Quick update
During the last two months I acquired a large pile of single comic issues ranging from obscure to ridiculous.
And since I need to fill my post per day quota, I am going to take every single one of those issues and make a post about them. Plus making a one large post about the whole pile would be a giant clusterf*ck.
Upvoted and subscribed. I'm the biggest sucker for 90's comic stuff on the face of the planet, so I'll be looking forward to this madness! Maybe I'll dig through the long boxes and join you. :)
One thing, I never uderstood about the 90's comic, are the special covers. Gold, silver holographic, metallic and etc. People really liked that stuff?
It's not so much that people liked it...there were some people who did, but it wasn't an across-the-board deal. Comics in the 90's were exploding, and part of that came from the collector mentality. People saw sales figures for old comic books, where a book from forty or fifty years ago with a cover price of five cents sold for $20,000 at auction. Rather than educate themselves about why that particular book sold for that much money, people foolishly got it in their heads that comic books were like gold: you bought them, held on to them for twenty or thirty years, then sold them off and put your grandkids through college or bought yourself a house.
One of the things these speculators quickly latched on to was the idea that special issues were worth the most money: first appearances, issue #1 of a given series, variant covers, and so on. People started pre-ordering and buying any of these special books they could find, so the market responded in kind: people want special comic issues, by golly, we'll give them special issues!
In the heyday of all this comes Image Comics. As a new studio with new IPs on offer from big-name industry talents, they produced a slew of #1's. Youngblood #1 I believe to this day is still the single largest pre-ordered comic book in history because its creator, Rob Liefeld, was one of the biggest names in comics at that point due to his work with Marvel. They printed literally millions of them, and people bought them assuming that in twenty years they'd be worth big money.
Well, here we are, twenty-five years later and you can't hardly give copies of Youngblood #1 away. They're worth less than the paper they were printed on. Market saturation's a bitch. ;)
They printed them because people bought them, people bought them because Marvel, DC, and Image did nothing to discourage this speculator behavior--and why should they? They were making money hand-over-fist from people who had no interest in the stories or artwork. Why cater to the real fans when you sold so much more product by appealing to the lowest common denominator?
So yes, to a certain point of view, people really, really liked that stuff. The only problem was that mostly the people who liked it liked it for all the wrong reasons, and when the bubble burst, it very nearly took the whole industry with it. :)
To add to this post, what has come in the generations after the holograms, die-cuts, crazy weird covers, is variant covers.
So you buy a comic, but on newstands, it will have like 5 cover choices, nothing hologram or diecut, just different artwork. Sometimes they will ship covers evenly, but most often they will only do 1 for every 10 you order of a book.
I think the newest newest thing, is making series a yearly thing. After DC Rebirth relaunched everything in DC with a new number one issue, and noticing Marvel had already been on this with a lot of books re-starting at 1 after a certain issue run, I believe that lure of getting people to buy a new issue at number 1 will be the focus. Which isn't bad as if you want a new reader, no one wants to starting reading a comic at Uncanny X-Men number four hundred whatever, and grab them with a shiny new X-Men issue 1, which gets new readers and doesn't usually scare off old readers. Who knows what is next after that.
I was never a fan of variant covers. I don't have a need to buy 10 times the same comic just for a different cover.
Agreed. Or I used to agree, until I started finding covers I did want way more than the original lol. The key I believe is not to be caught up in needing all of them, but I don't mind paying more for a specific one. Either way though, they are just taking money from the hardcore who ignore our thoughts and just gotta have 'em all.
https://steemit.com/comics/@modernzorker/michael-s-long-box-atomik-angels-1-1996-crusade-comics
Look what you two made me do... :)
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i hope you will upvote me back
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