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Avengers #500 Director's Cut - Good luck...

Started by drice6900,

103 posts in this topic

Silver Surfer

Silver Surfer

Posted
Posted
Lets put it this way- It was a hell of a lot easier to hoard comics when $300 a month would buy you a hundred copies of the entire line of Marvel comics each month.

To purchase the same amount of copies of Marvels output these days would require an outlay an unbelievable amount of capital.

Grabbing the first Comics and Games Retailer issue I could find,here's some figures.

From the Feb,2004 issue,using Diamonds final sales sats for the November 2003 order cycle.

The average price of a comic was $3.09

cover-price for 100 copies=$309

assuming the 50% discount given to larger accounts(top20%of accounts) wholesale cost of100 copies would be$154.50

Assuming the company only bought Marvel and DCs, that would be 149 books .To make it a bit easier lets throw in one more book and round it up to 150 books.

!50 books x 100 copies =15,000 books

15,000 books x an average cost of $1.54=$23,100

On a yearly basis $23,100 x 12 months=$277,200

This is only for Marvel and DCs,you'd have to assume someone doing this would be purchasing at least some Image,Crossgen,Dreamwave or some other book.Add in the cost of shipping,and storing these books and a realistic outlay would be at least $350,000 a year.

Are there dealers or companies buying some stock for future use-Absolutely.

But if anyone thinks that there are mysterious companies buying cases of every comic printed after looking at these figures,I'm not sure what to say.

BTW-a case is most often 300 copies so multiply all the above figures by three to determine the costs of buying them by the case. $1,000,000 dollars a year wouldn't come close to doing it.

Besides which-If there were companies doing this,wouldn't that mean that they expected these books to go up in value.

 

Totally agree because that's what I was thinking when I made my comments. Also, most of the big dealers have been around a long time and I doubt they are in a stage of their life where they are looking at hoarding issues in the hope that they can turn a profit 10-20 years from now. These days its all about keeping cash flow flowing. I often wonder if Chuck is planning an exit strategy given his current health, increasing frequency of large discounted sales and other outside interests.

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shadroch

shadroch

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Kevin,

You've got me curious here. what happens if orders come in at say 20,078. Do the publishers ever drop down to the lowest round number rather than overprint?

In some cases it would seem like the publisher would be just tossing away money printing extra copies just to reach a round number.

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Kevin Boyd

Kevin Boyd

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Kevin,

You've got me curious here. what happens if orders come in at say 20,078. Do the publishers ever drop down to the lowest round number rather than overprint?

In some cases it would seem like the publisher would be just tossing away money printing extra copies just to reach a round number.

 

Sometimes they underestimate the amount required, and you end up with allocations.

 

Generally they overprint by 5-10% of the print run and then round the number out.

 

In the case of an order for 20, 078 copies they might order 20, 500 or 21,000 (or more) copies from the printer. Comics cost only pennies to print and the printers don't print exact numbers but in lots divisible by ten (tens, hundreds or thousands).

 

The additional copies are also be used as promotional items (such as industry and in-house comps) and for subscription purposes.

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Silver Surfer

Silver Surfer

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Posted
The orders for New Avengers #1 don't have to be placed for a few weeks, they run these auctions so that they can beef up their pre-orders. You get a better discount of you order in larger volume.

 

Joe Q must be counting his year-end bonuses and plotting yet another relaunch. tonofbricks.gif

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shadroch

shadroch

Posted
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I just noticed on EBay that Inky's Comics is preselling 100 mint copies of the new Avengers #1 for a bin of $99.99? He has three separate auctions running and he is not the only one.

 

Yes,there still are people that order books by the hundreds.What I have said all along is that no-one is ordering each and every book by the cases,with the intent of sitting on them for future use. Mile high,saunders and a few operations may end up ordering thousands of these,but only because they know they wil be selling out 95-100% of them at retail.Offering 300 copies at a presale price is smart business practice,especially since I believe Marvel will be offering a dealer incintive book for every X amount ordered. They are passing the books along at cost,hoping the incintive book might bring in some serious bucks.But,again,this is far different from

buying cases upon cases to sit on for some future sale.

Not only is that not good business,unless your name is Warren Buffet,its business suicide.

BTW- Thanks for the heads-up on the sale. Believe I'll be taking a flyer on his sale. thumbsup2.gif

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shadroch

shadroch

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He said he'd replace any none NM books,so I bought them. If there is a problem I'm sure I'll post if things don't work out.I've never dealt with him but got good feedback from two friends who have.

He's making out by getting to keep the five variants that come with each 100 books he orders.

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Mister_Comics

Mister_Comics

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... finding one of these in decent shape! It has a silver, foil-type cover and easily shows bends, spine stress, etc. I went through about 25 before finding an acceptable copy.

 

May not be that hard to find. Just look at all the FF 500's in the census.

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blowout

blowout

Posted
Posted
... finding one of these in decent shape! It has a silver, foil-type cover and easily shows bends, spine stress, etc. I went through about 25 before finding an acceptable copy.

 

May not be that hard to find. Just look at all the FF 500's in the census.

 

There's nothing like pre-screening. One of the reasons why despite the 'low print runs' of current books, there will never be a shortage of ultra HG copies. 893scratchchin-thumb.gif

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deathlok

deathlok

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shad,

 

Just to let you know. I spoke with a my bery knowledgable LCS owner. He told me that there are several companies that LCS's are able to buy back issues from should they run out in store. The have an agreement direct from DC and Marvel, not through Diamond. He said these companies charge a premium for their books, but they are available, after a certain period from publication of the books.

 

I will talk with him more on Wednesday to get more info, but there are companies who buy back issues for sale to dealers and LCS, other than Diamond.

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MutantKeys

MutantKeys

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Marvel does have many issues....many books such as the the ones from the Ultimate line and other regular issues that always seem to have a line going down the left side of the book...but it seems that they should be more like DC when it comes to this matter news.gif

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colossuscomics

colossuscomics

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Yeah, DC has a much better track record has far has the quality of printing goes. I find even the second tier publishers offer comics with better production value. As an example, I submitted 5 copies of Dreamweave's Transformers Energon #25 to CGC and all five graded 10.0. I submit 100s of books to CGC/month and my Marvel issues rarely grade 10.

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MutantKeys

MutantKeys

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Yeah, DC has a much better track record has far has the quality of printing goes. I find even the second tier publishers offer comics with better production value. As an example, I submitted 5 copies of Dreamweave's Transformers Energon #25 to CGC and all five graded 10.0. I submit 100s of books to CGC/month and my Marvel issues rarely grade 10.

 

Wow....thats excellent proof right there...Even companies such as Aspen also have alot better quality paper than Marvel...I hope marvel decides to fix this matter soon...

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