Andrew Iwamasa of Collector's Corner in Midland, Michigan saw the news about the fall-out concerning Captain America #25 (see 'Death of Cap Press Overwhelms Retailers') and thinks Marvel should have let retailers know that additional first printing copies would be made available sooner:

Over the past two days I've been having quite a lot of conversations with my customers, both new and old.  Obviously Marvel wanted to keep this story line quiet, however it was, from a retailer's standpoint, hard to deal with.

Now I applaud the fact that there are more copies now available and that we're going to be able to get them to everyone that wants them, however after watching some of the amazing prices that they have gone for on e-Bay already, I wonder what those customers are going to think of Marvel releasing more copies of the book they just paid over $30/copy for.

How hard would it have been to have Marvel release, either to the public, or to Diamond (heck, even directly to the retailers would have been nice), that there would be more first printings of this comic available?  Would that have hurt the original sales?  Probably a little, but is that worth the negative backlash that I believe is going to be heard due to the way they've handled it?  I doubt it.  There were comments that they weren't bound or ready to ship, for whatever reason, and that's fine too.  I understand there is a lot going on that I don't know about as a retailer, but more communication would have been better.

Look at the press that the Death of Superman got.  The sales were there.  The availability was there.  Granted I don't know the last time I saw one of those sell on the secondary market, but that really shouldn't be Marvel's concern anyway (Unless they are trying to affect the secondary market and sales, which I suppose could be another whole story anyway...).

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