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Thursday, February 10, 2005
Thoughts on Opening Comic Boxes
Vimanarama not only has a very complicated pun for a title, but the story assumes that the reader has some familiarity with a culture other than the Western hegemony, so I'm guessing it's not going to sell as well as the violent animal book or the funny super-hero.
Menage A Trois managed to be timely with their Super Bowl themed cover. (No, I'm not kidding. I wish I were.)
I was successful in my anticipation that Young Avengers would have a "big shock and surprise" revelation in its first issue, and I was right. I was just wrong about which character. But since "Patriot" still hasn't been unmasked, there's still a chance that there will be a "big shock" there as well. Heck, I'm kinda hoping that each issue ends with a character unmasking to reveal some terrible secret.
Marvel's reprint projects are of increasingly dicey quality. The quality of their recent reprint of the famous Sub-Mariner/Human Torch battle was shameful, with figures reduced to indistinct colored blurs, and from what I hear it was pretty much the same inside the Golden Age Masterworks volume. And now Marvel Weddings not only has terrible reproductions of older material (which I'm prepared to forgive if no good copies of the source material were available), but more recent comics, such as the wedding of Scott Summer and Jean Grey, are also washed out and look like unfocused photographs of actual comic pages.
So, we finally got our replacement copies of Previews, and as I finish up bagging all of them, I realize I forgot to check them to make sure they were complete. So I have to unbag and check each one. Which was fun.
But Dorian, you ask, why do you bag Previews in the first place? Well, in a way, it's all Marvel's fault. When they started putting the Marvel solicitations in a separate book, we tried putting it inside Previews to insure that everyone who bought a copy would also get a copy of the Marvel booklet. We also made sure to get plenty of copies of just the Marvel booklet on its own, as experience has taught us that plenty of people were only buying Previews for the Marvel solicitations. And what ended up happening was that people would take the Marvel booklet out of the Diamond catalog and buy it separately. We discouraged this as much as possible, but people still tried it. All the time. So we ended up with a small pile of unsellable copies of Previews. So now we just bag up the Marvel booklet and the Diamond catalog together, because we'd rather lose six cents on a bag than $2.25 on a book with a very limited shelf-life.
And I'm sorely tempted to spoil the ending of next week's Wolverine #25. I will probably write about it once the issue ships, but let's just say for now that it's not hard to guess why Marvel editorial felt that this character was expendable.
