a box that was wrapped with bubblewrap and placed inside another box.
Needless to say, I was amazed. I’m certainly not used to receiving replacements that quickly. And I think the only reason they took as long as they did to get to me is that PRH was apparently slammed with complaints and it took them time to get everything sorted out.
The distributor also sent out an email, essentially apologizing for dropping the ball with their insufficient packaging and they they were taking steps to improve the quality of their shipments. Which is good to hear…I’m willing to give them the benefit of a doubt as they at least acknowledged this is a problem and it needs to be fixed, which is more than I get from some distributors.
(Speaking of which…said distributor shorted me my entire order of Star Wars: High Republic Adventures and about 1/6th of my order of the Bad Idea comic Pyrate Queen, in case you’re wondering how they’re putting their best foot forward the same week they lost a massive chunk of their business.)
Also, I saw that my initial tweets on the week’s shipment had been “favorited” by a certain comics columnist, which told me what I wrote there was eventually going to end up filling some column inches on another site. And yes, I predicted correctly, so if you happen to see the article while perusing the site for some reason, you don’t need to tell me you saw my name there. I already know where it is.
Lastly, nothing to do with Wednesday’s post, but I wanted to remind you I’m still taking your questions! Chime in and let me know your one question about comics! I promise to give you as good an answer as I can…or maybe just make a cheap joke. WE’LL FIND OUT!
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