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Free Comic Book Day 2011
No one has made a thread yet, but it's coming up! Here's the list. Some interesting stuff on there, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Darkwing Duck, and The Misadventures of Adam West(!?).
Comments
Ok, I forgot The Tick, but Inspector Gadget sucks.
The Mouse Guard one is pretty awesome, as expected.
The Darkwing Duck one is actually pretty good, and I will definitely be keeping an eye on it. It's got a pretty cool "Dark Knight Returns" vibe to it. (The chapter is even titled "The Duck Knight Returns")
I also picked up Castle Waiting and Stuff of Legend Vol 2 and that's not even released on Amazon until 05/17. Got them on discount because of FCBD.
For those who got Stuff of Legend check it out. Seriously, it's good stuff.
Do people really buy these 12 dollar variant covers? They're just a joke, right?
Basically the variant cover scam works like this. The publisher prints the variant cover at a certain rate depending on the issue. Pretend it's 1/75. That means if the comic book store orders 75 issues of the comic, they'll get one copy with the variant cover. If they order 150 they'll get two copies. There are so few comic book stores per variant issue that there is at least one moron per comic shop who wants that variant really badly.
The publishers are happy because this artificially raises the sales figures for that comic. Since the sales figures are counted by how many issues were sold to comic shops, not to people, a comic might appear to be a hot seller when it really just has a rare variant cover. Meanwhile all these comic shops are sitting there with 50 issues they can't sell just because they wanted the one variant cover they could sell at a ridiculous price to a crazy collector. Even if no crazy collectors come into their store, they can always sell the variant cover on eBay for a crazy high price. There are people paying a lot more than $12 for these things. Try $70+ depending on the issue.
The comic shop does the math and figures out it can make more profit on selling that one variant cover than what it cost to buy those 75 regular issues it mostly can't sell. Those 75 other issues end up at conventions in the dollar and/or fifty-cent bins.
By catering to these few crazy collectors and ignoring normal people the US comic industry has the same problems as the anime industry with its moe-ness. Actually, the other way around because the comic industry had the problems first.