Brock

Only the ones with the 25 cent covers.

Simu Liu is Chinese, not Korean - born in Harbin, China.

Numeris (Canadian equivalent to Neilsen) estimates about 1,000,000 viewers weekly in Canada, plus it streams on Netflix.

Simu Liu is pretty well known in markets as diverse as Canada, Korea and Singapore. Don’t confuse the fact that you don’t know him with the idea that he’s unknown. In fact, in casting him, Marvel may be tipping its hand that the film’s marketing strategy is less about the US than it is about the international market, as many others have suggested here. Overall, it also seems that the approach here seems NOT to be to cast the next Robert Downey Jr., but to find the next Chris Pratt and turn him into a star.

I would guess that it’s an original drawing, meant to be an image of the reporter himself - same hat, similar glasses, etc. Maybe for a retirement or get well soon party?

Back then, everybody was Kung Fu fighting - those kids were fast as lightning! In fact, it was a little bit frightening, but they fought with expert timing.

I think that depends what you mean by fan base... For years, every time someone in these boards talked about great series of the past, MoKF would be mentioned by multiple boardies. It never registered that way with me - but I was bigger into obscure characters like Starlord and Rocket Raccoon. It wasn’t me that made GotG big, and MoKF’s fan base won’t make Shang Chi into a hit, but even these small groups of supporters suggest that the concepts could resonate more widely.

Kind of like Incredible Hulk 271, Marvel Preview 4 & 7, and Jungle Action 5?

Here's another to keep the thread alive...

Plus, one says NEWSSTAND and the other says DIRECT. It's pretty easy when you get the hang of it.

Marvel Action Universe #1 reprints Spider-Man ans His Amazing Friends... that could be worth a look too.

In my mind, it may not be quite that straightforward. To the best of my knowledge, Scholastic does not release any sales info for individual books, but we can infer a fair bit from existing sources. First, we know that Scholastic sales are huge. In 2016, comic blogger Ben Towle (benzilla.com) put together some reasonable estimates suggesting that as many as 19.5 million US youth participate annually in Scholastic book fairs. For accuracy's sake, about 115,000 book fairs are held in the US each year. Plus, for many schools, there are catalogues (think of a mini Previews) that are sent home with each student for independent orders on a monthly basis. Of course, Scholastic also distributes its books (using similar approaches) across the English-speaking world, including Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and India (collectively a market that is as much as 5 times larger than the US). From this we can infer that the Scholastic market is exponentially larger than the direct market, or possibly even the US bookstore market. We can also see that the scope and scale of the marketing and distribution system are massive - so large that the company has 9,700 employees. So how does this affect comic sales? Again, we have few exact numbers, but there are some interesting indicators. In a 2014 interview with the Beat (comicsbeat.com), Ted Adams of IDW talked about the importance of Scholastic to IDW's publishing strategy. He said: The other place that I think is a great feeder system for comics but doesn’t get talked about much is the Scholastic book fairs and book clubs. We’ve had tremendous success with them over the years, most recently in the current Scholastic catalogue there are three IDW products, My Little Pony, Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One each of those books in the current catalogue. I just got the sell through on those and it’s also extraordinary, it’s through the roof. Adams was then asked if the Scholastic system actually worked for comic publishers (which is basically your question, too). He replied: Oh it actually worked. We’ve been selling to them for years. When pressed for specific numbers, Adams said: They’re actually looking to be completely sold out by summer. So you’re talking about virtually 100% sell through in significant six figure quantities for all three of those books. This suggests that, in 2014 IDW was selling AT LEAST 100,000 copies of single My Little Pony, Transformers and TMNT collections through Scholastic, and possible many, many more ("significant six figure quantities" being hard to pin down). We can compare these numbers with IDW's bookstore sales, using Brian Hibb's annual BookScan summary, and it shows that in bookstores, IDW's 2014 top sellers were Skylanders: The Kaos Trap (almost 12,000 sold), Locke and Key (8,602 sold), and My Little Pony (7,753 sold). This suggests to me that for a book like My Little Pony, Scholastic sales were AT LEAST 13 times higher through Scholastic than through bookstores as a whole (using Adams' six-figure comment as a 100,000 unit baseline) and potentially much, much higher. It seems likely to me that we can apply similar multipliers to Marvel's books through Scholastic, though this is obviously an approximation. So if Ms. Marvel Vol. 1 sold 11,479 volumes for Marvel in bookstores in 2014 (as suggested in the posts above), it's not unreasonable to estimate that Scholastic could have sold AT LEAST another 149,000 copies through their distribution system. We can quibble about the exact number, but the scale of the sales is evident. In terms of how this impacts Marvel's publishing plans, it's important to keep in mind that Marvel has always underperformed in the bookstore and collected edition component of the market, where competitors like Image and DC have run circles around it. In part, this is because it lacks perennial sellers like Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns, and (IMHO) because its constant relaunches make it difficult to know which collected volumes of any given series to read next. Everyone knows what the next volume of Sandman or Walking Dead to read is, but it's hard to know what volume of Avengers is next... So, in an environment where Marvel struggles to succeed, a single buyer like Scholastic can definitely be the tail wagging the dog. Sales of 5,000 copies in BookScan or in the Direct Market can't tell the story about Scholastic. However, Marvel itself has suggested that these sales are strong (and they must have SOME rationale for continuing to publish these books), and the circumstantial evidence presented here helps to explain the wider context. Not necessarily proof positive, but I think this is pretty compelling.

I think this other market dwarfs the direct sales market... Rain Telgemeier is a legitimate comics superstar, and earns millions a year from her comics, but few on these boards have probably read any of her work. However, few people playing in that "other" market (served by Scholastic a range of specialist publishers) see any of their books rising in price in the back issue market (the thrust of this thread). It's interesting to see, though, how Ms. Marvel crosses these two solitudes - selling well in the "other" market, while her back issues continue to rise in "our" market. In that context, there are very few comparators - maybe Bone, Walking Dead and Saga? Perhaps Maus (with early editions/appearances being so pricy)?

This has always been my strategy - it's left me with 3 NM copies Devil Dinosaur #1, and 5 of Eternals #1 - plus 3 copies of Nova #1, 7 copies of She-Hulk #1, and 11 copies of Ms. Marvel #1. "Be greedy when others are fearful..."

There's a very detailed thread on these books in the Copper section.

It's mostly text stories, but there are a number of Gulacy pages (some are NSFW). Here's a couple of examples:

Here's a more obscure one by Don McGregor (Sabre) and Paul Gulacy.

I think the series is still flying a little under the radar, though the television PR machine is starting to ramp up now. Some of Rucka's past work (e.g. Whiteout) hasn't really benefited from moving to other media, and some other TV shows haven't cased much back issue action for older indie books (e.g. Wynona Earp). Having said that, I'm pretty bullish about Stumptown. It's one of my favourite comics of all time, but it definitely didn't get much notice as it was coming out. If the series is half as good, the very low print runs on this books could send it through the roof. Plus, with the rise in price for back issues of The Boys and Umbrella Academy, there could be a bit of a FOMO effect.

Looks like this thread is making a comeback... Let me add a few cool books:

Nice books! Welcome to the Boards.

DCCP 22 is still definitely the hardest, though high prices are starting to bring more copies out. I think Action 508 is not that hard, and Flash 286 is fairly easy. Legion 264 seems to be very easy at the moment. In terms of the current market, I think JLA 179 is the toughest. As always, DCCP 1, 2 and 3 are the easiest Whitmans.

I saw some remaindered CrossGen TPBs at a Dollarama n Niagara a few years ago, but that’s the only time I’ve seen comics.

I think this may be getting confused with DC Comics Presents #22, which many didn’t believe existed until about 5 years ago. For awhile, there were only a handful of known copies of that book, though we must be up to 40 or so by now (which is still very scarce). In my mind, Sgt Rock 329 is also a tough book, but not to the same degree as DCCP 22. I would say there are likely a few hundred copies out there. I would also say that this book is EXTREMELY difficult in high grade. However, I do think that Sgt Rock 329 is tougher than several of the so-called big 8 Whitman variants. Please note that these are my impressions, and I have no hard evidence to back this up... just that I’ve been watching them for about 15 years.

I see that quite a bit... Of course, that might be what it takes to get CGC to label the books correctly. I have 4 or 5 where CGC has assigned them the wrong number. Sometimes, it’s not that big a deal. Like I have a Wonder Woman #250 labelled as #251. But that’s OK, because I also have a #251 labelled as a #250.

I’ve also seen Keanu Reeves mentioned for this...