Daniel Block of Titan Games and Comics in
It's rare we ever comment on these issues (as a store), but the new Spidey book kind of needs the comment. Regardless of blind pre-solicits with no schedule of media news releases and no pre-announcements, Marvel really goofed on this. I mean big time. This was a perfect opportunity to do a "giveaway book" ala Free Comic Book Day, when they could have hit a non-core audience, built goodwill and traffic for their core retailers, and brought the comics medium back into the spotlight for a short time. I know that I would have ordered 400+ copies for our three stores at a price anywhere near cost, and considered it marketing. Instead we chose to order slightly up on a Mark Waid story with a 5-page follow up about the next President, but not enough to bring us back to out June issue levels for the "order level."
So, zero variants for us. All of our subscribers and regulars will get the basic issue, and we'll even have a few for the shelf. We're not going to lose a dime or a nights sleep over this. I'd love to be able to give my regulars this variant, but not when I lose money on each copy. We don't and won't play the hot issue game and shill for every dime we're worth. We will offer folks looking for this book the Topps Obama trading cards we got one week before the mass market though. Way to go Topps -- clear support and solicits for the often neglected core market.
We've been at this 25 years and we've seen this before with Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. We choose to not play this game; it net's us no new customers and does us no favors for the future. Instead, we'll focus on selling those Topps cards, and every other book that came out this week. Did anyone else notice the real must read/must have book this week? Final Crisis #6 with the death of Batman, anyone?
As a side note. How did Marvel handle accounts that had no previous issue to meet a level? Did they punish them in some way for having ordered more of a title during the summer, before a series of basically one-off creative teams began? We chose not to increase our order by the 30% that this book dropped off for us over the last six months. We're still cutting the title as subscribers and walk-ins drop the book, and hope the slide on one of Marvel's most "center of universe" characters stops soon. If Marvel would like to swap us any #583 variants for all of the dead stock #560-582's we have we'd also welcome that. We could probably cobble together a couple of hundred.
The (admittedly limited) newsstand got to return them, but we never did so I guess in some ways we've really already qualified in terms of absolute numbers on Amazing Spider-Man.
The opinions expressed in this Talk Back article are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
