RockMyAmadeus

Yup. It's been the case since at least SDCC last year.

You should have told him they were the first editions, with original cover and everything.

Neal Adams is smarter than us, you see.

It's because JSC has been fed the lie by unscrupulous "facilitators" that anyone and everyone slabbing is doing it for "phat stacks of cash", and he thinks that's unfair to him. He is as anti-slabbing as it is possible to be, and still be willing to tolerate it. No one's bothered to explain it to him otherwise. He told me...to my face, mind you...that I would have to wait to get my books signed, because he had to sign "for the fans." Because you see, after all, everyone slabbing isn't a fan. And it's the scummy "corporate facilitators" (whose names are all over the SS area) who, themselves, aren't fans, and lie to creators to gain access, telling them that everyone slabbing is doing it "for the money", and they can get them their "fair share" of that "money" if they become "exclusive" with them. It's nothing but deliberate misrepresentation, on purpose, to get THEMSELVES that "money." And then they have the unmitigated gall to complain about people lying to creators about their intentions WITH THEIR OWN PROPERTY. It's comedy that Shakespeare couldn't write.

Whether you contact them or not, the statement by you "yet you make claims that there is no way to backup, ever." is not true. There is a way to backup my claim: ask Kirkman or Tony Moore. I have confirmed it. If you don't trust me....and there's no reason why you should...then you'll have to ask them yourself.

It's funny that you are so hard to come down on Comichron numbers, yet you make claims that there is no way to backup, ever. Also...everyone needs to be honest when having these sorts of discussions, especially if someone is going to challenge what someone else says. You added bolding where there wasn't any originally...but let's emphasize another part of that quote: It is a fact that both Kirkman and Moore had copies of WD #1 that they sold at conventions in 2003-2004. You need only ask them. But notice the emphasis I added up there: "I suspect"...it means I do not know, but believe it to be true. It represents an opinion. It means that I could very well be wrong. In other words, it's a qualified statement. Do not misunderstand me: I very much appreciate that you're willing to challenge the things people say here. VERY much. It keeps people sharp and on their toes. But if you're going to do that, you need to be on your toes as well.

It's funny that you are so hard to come down on Comichron numbers, yet you make claims that there is no way to backup, ever. Sure there's a way to back it up. See the address at the back of the latest Walking Dead issue? You can contact Kirkman directly that way. Write him, see what he says. Unless you don't believe Kirkman....? And I am not "hard to come down on" Comichron numbers. The numbers that JJM provides to the collecting community are invaluable, and a great service. I come down on the people who MISUSE those numbers, who don't understand those numbers, and who repeat those numbers in ways they are not intended to be used and don't mean.

Oops! Dang it. That was supposed to be spelled with a T, and I hit the wrong key. Now I can't edit it or anything...

Noob. Douché!

The eBay comics board started 19 years and 3 months ago. That wasn't the first online comics message board, but it was one of the first that was exclusive to comics (as opposed to those sub sections in .rec.arts) and one of the first in that format (scrolling message format.) Very few people can claim to have been inaugural members. I'm one. If only I'd known.....

Noob.

Well.

Compare those Cap City numbers with New Mutants #98 - 52k...and #100...104k....and X-Force #1....800+k....and you see that the orders for ASM were pretty dismal for the era.

Thanks Brock! As you can see, not a substantial bump for #300, and numbers about where New Mutants was when Liefeld took over. Pretty sad, all things considered.

I don't have my Krause handy; what were Cap city's orders for #298-305? They were shockingly low, all things considered.

Probably not. A full 8 years separated them. In comic book readership terms, that used to be a lifetime. I suspect that the juvenile and adolescent boys who made up the bulk of readership of ASM #200 had long since left comics behind by issue #300. I further suspect that it was the ho hum response to X-Men #200 in late 1985 that might have had something to do with the ho hum response to #300. And, historically, anniversary issues, by virtue of their being anniversary issues, have never done well, because retailers typically "over order" them (which was true of #300, by the way), and very little happens...ASM #300 just turned out to be the massive exception. And....it being Venom's first appearance didn't much matter until 1992-ish, with the Carnage 3-part storyline in #361-363, and then, of course, Lethal Protector the next year.

There was a gigantic shift in buying habits between February, 1988, when ASM #300 was published, and December, 1990, when New Mutants #98 was published. Despite claims by some, nobody was buying "cases" of ASM #300 to "put away." That's one of the reasons why 1. it's so valuable, and 2. it's comparatively rare in ultra high grade. When I say "nobody", I don't mean the 5 or 10 speculators nationwide who were doing so at the time. By the time NM #98 was published, people...normal, every day people, not hard core speculators...were buying multiple copies of the book, hoping to cash in on "the next McFarlane." ASM #300 came out at a time when nobody had really heard of McFarlane, and only a handful of books...Hulk #340-342 (which relatively few were reading at the time, compared to, say, X-Men, which was in the middle of Fall of the Mutants, and still selling very well), and Detective #578, which no self-respecting Marvel Zombie had even seen. ASM #300 took a lot of people by surprise, but it wasn't even an instant sellout (again, despite claims of others.) If you look at ads by national dealers of the time....American Comics/Entertainment, East Coast Comics, J&S, Mile High, etc...you'll notice that they had copies of ASM #300 for a small premium available throughout calendar year 1988. It's only as we move into the middle of 1989 that copies finally began to dry up, and prices started to inch up past the $5 mark. Prior to ASM #300, you had #298 and #299, in which McFarlane's pencils were absolutely buried by McLeod. Like dropping the pages in quicksand. You can't see much of McFarlane in those books at all. As a result, the vast, vast majority of copies of ASM #300 ordered were sold, one by one by one, to individuals. There weren't a lot of people buying multiple copies of that book brand new, which has had a tremendous affect on its survival rate in very high grade. NM #98, on the other hand, came out after Liefeld had been on the book for over a year, just after the massive superhit (and, I believe, the best selling X-crossover up to that point in time), of X-Tinction Agenda, and Cable mania is growing, and so you get a lot of people buying multiple copies the day or week of release, bagging and boarding them, and then never taking another look at them for the next 20 years. And, of course, everyone and their mother's sister's husband's first cousin once removed had bought multiple copies of Spiderman #1 just 6 months before, hoping to cash in, and would do so again with X-Force #1 and X-Men #1 the next summer.

Who said it had a print run of 7,266...? Whoever said that...and whoever repeated it...is wrong. Kirkman and Moore both had several hundred...if not a couple thousand...copies that they sold at conventions in 2003-2004. I suspect that the sales figure reported on Comichron represents a mere 50%...or less....of the entire print run of WD #1. The print run is FAR in excess of 7,266, and the number 2,888 represents a number of resubmissions that didn't get labels turned in. How many? Nobody will ever know.

Oh yes...it's a Bubbilicious bubble. Who knows where it ends.

Wrong book, oh master of the search. Make sure you click on the original listing, not the one eBay force feeds you.

Thanks for looking that over. Here's the thing about these...there's been a concerted effort to locate and systematically identify these for about the past 10 years. All the books that are known today have been known for about the last 10 years. I think AOS #499 3rd and MOS #20 2nd were the last ones to be discovered. So, with a small, but very dedicated, group of people looking for these for such a period of time, combined with the resources of the internet, I can say with a decent measure of certainty that AOS #499 2nd doesn't exist. Because of the haphazard printing of these books by DC, someone just made the mistake of identifying the second printing as the third. They probably didn't have records...they just looked at what they had, or thought they'd already done, and the "third print" was born. "But don't people discover books that no one thought existed still today?" Yes, but for the most part, those are books that few, if any, even suspected existed. In the case of AOS #499 2nd....many people have been looking, for many years, and yet....nothing. Does that mean it doesn't exist? No. Does that mean it will never be found if it does? No. But the odds of it existing after such a search for years and years is now very, very low, and if they exist, if they were ever made, it's possible that they were never released. But that's starting on a big if. It'll be exciting to see, though, as it is certainly implied, unlike any of the rest of the books.

That's WONDERFUL! Thanks for posting that! The uninterrupted continuation of Western's 3-pack Whitman program with Marvel comics, well into the Direct market era, is pretty sound circumstantial evidence that, while DC's Whitmans were, in fact, specifically produced for distribution by Western, the Marvel program was not. And we know that's absolutely true after early 1979, because Direct distribution at Marvel went line-wide, for all titles...and those books were not distributed solely through Western. Thus, calling the Direct market books from Marvel from 1977 to 1979 "Whitmans" is, and always has been, a misnomer. It's very fascinating to me how DC and Marvel handled the Direct market. DC was the first to have UPC box art in 1978 (Marvel didn't have UPC box art until Jan, 1980 cover date), but Marvel was the first to make a distinct Direct market product with feb, 1977 cover dates. Man, I wish I'd been older and could have recorded all of this as it came out. Thank you!

And, since we're quoting Chuck: http://www.milehighcomics.com/tales/cbg41.html I happen to agree with Chuck, from a merely economic standpoint. Perelman's plan was to flood the shelves with product...product buyers felt very compelled to buy...to crowd out any and all other competition, while aggressively raising prices without any of the economic factors present in the 70s that forced those price increases. Yes, the page count from the 30s to the 60s gradually decreased....but there was an entire decade (1952 to 1961) where the price of standard comics did not increase and the standard page count (32) did not decrease, and that was nearly as true from 1962 to 1969. In Jan 1969, the price of a standard comic was 15 cents; by Dec 1975, it was 25 cents. That's a 66% increase in price in those 6 years, at a time when the rate of inflation (just ONE factor) was 56% In Jan 1975, the price was 25 cents; by Dec 1981 it was 60 cents (real time, not cover dates.) That's a 140% increase, with a corresponding 80% increase in the rate of inflation. https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm In Jan 1991, the price of a standard comic was $1.00; by Dec 1997, it was $2.25. That's a 125% increase, with only a corresponding 20% increase in the rate of inflation. In fact, the numbers look even more bleak, since the cover price for standard books remained $1.00 until the very end of 1991, and were $2.25 by early summer of 1997. If there's any corresponding time period in history where the price of a standard comic book rose so rapidly as 1991 to 1997, without most of the factors that drove previous price increases, I've yet to discover it. Maybe....MAYBE....1971 (15 cents) to 1977 (35 cents)...but, then, inflation was going bonkers. And we're not talking "oh, well, they went to slick, high quality gloss paper, so, yeah..." That ruse was over by mid-1996, and we were back to the cheap stuff again, albeit, all printed via offset printing now.

What I said is absolutely correct. Valiant's demise had nothing to do with Shooter's ouster...and ouster it was...but the insistence on Massarsky to print millions of copies of books that were being sold to "speculators" by the caseload. I discussed it at length with Layton over dinner very recently. There was no need to print 1.75 million copies of Turok #1....and it was only the 6TH highest selling book of 1993! Have you ever seen the pallet of Rai and the Future Force #9 picture that is floating around the internet? I didn't say Marvel's problems had to do with variants. Obviously, that's not even remotely true, since by 1997, there were still only a handful of variants that Marvel had ever done (less than 50 total at that point.) The problem was the same as it is now: shoving product that no one really wants, but feels they MUST BUY, onto a shrinking pool of buyers. What do you think funded Perelman's shopping spree...? He AGGRESSIVELY pushed both a flood of titles and a persistent cover price increase onto the market. That's why the price of standard comic books more than doubled from 1991 to 1997, WITHOUT the same inflationary economy that spurred the 70s price increases. In fact...throughout the 90s, technology made comics CHEAPER to produce than they ever had been, in an adjusted-for-inflation model. It doesn't matter if it's 50 different versions of ASM #800, or 50 different titles featuring Punisher: the net result is the same.