retailing

Was Todd six inches or only three?

filed under Categories misfit toys, retailing 10 Comments

In response to Monday’s post, where I rambled on at length about Spawn toys and their lack of secondary-market interest, readers Corey and Doc Arkham brought up the first issue of the Spawn comic book. To quote Doc, in his response to Corey’s comment about Spawn #1’s ease of sale:

“Spawn #1 is an easy sell, but every 90s collection is almost guaranteed to have at least one copy in it. It’s such a readily available resource that it doesn’t even figure into an offer price.”

I see early Spawns all the time. In fact, I purchased part of a collection at the shop yesterday, but passed on those very Spawns. Spawn comics, especially #1, are among those where far more people are interested in selling them to me than buying them from me. (Kinda like sets of Marvel trading cards, but that’s a story for another time.) I do sell those #1s on occasion, but too often people who ask about it are trying to price their own copies and are often amazed that it isn’t hundreds of dollars. Now, Spawn comics from about issue 50 to 100 or so…those I could use.

To clarify some of my comments from Monday…yes, while a lot of McFarlane toy sets warm the pegs quite nicely, there are certain figures I could always use. Some of the more famous modern monster figures, like Freddy Krueger or Jason, I could sell those all day. Or this Six Faces of Madness series…that was an enormously popular set. Or Spawn. Not “Medieval Spawn” or “Spawn as He Appeared on the Cover of Issue # Whatever” or Wings of Redemption Spawn. Just plain ol’ Spawn, with the chains and the big cape, as he appeared in that first issue. I could probably sell those.

As for the Todd McFarlane figure, Heli has this to say:

“Unless I’m mistaken, that figure was actually originally thrown in with some Spawn movie playset or other as ‘the bum,’ and then carded and resold through the club.”

That did stir some ancient memories in my tired brain, and that set was Spawn Alley. That linked page includes the note that the “Todd the Bum” figure (pictured here) was only in the sets distributed through Diamond Comics. My memory was that the movie playsets were actually produced at a smaller scale than the standard Spawn figures (like at about 3 inches), while that Collector’s Club figure was at the usual 6-inch Spawn scale. However, the “Todd the Bum” and Todd McFarlane figures are the same sculpt (with different color schemes), even if they are, possibly, if I’m recalling correctly, different sizes. Please correct me if any of you out there know for certain. I know the Spawn.com listings have them at the 6-inch scale, but I’m certain at least one of those sets was at a smaller scale.

One final comment, from the amazingly-named Suckmaster Burstingfoam:

“Do you really wear a toupée? Interesting.”

To paraphrase an old David Letterman joke…if I needed a toupée, would I buy one that looked like this?

In which I just sort of run off at the mouth about things you don’t care about.

filed under Categories dc comics, publishing, retailing 15 Comments

THINGS YOU DON’T WANT TO DO: Somehow completely forget that the comic order is due, like, THAT EVENING, and you completely drop freakin’ everything to get that bastard typed into the computer and then suddenly there’s like a thousand different Uncanny Avengers #1 variants you have to figure out and you’re all “Uncanny Avengers, oh dammit Marvel” and you’re trying to balance out order plateaus and ratios and what have you to get the right amounts of everything and oh Lordy I was actually feeling nostalgic for the time when we were only dealing with pre-bagged copies of X-Force #1, each with a different card.

Anyway, the order’s in. Hopefully I didn’t have a slip of the finger while speedily entering the order and accidentally got 5,000 copies of the Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan statue. I mean, I only need a thousand.

Also, there are some Avengers Vs. X-Men follow-up series, which hopefully won’t go the way of the Fear Itself follow-ups, where we went from the main series selling pretty well to the series that followed having us think “hmmm, well, maybe we can glue these back together into trees.” My general feeling is that once the main event is over (whether it’s Avengers Vs X-Men or Fear Itself or whatever) then the readers are pretty much done with that particular idea, too, and don’t need these supporting series after the fact. It’s like “yeah, okay, we did that, what else you got?” I mean, nothing against the comics themselves…maybe they’re fantastic. But it’s better to move on before the diminishing returns set in, which is something that goes against everything that’s ever happened in the comics industry ever, but still, c’mon.

In other news, a lot of hay has been made about Superman and Wonder Woman hooking up in Justice League, which, yeah, I don’t know. Hasn’t the point of nearly every previous story featuring an attempted Superman/Wonder Woman romance been “Superman and Wonder Woman really shouldn’t be romantically involved?” Well, okay, maybe not Kingdom Come, and I’m sure there’s another story somewhere I’m forgetting. But, hell, why not, so long as DC’s new publishing policy is “throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks,” this isn’t any better or worse than other decisions they’ve made. And I’ll link to this news story about it because the headline is kind of amazingly crass. This is showing up in real world news sources too, which is even more amazing.

I get some folks at DC want to try new things, which is cool, and I’m sure the attention doesn’t hurt, but DC Comics only has itself to blame for teaching me over the years, among other important life lessons, that Supes and Wondy aren’t meant for each other. Besides, I prefer the Batman/Wonder Woman romance that they sorta danced around in JLA.

Also at DC, Rob Liefeld is outta there, apparently unhappy with how things were going behind the scenes. I honestly figured he’d be done and gone three issues into Hawk & Dove, but he worked on ’em all, I believe, and went on to do even more titles, at least for a bit. Ah, well. …I was thinking “maybe Marvel can get him back again” and then I was wondering what the absolute last title would be that he would do, and Howard the Duck was the first thing that popped into my head. I would break my “no non-Gerber Howard the Duck ever” rule for a Liefeld Howard.

For some reason, I was reminded of Image United…if you don’t remember this as yet uncompleted mini-series, ask your grandpa if he recalls buying it off the stands. Anyway, checking with the distributor, issues #4 and #5 are in the system, with “scheduled” shipdates for the end of the year. I put “scheduled” in quotes because they both have the same date, the last shipping day of 2012, which makes me think they’re placeholder dates and not the real thing. I guess we’ll see. We’re not quite up to Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk levels yet, but soon. Soon.

The opposite problem of Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk.

filed under Categories retailing, this week's comics 13 Comments


Well, this is certainly my favorite comic of the week, a complete reprinting of the original Popeye #1 published by Dell Comics in 1948. 48 pages of comics, plus inner covers and back cover plus a swell front cover, all filled with fights and jokes, which I know you people like, for only $3.99. Worth every single penny.


Mike Allred draws the new issue of Daredevil, and…okay, don’t get me wrong, I think Daredevil as written by Mark Waid is a great comic, and currently one of the best, if not the best, Marvel has to offer right now. Even the non-Waid annual, which was written and drawn by Alan Davis, was a lot of fun. But there have been an awful lot of Daredevil comics recently, and double-checking the invoices…sure enough, there have been three regular issues plus the annual released over the last five weeks. Of course, the indicia does say “published Monthly except in May and August” but still, I don’t know you want to push your readers’ pocketbooks quite that much, especially with current economic conditions and with an audience base that’s looking for pretty much any reason to reduce their disposable income expenditures. Flooding the stands with consecutive issues of a series on what appears to be no set schedule is a good way to overwhelm your readership, and cause them to cut even titles they like if they think they can’t afford to keep up.

I mean, I get it. It’s a publishing and marketing strategy, designed to push other comics off the shelves, and force customers to devote more money to your popular “essential” titles while taking money away from your competitors’ titles (and hopefully not from too many of your own, though that inevitably happens). And it’s the kind of short term profiteering necessary in the current depressed comics marketplace, where you have to grab that money while it’s being shoved in your direction, as trying to build up a solid readership over an extended period of time takes, well, an extended period of time, and who has time to wait for that, amiright?

…That’s a long-winded way to say “I wish they’d stick to a schedule,” because cranking out a new issue of a series every one or two weeks causes my customers to increasingly groan “another new issue already?” even on titles they love. And that’s not an attitude anyone in this industry can afford to encourage.

Okay, wasn’t intending to rant about that. The new Daredevil is great. And let’s end this on an up note:


So this relaunch of Supreme by Erik Larsen and Cory Hamscher, picking up from the Alan Moore run from a few years back, is a bit of a hidden gem, I think. It’s a hoot and half, despite that bloody cover I scanned up there which fits in fine in context, honest. There’s all kind of crazy stuff going on in this series, and Invincible fans may want to pick up this particular issue. That the Moore issues which preceded this series are out of print and not always readily available in back issue bins is a shame, and may have hurt this restart’s chances with those stories being mostly out of memory. But, hell, just jump on in…it’s a lot of fun, and it’s not like you’ve read every single issue of, say, Batman before you read your first Batman story. You’ll live.

Just when I thought I was out…they POG me back in.

filed under Categories pogs, retailing 32 Comments

So the boss had some friends who came into the possession of a storage unit full of material that once belonged to the distributor of a certain product. Those friends had no particular use for said product, and they said to the boss, they sez “here, you can have it all, and see if you can get anything for it.”

And thus, on a warm Sunday afternoon, the boss pulled the rental truck up in front of the shop, and this was the scene within:


And here we are, a little closer and at a slightly higher angle:


Yes. Oh, yes indeedy. So, we meet again, my old enemy:


Yes, that’s right, boxes and boxes and boxes of POGs and milkcaps and slammers and carrying tubes and oh sweet mother an entire CASE of Ultra Pro POG sleeves and uncut cap sheets and a generous handful of SLAMINATORS:


This fellow was apparently a distributor and / or manufacturer of cap products during the height of fad, in the early ’90s, and these rare jewels have apparently been resting in storage for nearly two decades since. I haven’t had much of a chance to actually go through the boxes, since mostly we were just hauling them out of the truck and making a giant POG box pyramid in a corner of the shop. However, one employee drew the short stick and he’s going to go through and sort everything out…and when I’m back on Tuesday, I’ll begin the process of getting these things on the eBay and finding homes for them.

Yes, this means I am back in the POG-selling business. …Don’t you judge me.

As we were hauling boxes into the shop, I was carrying a smallish box which caused some wag to call out “Hey, Mike, way to pitch in!” to which I replied “Here, you hold this box” which was filled with brass slammers and thus heavier than your mother:


And if you don’t know what “slammers” are, please don’t ask me to explain. Speaking of which, another customer, a young fellow of about twelve, asked us what POGs were as he’d never heard of them, and I envied him his youthful innocence.

By the way, SHAQ POGS:


And all of these caps were presided over by their true and rightful king:


Just to allay any concerns, I took this pic on top of one of our glass cases, so Pogman isn’t directly sitting on top of our copies of Daredevil #7 (1965), Marvel Tales Annual #1 (1964), or X-Men #8 (1964), as it may appear.

There was one of these as well, a videotape sealed in its original shrinkwrap, and thus presumably the “6 Collectible Wackers” are still included:


The back, since I know you’re curious:


Oh, there are no winners here.

Most terrifying part of this video?


Yeah, there was more than one in this series. Seriously, I am tempted beyond all belief to pop this open and watch it.

In an odd sort of way, I’m sort of excited, just for the sheer “OH MY GOD WHAT’S THIS” entertainment of it all, not to mention seeing what actually does sell and for how much. And believe you me, I’ll be taking full advantage of the “pogs” category on this site if I find any more treasures.

In the meantime…drop by the shop! Scale POG Mountain! See Mike just kinda stand there and shake his head in bemusement!

There’s probably a reason why I don’t get interviewed for articles like these more often.

filed under Categories retailing, self-promotion 11 Comments

So a while back, Matt Wilson (he of The Supervillain Handbookfame) asked me “if superhero movies are so successful, why aren’t people buying more comics?” And I said “because people are big poopie-heads.” Well, okay, I didn’t say that, but you can see what I did say by looking at Matt’s article right here. My response is hardly the be-all/end-all answer to that particular quandary, but, you know, it’s a start. Oh, and some other people responded, too, but pfffft, they’re obviously not me.

Nothin’ says lovin’ like Hulk from the oven.

filed under Categories collecting, retailing, the eBay 13 Comments

So it can be difficult to buy things at the shop at times when people bring items in that they’ve already “researched” on the Internet, particularly when they see prices like these:


Note: the “used” copies start at $150, and work their way up into the $500s.

Now, I know this is not a terribly common item, and that the 1970s Fireside paperbacks are usually in-demand collectibles. Even in pristine shape, though, the books in the line don’t sell for that much, at least to my knowledge. We had a copy of the Fantastic Four Fireside paperback in Near Mint condition that sold for about $60, and it took forever to move it. We also had a…rather well-read copy of America at War, the Fireside reprint of DC’s war comics (and, I think, one of the most sought-after volumes from this series, next to the romance book), that sold for about six bucks.

In the past, when we’ve had copies of the Marvel Superheroes’ Cookbook, they were usually in Good to Very Good condition, and, if memory serves, we usually sold them for around ten dollars or so. Or maybe it was the Marvel Strength and Fitness book…basically the same type of book, with about the same level of demand and desirability. Basically, it’s a book that’s an interesting novelty item, but not really comics as such, and not with an excessive value.

At least, that’s what we generally believed. A quick look at one online store lists a Mint copy as being in the $150 range (theoretically, as they don’t have any in stock). And a look at completed eBay auctions shows that a couple of copies have sold in the $40 range, which may be a more realistic assessment of this item’s value:


…since this is showing what prices people are actually paying, as opposed to, as shown in the Amazon image above, what prices that sellers are trying to get.

But I don’t know…maybe I’m wrong, and Amazon sellers are turning over copies of this book all the time at hundreds and hundreds of dollars. But we have to base our pricing and purchasing on what we think we can sell it for, and what we’ve sold it for in the past, and not on what high hopes others might have. And frankly, I would have zero confidence in getting prices like those on Amazon for this copy of the book. I doubt we would have even really approached those eBay prices, but it’s all a moot point since we couldn’t come to terms on the book with the seller anyway.

Ah, well, At least Chris wrote up this description of the Marvel Superheroes’ Cookbook we can all enjoy.

There’s gold in them thar funnybooks.

filed under Categories collecting, market crash, retailing, turok, valiant 9 Comments

While the Valiant Comics collectability heyday of the 1990s is now a distant memory, along with most collectability of ’90s comics for that matter, there still remains some market desirability for certain Valiant releases: the early “pre-Unity” issues (Unity being Valiant’s line-wide crossover event series), the last issues of some of their series (with their smaller print runs, you see), the early video game comics (Captain N, Super Mario Bros.), some of the #0s and mail-away/promo books, and the gold logo/gold foil variants of some of their regular issues.

Now, it’s been a long time since I’ve thought about how these gold variants were distributed to retailers…I don’t think it was like how variants are doled out by the big publishers today, where you get one special variant for every 10, 25, 100, whatever regular covers you ordered. I suspect, at least in some cases, that the gold editions were just mailed out to retailers for us to do with as we wish. In any case, in recent years these gold variants have been selling for a pretty penny on the eBay, and the few we’ve acquired in collections over the last few years turned over some sizable profit via the online auctions.

However, I suspect we may experience where the line is drawn vis-à-vis Valiant gold-logo collectability with this recently-acquired golden edition:


It’s probably a bit hard to tell, but that’s a gold corner box and a gold foil logo on that Turok #1. Now, as I’ve written before, Turok #1 was, if not a cause, at least one of the primary symptoms of the ’90s market crash. Hot collectable company produces what should be a hot collectable #1, every retailer on the planet orders a royal assload of said #1, #1 comes out, nobody cares. So all those retailers end up with a huge ol’ turkey that they try to blow out in their bargain bins in the subsequent decade or two since.

Now, it’s possible that someday we’ll experience the Shazam! effect, where the greatly-anticipated release of Shazam! #1 in 1973 resulted in a huge abundance of that comic in the marketplace, with many copies going straight to quarter boxes. There they sat, thumbed over and exposed to the elements, until suddenly…oh, hey, it’s awfully hard to find mint copies of that comic nowadays, and now price guides have mint copies of Shazam #1 at, I don’t know, $40, $60 maybe? I don’t have my guide in front of me, but you get the idea. But if that happens to Turok #1, ever, it may not be until after I’m long dead, so, you know, in ten years or so. But basically what I’m saying is that Turok #1 is not seen as a desirable collectable by pretty much anyone, and I suspect even having a gold logo may not make that much of a difference. This site, which has been monitoring online Valiant sales, notes the market value at about $12, but ain’t too bad, I guess, but not really a patch on some of the money we’ve made on other gold Valiant variants.

But still, that gold edition Turok is nice-looking. And I do like Turok comics. Maybe I’ll just keep it.

Speaking of gold editions…this strictly isn’t just a variant, as such:


…but a second printing, which DC indicated by changing the frame of the cover from the first printing’s dark blue to this printing’s gold adding a gold border (thanks, Old Bull Lee!). Mostly I was just going to bring up the fact that Deathstroke, at one point in history, was popular enough in his own title (due in part to a brief renaissance of the Teen Titans franchise at the time) to warrant a second printing for his first issue, but then, oh yeah, it happened twice.

Warning: things get totally depressing at the end of this post.

filed under Categories dc comics, jack kirby, pal plugging, retailing 7 Comments

So y’all know Matt Digges, right? The artist of Awesome Hospital? The guy who drew me this?

Well, the man is in need of a little extra scratch, and thus is now taking commissions to draw your favorite character…and if you ask nicely, he might draw characters other than Swamp Thing or Sluggo, too. You can read all the details on his Tumblr-thingie. But in all seriousness, Matt’s a swell cat and well deserving of your dollars, so go give him a few and get a wonderful drawing in return.

In other news:

  • Hey, have I mentioned I’m doing a little lite-blogging on this site for my place of employment? We needed a new blanket site to cover both stores, I ended up doing a quickie WordPress install, and voilà, suddenly I’ve got another blog to maintain. It’s mostly a lot of “hey, look at this stuff we would like you to buy!” but we’re having fun with it. It’s just starting out, and I need to slap another coat of paint on it, but I think it looks nice, though I’ll have to beat Employee Mark if he uses another emoticon in a post again.

  • We got in a copy of the Infinite Crisis Omnibus hardcover, and I sort of wish I remembered to take a picture of it, because this thing is just goofily thick. I mean, physically thick, not, you know, thick as in “not very bright,” which I suppose some of you would mention if I didn’t. But this thing is a real bullet-stopper, the kind of book you’d use to knock out a moose prior to surgery. It has purt’near every tie-in and mini-series to Infinite Crisis, and it’s like four inches thick, and it’s just amazing.

    …Now, there have been similar books, like those Omnibii that Marvel has been doing (for example), so it’s not as if this kind of tome is anything new. But while big ol’ Gutenberg Bible editions of Fantastic Four, Watchmen, and even Howard the Duck sort of receive the “yeah, sure, we get it” reaction, this special Infinite Crisis: Overkill Edition tends to get The People’s Eyebrow and the occasional disbelieving “Really? They made one of those for that?” and all I can say is “hey, I got a dude who wants it, and that’s good enough for me.”

    Of course, that there is not yet a Swamp Thing Omnibus with every 1970s appearance of the character is a crime that comics will pay for someday, oh yes.

  • Pals Dor and Ken have another look at trailers for forthcoming movies…I always really look forward to each new installment of this column!

  • Pal Andrew has another installment of “Nobody’s Favorites” and this time he takes on The King! Yup, one of Kirby’s latter-day creations gets Andrewified, and you can read the results right here. …A few years back, I had a brief discussion on this site about fandom’s contemporary opinions on Kirby’s later output (here and here) which generated some lively discussion (link goes to old commenting system…don’t post new comments there, please!). I only bring those posts up, not just to complement Andrew’s post, but to point out a certain realization I had about fandom’s reaction to that period of Kirby’s work:

    “Okay, we look back on that stuff now and we can appreciate it for what it was. I don’t know if it took us 30 years to catch up to what Kirby was doing, or if it’s just nostalgic fondness for the comics of yore, or if it’s ‘ironic’ appreciation, or just admiration for Kirby’s energy in producing just pure ‘comic-booky’-type comics with no pretense at being anything other than what they were: escapist entertainment for kids. And I’m sure part of it is an unwillingness to take any portion of Kirby’s output for granted, since, obviously, there ain’t no more comin’”.

    “There ain’t no more comin’.” I put in sort of a fake-folksy way, but it doesn’t make that thought any less depressing, and it’s sort of stuck with me all these years since I originally wrote it. Looking at that Witchfinder series John Severin drew last year, and thinking “no more Severin art.” Or “no more Gil Kane drawings.” Or “no more Steve Gerber stories.” The fact that there are still some stories and art from departed creators in the vaults, as it were, such as that Infernal Man-Thing mini featuring Gerber’s previously-unpublished scripts, simply serves to remind that we can only look forward to unearthed archived material, and That One Guy/Gal You Really Liked Who Just Passed Away isn’t sitting at his/her typewriter or art table and working on something brand spanking new at this very moment.

    …Sigh. Sorry. “People die and it sucks” is today’s lesson, apparently.

    Speaking of which…so long, Andy.

This is all assuming there’ll eventually be a back issue market for anything coming out right now.

filed under Categories collecting, retailing 12 Comments

So this week is the first time one of those digital download codes turned up in a Marvel comic I follow (Incredible Hulk, in case you were wondering), which got me to wondering about something.

The Marvels that have a digital download code printed inside protect the code from being stolen in-store by hooligans and ne’er-do-wells by covering it with a black label, which looks a little something…like this:


Of course, it’s not as if someone couldn’t just peel it off and jot down the code anyway, but as I haven’t yet experienced a floor littered with these little black labels, I think that hasn’t become a real problem yet.

One thing I’ve been thinking about, from the “dude what sells the old comics in a collectors’ market” point of view, is this: remember Marvel Value Stamps? Those little stamp drawings that appeared on editorial pages/letter pages/etc. in ’70s Marvels that you would clip and save for…well, something or another, I guess. Anyway, for folks like me who, as I said, deal in back issue sales, those things are the bane of my existence, as you really need to go through and check that the particular comics that had said Value Stamps in them weren’t clipped out. Because, if that stamp is clipped, suddenly that Wolverine appearance in Incredible Hulk #181, normally worth exactly one billion dollars, is now only worth about five or ten cents, max. (NOTE: pricing approximate.) So, yes, a missing stamp does negatively affect the value of the comic.

So now there’s this thing, the little black sticker covering the code. I suppose technically if the sticker is missing, the comic would be incomplete (or at least, altered from its original condition as released) and therefore probably shouldn’t be sold as a mint or near mint copy. Which means, if I start dealing in used copies of these (and I really haven’t, as of yet), I’m going to have to start checking to make sure that sticker is still intact. (I should note that I haven’t experimented with the sticker in my Hulk comic yet, so I don’t know if the sticker can be reattached…I’m guessing “no.”)

Before you say anything…yes, this is a dumb thing to be thinking about. But I guarantee you, this situation is going to come up and I’m going to have to deal with it at some point. …Not that I’m looking forward to that buyer/seller interaction:

“Well, this copy of Avengers Vs. X-Men II: The X-Avengening #3 would normally be worth about ten bucks….”

“Yeah?”

“…Except the digital code sticker has been removed. Sorry, this is only about a four dollar book now.”

“…What. Seriously?”

“Yeah, really. …This isn’t my proudest moment.”

Or maybe I can go the “professional grading” route, where some of those companies squirm out of pinning a book down to a specific condition by giving it a “qualified” grade based on its apparent appearance, instead of the grade that actually should be applied based on the damage you don’t immediately see. (You know, “Qualified Near Mint, loose centerfold” — that’s probably a “VG” to you and me.) …Of course, if I ever actually write “Qualified Near Mint, missing digital code sticker” on a book I’m trying to sell at the shop, I do welcome any of you to come put me out of my misery.

(By the way, I’m totally pulling that sticker off my Incredible Hulk comic…I want to see what all this digital comic hoohar is about.)

Slightly after Before Watchmen.

filed under Categories retailing, watchmen 10 Comments

So, when we were last talking about Before Watchmen, I posted a poll asking what some of you folks were planning to regarding the series…avoid it, try it out, steal it, whatever. Thus far, three-fifths of the respondents indicated that they would not buy it.

Now, that poll may not be entirely balanced…an online fandom interested enough in the matter to 1) read comic blogs and 2) vote in an online poll may be a little more aware of the situation and thus more inclined to skew negatively. But even those in-store customers of mine who don’t pay any attention to comics news outside of whatever happens to be in Comic Shop News that week (I assure you, such customers exist) are voting the way comic readers usually vote: with their wallets.

Now that I’ve had a few days of sales to see how things go, I can report that Before Watchmen: Minutemen #1 has sold…okay. Not flying off the shelves in a Superman #75-esque frenzy of consumer demand, but moving along at a steady pace. From previous experience, I’m relatively certain once Minutemen #2 comes out, or even when the next series or two start up, we’ll get further requests for the initial releases. However, like I’d said before, we’ll see how it goes in the long run, if we’ll get consumer resistance once the series and issues start piling on.

I’ve only had a handful of customers at the shop bring up Alan Moore’s disdain for this project, and it was about 50/50 whether those particular folks picked up the book or not. And there are other reasons outside of creators’ rights issues why some customers may not be picking up the book: didn’t like the movie, didn’t care for the original comic, it’s been just plain too long since the original to care about prequels, still burnt out on Watchmen after the media saturation surrounding the film, or simply aren’t interested in a Watchmen comic not by Moore and Gibbons. But, like I said, it’s not like it’s not selling…it seems to be selling fine. It’s not a monster smash like Avengers Vs. X-Men, but I would have been surprised if it were.

I’m almost tempted to put up another poll, “Of those of you who said you wouldn’t buy Before Watchmen, how many of you bought it anyway” because c’mon, I know somebody did. And this is interesting: I usually get my share of Google referrals to my site from people looking to mooch uploaded scans of current comics, generally a few a day. But in the last week or so, I have been bombarded with searches from people looking for scans of Before Watchmen. Apparently, the demand is there to read it, just not pay for it.

Like the presumably-pseudonymous Interstate Shogun said in the comments, I’m also surprised it took DC this long to do more Watchmen comics. A few years back I swore up and down that if DC was going to do it, they’d do it when the movie came out just so they’d have more product to sell during the peak of interest in the property (aside from the misguided After Watchmen promotion, which tried to get Watchmen fans to sample similar books, such as…um, Identity Crisis and Batman: Hush). I wonder how Before Watchmen would have sold had it come out then? (I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t a brand new one-shot comic adaptation of the film, distilling the movie, itself a paring/dumbing down of the original material, down to 64 pages or so.)

Now, about Before Watchmen: Minutemen #1 itself…it wasn’t bad. Darwyn Cooke’s art is, as always, beautiful. The story is…well, if you wanted more action from the Golden Age characters in Watchmen, here you go. It all looks relatively surface-level, expanding on material already covered in necessary depth in the original book. Not terribly deep in the metacommentary department, as most of the points made about the genre are, again, repeated from the original, aside from the very opening pages of the comic, a seeming reaction to trying to tell this story under these particular circumstances. Alan Moore as the “guy [who] throws a wrench in the gears,” taking “away your understanding of the world you live in” — the superhero comics genre — and the folks who “search for the things that brought [them] happiness in the past” — the way superhero comics were before everyone thought imitating Watchmen was the way to go. And of course there’s Mason’s (Cooke’s) own reaction to trying to duplicate Moore and Gibbon’s style from the original.

…And this has been “Mike Overanalyzes A Dumb Ol’ Comic Book at Stupid O’Clock in the Morning.” Thanks for putting up with these rambling thoughts on the topic, folks, and I’ll see you again in a day or two.