retailing

I have a question about the Comics Code.

filed under Categories comics code, retailing 27 Comments

Not to kick a code when it’s down, but just out of curiosity…has anyone reading this experienced any kind of real-world impact of the Comics Code Authority? I don’t mean the behind the scenes stuff, where maybe the publisher altered some art at the CCA’s request, or they objected to some content and the publisher just put out the book anyway, sans approval stamp. I’m sure that happened all the time.

What I’m talking about is people running shops or newsstands who explicitly said that they would not carry comics without the Comics Code stamp on the front cover. Or parents who specifically looked for the stamp on the cover before allowing their children to read it. That sort of thing.

As I can recall, I’ve only run into it once in my century or two of comics retail, where a parent told her child to just look at the comics with the stamp on the front. However, I don’t think that counts, since I’m pretty sure we told her about the CCA stamp. She was getting pretty antsy about her kid’s interest in funnybooks and we reassured her that so long as the code was on the front cover, there probably wasn’t anything objectionable inside…so relax and enjoy!

Anyway, if any of you folks have any stories like that, I’d be interested, particularly if it’s from the last, oh, decade or so. But if some of you out there have…experienced more of life, and have got any tales of CCA woe from the ’50s or ’60s, I’d be curious about that, too. Please drop ’em in the comments if you’ve got ’em. It doesn’t even have to be anything drawn out and complicated…even if it’s just “my mom wouldn’t let me read non-code books,” that would be fine. I’m just kind of curious what sort of actual impact the CCA had in the marketplace, especially in recent years.

In the meantime, let’s congratulate DC and Archie on finally reclaiming that extra square quarter-inch of cover space!

Okay, I’ll stop talking about Zero Hour after this.

filed under Categories retailing, this week's comics 2 Comments

Well, without overly belaboring the topic again, thanks to you folks for responding to my query yesterday about Zero Hour sales. I’m going with It’s Just One of Those Things in regards to why it’s experiencing a sales bump at our shop, a possible combination of my throwing it on the featured book rack, and the Dan Jurgens/possible implications for future events factor. As pal Andres noted, just by my putting the trade on display I obviously contributed to its increased sales, but that alone wouldn’t explain the sudden demand for the actual back issues, except for, as mentioned, possible ties to current DC shenanigans.

In response to commenter Joe, who suggests I put other books on the Featured Graphic Novels shelf and see what happens…that’s pretty much what we do. Right now, we’re using that space for the Walking Dead hardcovers (which have slowed down in sales since Christmas, but still move occasionally), Chew (one of the current Hot Things), Ex Machina (which had bit of a sales spurt up until we put it on the Featured Shelf rack, go figure), and Zero Hour, plus what new books get released each week. Joe suggested that I throw Dark Knight Strikes Again up there, but frankly, that and its predecessor, Dark Knight Returns, already sell pretty regularly from the Batman shelf as it is. Anyway, it’s not working with Ex Machina, as noted, but maybe I’ll try another DC “event” book and see what happens. (Shame Final Night seems to be out of print.)

Commenter Nimbus wonders if maybe, given the involvement of Green Lantern and Parallax in the Zero Hour storyline, that maybe interest in the forthcoming Green Lantern film might have had something to do with it. I actually haven’t seen a GL movie sales bump just yet, aside from some very infrequent requests for “early Green Lantern stories” (which the Green Lantern Chronicles and Showcase Presents Green Lantern books satisfy quite nicely). The GL franchise comics are still selling quite well, having dipped only very slightly since the height of the Blackest Night hoohar, but if there is usual pre-movie release uptick in interest from the general public, they probably couldn’t have picked a worse time to sample a GL comic, what with all the event tie-ins and multitudes of characters who aren’t Hal Jordan and the Red Lanterns vomiting blood or whatever it is they’re doing. But hopefully any of these theoretical new customers will go for the paperback collections, where the worst that’ll happen is that I’ll have to explain/apologize for the whole calling-his-sidekick-“Pieface” thing.

Did I say “without overly belaboring the topic” at the beginning of this? Why, yes, I suppose I did. Um…sorry about that.

Let’s see, what else is going on…ah, I know: folks seem generally pleased that most of DC’s comics have dipped to $2.99 across the board. Too early to tell yet if this is going to have any kind of significant increase in sales…mostly it seems that people who were already buying the $3.99 series are glad to be only paying $2.99 for them now. Haven’t heard any complaints or even many comments about the story page count dipping down to 20, but most of the DCs I’ve read in the last couple of weeks have been pretty heavy on plot and dialogue and the two extra pages weren’t missed. Of course, that may simply be the result of 22-page scripts being squeezed into 20 pages (which I’ve heard at least one comic writer confirm was the case with his script), but we’ll see what happens once we’re sure everyone’s writing for 20 pages. So long as we’re not getting half of those pages as splashes, everything should be fine.

Speaking of new comics, here’s some stuff coming out this week:

  • Smurfs Vol. 4: Smurfette – I sincerely hope that, when the movie comes out and crashes in the box office, that it doesn’t kill this reprint program. The Smurfs comics are fantastic.

  • Wolverine & Jubilee #1 – Wolverine should just regularly team up with teenage girl superheroes who then become ninjas over the course of the story.

  • Steampunk Palin – well, that’s certainly some timing.

  • Hellblazer #275 – two things come to mind about this comic. One…good gravy, I’ve been buying this on a monthly basis since #1. This is about 30 issues longer than the Silver Age Flash’s original comic book run. Two…$4.99, for this “special oversized anniversary issue?” Urgh. Good thing the other DCs I’m buying are $2.99.

  • Not a comic, but horror film mag Fangoria is releasing its issue #300 this week. We’re usually good for selling at least one copy of this to somebody every month. Mostly, I’m just amazed it’s still hanging in there during a time when this kind of showbiz publication is barely surviving in competition with free online sources. Good on ’em. Wouldn’t be the same without something horrible and bloody staring back at me from the magazine racks. I mean, aside from any comics featuring the Red Lanterns.

I’m certainly not complaining about the sales.

filed under Categories retailing 20 Comments


Those of you unfortunate enough to have been reading my site for nearly six years may remember me mentioning this before, but briefly: several years ago, I received over the course of a week multiple calls from buyers all across the country seeking the last issue of Marvel’s Masters of the Universe series. And, as far as I can tell, there was no connection between the callers…or, at least, none that any of those folks were willing to admit to me. Anyway, you can read more about it that that link.

I bring that up because it’s kinda sort happening again, only with the customers who are actually walking into our shop, and with DC’s 1994 “event” series Zero Hour: Crisis in Time.

Now, I thought part of it may be that the trade paperback collecting the series was just recently reissued in a new printing…but that printing was dated 2006, which isn’t as recent as I thought.

It basically started when Employee Aaron noted that we were out of the Zero Hour trade, so I put in a reorder, and when it showed up, we just put in on the new arrivals bookshelf, intending eventually to file it onto the regular bookshelves. And it sold. Immediately. So I ordered another one, and when that came in, we put it on a little “featured graphic novels” shelf that we have. And it sold again.

And it keeps happening. And it isn’t just that we’re displaying it to customers and it’s an impulse buy. I’ve had multiple requests from folks looking for the copies of the five issue run of the series, whether or not the book itself is on display. Sometimes I get requests before I’ve restocked the Zero Hour bin after the previous sale, and I have to scurry back into the backroom and pull more sets.

I realize I’m making it sound like we’re selling hundreds of these things, and we’re not. It’s more like a dozen and a half or so over a few weeks, but given that sales on both the back issues and the collection have been hovering around slim-to-none for well over a decade and half, this sudden upswing in demand can’t help but stand out. I’ve probably sold more Zero Hour, in either format, in the last month than I have in the previous five years.

So, I’m wondering what’s the deal. When I noted this on the Twitter, pal Andres, who was one of the folks who purchased a copy of the trade from us, replied that he’d simply missed it the first time around and picked it up. He also opined that it may be a result of the current popularity of the Green Lantern franchise (as Hal Jordon is prominently featured in the series), which is possible, I suppose. Plus, there’s the fact that Dan Jurgens wrote and drew the series, and he’s one of DC’s more dependable creators, and a lot of the time-travel themes and characters he likes to explore (recently in Booster Gold and currently in the new Time Masters mini) are in this comic. (And there was that Booster Gold Zero Hour tie-in in the most recent series, but that was published a couple of years ago and doesn’t seem to have a whole lot to do with the current interest.) Or maybe it’s just that it’s a fun and colorful superhero story, with lots of guys and gals flyin’ around and punching each other, with some time travel stuff mixed in, and some nice Jurgens/Ordway art.

None of that explains why people are deciding to look for it and buy it now. Just coincidence? Something in the comic news media or a price-guide push or a footnoted “* see Zero Hour #3 for details! – Editor” in a comic I didn’t read? I suppose the next step is quizzing the customers about it, but I probably annoy them enough as it is.

…

Of course, simply by making a big deal about it here, we’ll now never sell another copy. Wouldn’t that just figure.

If any of you folks out there have noticed a similar upswing in sales of this series, or perhaps have your own theories, or even just believe I’m thinking about this too much, let me know in the comments.

Oh, hey, comics…they still publish those?

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, peanuts, retailing, this week's comics 7 Comments

So apparently what the people want is creepy hobo Charlie Brown, judging by the linkage and traffic I’ve been receiving lately. Thanks for encouraging my behavior, Other Internet Sites, though sadly I don’t have much else in the vagrant Peanuts character vein. However, it does remind me that I haven’t mentioned pal Nat‘s new book The Peanuts Collection, a neat compilation of photos and replica tchotchkes (like trading cards, rare booklets, cels, and such. He brought a copy by for me to poke through, and it’s certainly a neat and beautifully-done package. No Hobo Charlie Brown that I noticed, but you should probably buy a copy anyway, courtesy this little box here:


In other non-Peanuts news, people have been sending me the link to Our Valued Customers, a collection of one-panel cartoons presenting things said by customers and Overheard at The Comic Shop. Reminded me a bit of that mini-comic I did back in ’96, and posted here on my site, though my examples are more general “everyone’s heard ’em” quotes, and Our Valued Customers’ examples are more of the frothing-at-the-mouth type. As has been noted by a pal of mine, I’m not sure I’d draw actual caricatures of my customers and post them online, but hell, I can enjoy ’em and not have to worry about taking the heat if any of them find out. (Though, as I admit in that old post, one person in my mini, aside from the self-portrait, was an intended caricature…she hasn’t come back and killed me in the 14 years since, so I think I’m safe. …So far.)

In other news, some new comics came out this week:

  • The new Smurfs volume The Smurf King is out…still the same complaint about the lettering I had last time, but that still remains really my only complaint. Some fine, funny, witty cartooning that holds up all these decades later. Don’t dismiss it just because of the ’80s cartoon show…this is genuinely classic stuff.

  • Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #6 – I think maybe if the only superhero comics I’d read from now on were ones written by Grant Morrison, I’d probably be okay with that. I get all the wonderfully strange and inventive and near-celebratory superheroic storytelling that I want from his comics, compared to some other titles where it just feels like pages are getting filled. In this particular case, it’s a shame about the series’ timing, but still remains a satisfyingly odd exploration of the history of Batman and a solid chapter in Morrison’s ongoing Bat-saga.

  • Glamourpuss #16 – I’m the only person still reading this at our shop. I’m still enjoying it. Not even quite sure how or why I’m enjoying it, but Sim’s goofy combo of fashion industry parody and in-depth examinations of classic comic artists still keeps my attention.

  • Green Lantern Emerald Warriors #4 – I’m a sucker for still getting this. I just really like the Green Lantern concept, so I’m an easy mark.

  • Comic Book Guy The Comic Book #5 – End of the series, kind of wish there was more actual Comic Book Guy action throughout the story, but still a funny parade of knocks on the comics industry and the folks who enable it. In-jokey, but not overly so.

  • Muppet Sherlock Holmes #3 – The parody Muppet minis aren’t as strong as the ongoing Muppet Show series, which means they’re only excellent instead of perfect. Plus, I’m a big fan of Sherlock Holmes pastiches and parodies, so this is right up my alley.

  • Hellblazer: City of Demons #3 – Really have no idea why this didn’t just run in the regular series. It’s not a bad comic by any means, but the market doesn’t really need two Hellblazer comics on the stands at the same time. Nor does it need three Wolverine titles, but I think I’ve mentioned that enough.

  • The Incredible Hulks #616 – I was kinda hard on this title last time, since the proliferation of Hulk characters (hence the title change) was wearing on me a bit, but I find myself enjoying Bruce Banner/the Hulk’s responses to the situations they’re finding themselves in. But I’m pretty much ready to be done with the whole Sons of the Hulk thing.

  • T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1 – Okay, first, it’s a pain in the butt to type all those periods in that name. Second, I may have mocked this comic a little in the past, but the fact that Nick Spencer, the man currently writing the fantastic Jimmy Olsen back-up in Action Comics, is also writing this is very positive sign. It’s still an uphill battle, trying to get people invested in yet another new revival superhero series, but maybe it’ll actually have a chance if the writing is strong.

  • Dungeons & Dragons #1 – By all accounts, a good comic, I’m hearing. Yes, everyone is completely surprised by this fact. The retailer incentive variant had a cover that resembled the old D&D adventure modules from TSR, and even included an actual playable adventure that wasn’t in the regular version. IDW has this habit of making the incentive editions the cool thing that might actually sell well, instead of making the regularly-available issue awesome. Don’t put that photo cover of handsome bastard 1960s William Shatner on your variant, put him on your regular Star Trek cover…and don’t make just the variant D&D book look like a module, make ’em all look like that. That variant grabbed the eye of everyone who looked at it, far more than the generic fantasy covers of the regular editions that simply blend in on the rack.

  • Avengers: Children’s Crusade #3, Avengers Prime #4, New Avengers #6, I Am An Avenger #4, Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes #1 – sigh.

  • Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali hardcovers – one version is at the original “treasury edition” size, the other at the standard comic book size (but containing additional unpublished art), and I’m unclear, since they arrived shrinkwrapped…are they both recolored by Neal Adams’ studio? If so, that’s a shame, but the fact remains that this really is one of the greatest Superman stories of all time, and if you can’t get your mitts on the original, I’d recommend the treasury-sized hardcover over the smaller one, regardless of the extra material. This comic needs to be read BIG.

“Hi! I’m a Rogue button!”

filed under Categories buttons, retailing 11 Comments


“Hi, Rogue button!”

Sorry, this is all I have for today’s post. Actual content will resume tomorrow. …Boy, Rogue sure looked different back then. Found this button when we were doing a little cleaning up/emptying of storage areas around the shop…sold tons of these white-background X-Men buttons back in the early-to-mid 1980s.

Also found during the clean-up: an envelope containing $3 we owed to pal Cully for selling copies of his Skulldog Comics mini, $6 we owe to a guy for selling his mini-comic even though I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen the guy in over a decade, a stack of Thieves World novels I was supposed to take home a long time ago, an ersatz Oscar statue prop left behind by a friend when he used our shop for a student film he was making, a love letter written to a former employee (sorry, Timmy, not you), some foil Pokemon stickers (none of them of the greatest Pokemon of all time), and the Peanuts comic that I scanned from for yesterday’s post.

I suspect if we continue cleaning out our cabinets, we’ll eventually find out what happened to former employee Nathan.

Yesterday was the Monty Python reference, today is the Firesign Theatre one.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, employee aaron, pal plugging, retailing, sir-links-a-lot, watchmen 5 Comments

So Wednesday I had a customer ask me where he could find the Black Freighter comic book, as seen in the Watchmen film. “Only in Watchmen, my friend,” I told him, but I’m still really surprised no new comic-format tie-ins to the film were released. A “replica” Black Freighter comic would have been kind of neat, and perhaps not as…off-putting to the purists as, say, a Nite Owl & Silk Spectre mini-series. Well, there was that fan-made attempt at reconstructing the comic from its excerpts in Watchmen. But I suppose the Black Freighter DVD that was released made an actual comic book release redundant.

…Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m about a year out of date with this Watchmen movie tie-in talk. Look, I’ve been out of it for about a week, and this guy really did ask me this yesterday. I gotta work with what I got, man.

Also, pal Brandon passed this link along to me, and I was going to put it up as one of my sick day posts, but a quick Googling showed that it already made the rounds on some of the comic news sites. But, eh, what the hell…a song about Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl. It ain’t too shabby.

And in all my griping over the last few days about my painful dental issues, I see I never did mention that poor ol’ Employee Aaron managed to get one of his toes broken. No, no, not as a result of a cruel and unfair punishment meted out by me for violating one of our draconian workplace rules. This time. He was doing something at home, like, I think, saving a bunch of nuns and orphans from a buffalo stampede, when he tripped and fell, and, whoops, there goes the pinkie toe. So Sir Aaron Limps-a-lot is staggering around the shop, I can’t talk to anyone because my cheek has swollen up into a hot, painful lump the size of a Ford Festiva, and Ralph has pneumonia, dengue fever and the yaws…we’re a fine bunch.

Speaking of Watchmen, and not speaking of all us sick crew, as I was trying to find that Black Freighter reconstruction, I came across this photo of (presumably authentic) Watchmen film props for the Black Freighter comic and the Tijuana Bible. The user who uploaded that image has other Watchmen items from the film, including some of the magazines…that New Yorker would be a neat item to have.

In other news:

  • So former employee pal Sean‘s band, The Kill Junkies, just released their first album Steamroller which is available from Amazon in that convenient MP3 format. It’s more metal than a really metal thing filled with metal, so it may not be for gentler ears, but Sean’s a swell guy and I’m happy to support his creative endeavors.

  • And now…NAKED SUPERMAN AND BATMAN (safe for work, from a Code-approved comic)! I find the jar containing the brain of the Gorilla Boss (visible in one of the panels) to be simultaneously creepy and sad.

  • I am slowly…very slowly…almost too slowly…going through and tagging my older posts, and the most recent effort was made tagging most of my Watchmen posts. Now you can more easily find my writings on that particular topic, including the single greatest Watchmen post to ever appear on any comic blog, ever.

What you don’t what to hear your dentist say as he’s looking in your mouth: “What the hell is that?”

filed under Categories pal plugging, retailing 13 Comments

The pain is (mostly) gone, but I’m still pretty wiped out from a night of not really sleeping, and a day of a mouth sore from multiple novocaine injections and metal tools digging into my teeth. Hey, who has abnormally long tooth roots? THIS GUY. Anyway, I’m keeping it short today, and let’s hope for a fresh start next week, without any unexpected medical shenaniganery.

BEHOLD:

  • On one hand, DC Comics is dropping prices on many $3.99 titles down to $2.99. On the other hand, stories are dropping down to 20 pages from 22. Not sure how I feel about that, especially since, unless sales increase significantly across the board, this is only delaying the inevitable line-wide price increase. At the very least, this creates some breathing room to decide what to do next, which hopefully won’t be 20 pages for $3.99.

    Judging from the reaction I’ve seen online, 20 story pages is less of a disincentive than the higher cover price, which only makes sense…no one wants to pay more money for funnybooks, especially in this economy. But I do worry a bit about the lack of perceived value. Is the loss of two pages really that big of a deal? Depends on the book, I guess…I’m not going to want to see three or four splash pages in one story any more, unless there’s darn good reason for it. Related: will there be a trend away from decompressed storytelling in the periodical market because of the page count decrease?

    …Just some of the random thoughts that came to mind…when I’m fully functioning again, I’ll try to ponder it further. Plus, I’ll probably run the news past some of my customers, and get some feedback from them.

    Also…was it Jenette Kahn who said that when she took over as publisher of DC, one of the first things she wanted to do is increase the page count from 17 to 23 pages, and give the kids more bang for their half-buck? That’s my memory, anyway…this current situation brought that to mind, for some reason.

    One other thing: that new Jimmy Olsen back-up in Action Comics better spin off into its own series, if it’s losing its slot due to the price/page drop. I think we’re all down with a new Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen comic book series by that creative team.

    And another other thing: Marvel announced that they’ll stick to $2.99 for new series starting in 2011. No word on page count, but I’m guessing they’ll keep at 22 pages, for now, just to stick it a little to DC.

  • Give my pal Euge twelve bucks for his new album:


    Limited edition CD of awesome nerdrap, with bonus disc and button, plus immediate digital downloads. GIVE THE MAN YOUR MONEY. (You can also listen to all the tracks from the main disc, in full, on that page.)

    BONUS: Unexpected Swamp Thing reference in one of the songs! I ain’t tellin’ you where.

Behold my mastery of graphic manipulation.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, does mike ever shut up, employee aaron, market crash, retailing, siegel & shuster, sir-links-a-lot 8 Comments

So anyway, I did this as a quickie gag for a couple of friends in email, and the files have been sitting on my desktop for a few days, so what the heck, here you go:


SUPERMOBILE


CLARK KENTMOBILE

Just grabbed the pic via the Googling, so hopefully I didn’t offend anyone with my repurposing his/her scan. It was for the purpose of creating a better world, my friend.

Anyway, in other news:

  • Regarding that panel I posted yesterday…I felt a little funny picking out a panel by freakin’ Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, for a bit of good-natured mockery. I mean, it seems almost sacrilegious, doesn’t it? Anyway, that panel was from a strip called “Federal Men,” which ran for quite a while in the various iterations of early Adventure Comics. You can read descriptions of some of the stories here. A reprint collection of these stories would be interesting, but I’m not holding my breath.

    By the way, speaking of sacrilege: here’s reader Todd with his slight reworking of the panel:


  • Tom Spurgeon has some commentary from one of his readers about comic pricing and buying habits. In particular, there is some discussion about the likelihood of someone spending more than $20 a week on comics in the late 1980s. As someone who entered the high-finance world of funnybook retailing in the late ’80s, I thought I’d supply a brief bit of anecdotal…well, perhaps not “evidence,” but it may be of interest.

    Starting about the mid-’80s, and off and on through the late ’80s, our shop had a box of overstock and/or deadstock comics by the register with a sign on it that read “FREE COMIC WITH $20 PURCHASE.” And, it is my memory that the $20 level was originally picked because 1) it wasn’t a price level that was normally breached terribly often by the majority of customers, but 2) it was close enough to what a significant portion of customers were spending that the hope was that they’d plop another comic or two on the pile to hit $20 and qualify for their free comic.

    Now…and please consider, I’m working off decades-old memories here…I believe that we had some, but not a lot, of customers slapping on additional comics to get to twenty bucks, but that eventually we had enough people already buying twenty dollars’ worth of stuff without going back and grabbing an extra book or two that they got their free comic anyway. And, eventually still, sometime around the big Batman movie-fueled boom, we did away with it completely. (I suppose we could have just raised the price level to, say, $30 or $40 for the free book, but at the time rivers of cash were flowing through the direct market and thus, perhaps the need to encourage additional sales in that fashion was no longer as strong.)

    Later, we briefly did a “spend $50, get a free poster” thing along these same lines, which I’m pretty sure was in the post-market crash years of the mid ’90s. And that tells me that, even though the high-livin’ days of the boom were long gone, the customer base that remained was spending far more on average than they had pre-boom, so that $50 now seemed like the just-above-average typical sales level that seemed achievable.

    My memory was that was more about clearing out old poster stock than hoping people would hit $50, which, like what happened with the $20 level, is something people gradually started doing anyway.

    Wish I remembered more details about these things. Should’ve kept better notes.

  • Speaking of our retail past: Chris Sims recently concocted this Comics Alliance article about comic book bumper stickers, and in the comments section to it, someone mentioned our old “U.S. OUT OF LATVERIA” stickers that we had at the shop. [NOTE FOR MY DAD, WHO READS MY BLOG: Latveria is the fictional country that the Fantastic Four’s arch-nemesis, Dr. Doom, hails from.] Now, I tried to respond to said comment with a link to a post on my site featuring said sticker, but alas, the CA comment machine does not like linkity-links, so instead I’ll post that link here.

    And before you ask: no, I don’t have any more. Sorry, kids.

  • More Comico history: the transition to color printing, including some early and neat-looking coloring guides for a page from the original Mage series.

  • Pal Dorian does terrible things to an old DC subscription pitch. TERRIBLE THINGS.

  • Employee Aaron’s fiancée Kempo whips out her 2010 San Diego Comic-Con report, with lots of photos of the two of them eating meals.

  • I’d noted something on my Twitter the other day, and thought I’d repeat it here: you know what I’d like to see Christopher Nolan name the third Batman movie? The Caped Crusader. That’d be pretty awesome, right? Yeah, I knew you’d agree.

I haven’t mentioned “Ghost Rider” on this site for nearly two years.

filed under Categories retailing 4 Comments

So this turned up in a collection at the shop…it’s one of the pack-in comic books from a Marvel Legends Toy Biz action figure, this one reprinting Ghost Rider #2 from 1990. (The reprint itself is dated 2002.)


First thing we noticed was the fuzziness of the cover image, like it was taken from a bad scan or photo. And not just that…check this out:


Those small white creases there? That’s not spine damage on the reprint comic. That’s spine damage on the original comic this cover was scanned from. Apparently it was crazy hard to find a mint copy of Ghost Rider #2 a whole twelve years after the fact. (Should’ve asked us…we could have sent them a whole pile to choose from.)

Well, okay, there may have been other factors involved here, like, say “OH CRAP we need the cover for this scanned like five minutes ago, HURRY UP FIND A COPY,” or “man, just scan the file copy, no one’s gonna care that it doesn’t look mint except some dork on a blog eight years from now.”

On a related note: a long time ago…why, way back in the year foretold by Prince, 1999…I was contacted by someone either at Marvel, or someone doing some design work for Marvel, seeking a cover scan of Amazing Spider-Man #122 for a trade paperback they were working on. I just happened to have a copy in the shop at the time, and sent a scan along…and eventually Spider-Man: The Death of Gwen Stacymade it to the shelves, and lo, there was a blurb in the book thanking our store for helping out. When the next edition of the bookwas released, the credit was gone, but we enjoyed our moment in the sun. Oh, and SPOILER: Gwen Stacy dies.

And in case you’re wondering…no, that copy of Amazing Spider-Man #122 I scanned wasn’t in mint condition. Man, it’d only been out for 26 years, we couldn’t cough up a mint copy? We suck.

Odds & Ends.

filed under Categories retailing, sir-links-a-lot 5 Comments

  • To you folks out there who 1) visit my site directly instead of just pulling the RSS feed, and 2) use some form of Internet Explorer, I apologize for the font size problem yesterday. I had an HTML tag that I didn’t close, and I didn’t notice since I’m on Firefox and that seems to correct for display errors like that, but apparently the problem caused IE, at least in some cases, to go haywire.

    Anyway, I’m pretty sure it’s fixed now.

  • I was discussing late comics with some pals the other day, because that’s the kind of thing I do after I get a couple of drinks* in me, and the topic of Batman: Widening Gyre popped up. So I went through the records, and here are the dates of release (well, actually, the date the invoices were generated, with the comic coming out the following Wednesday):

    #1 – 8/23

    #2 – 9/26/09

    #3 – 10/31/09

    #4 – 1/9/10

    #5 – 3/6/10

    #6 – 7/24/10

    So, eleven months or thereabouts, which averages out to about bimonthly, if one were to be charitable. Also noticed that this time around, I didn’t get the parade of complaints demanding the next issue during that extended delay between 5 and 6. Perhaps the reason is that, if one were again charitable, customers finally have learned to expect some comics to ship late.

    Hmm. When Batman and Robin is only a week late, I never hear the end of it. Funny.

  • So I was looking at Scott McCloud’s site, and he snapped a pic of some cosplayers he spotted while at the theatre to see Scott Pilgrim…and lo and behold, at the bottom center of the pic, with the green hair and baseball bat, is pal Dana, she of cookies, cakes, and holiday cards. I guess she’s dressed as, I don’t know, Matilda or something. Hey, I didn’t read this “Scoot Pogom” comic.

    Anyway, our little pal Dana is moving away and going off to big person’s school up north at the end of the week, so she’s just going to have to mail us cookies and cupcakes from now on. She’s not getting away that easily. But good luck, Dana! We’ll miss having you around, but we’ll still be able to annoy you via the Internet! Thank God for technology!

  • Reader JB sends along this link to a convention sketch of Swamp Thing by Bill Sienkiewicz. Pretty darn cool.

  • I don’t even have the words for Andrew’s latest Nobody’s Favorites. It’s a little outside the realm of comics, but Andrew wouldn’t break the format if it wasn’t for good reason.

  • Do nerds ruin everything? YOU MAKE THE CALL. (In this case, yes, but I’d totally buy one of these.)

  • James Marsters is returning to Smallville for that show’s 200th episode, but not reprising his role as Brainiac. He’s coming back as Legion of Super-Heroes member Brainiac 5. This is…actually pretty clever, I think. Plus, maybe we’ll get him slathered in green body paint which, it goes without saying, is a fetish for someone, surely.

* Diet Cokes, mostly.