Random comics-related things

[RonnieM]

And who knows if the chromium, die-cut variant of Pig-Knuckle Man #1 is going to pay for your retirement?

Every comic shop I’ve ever spent time in that also buys collections from people get people that come in with stacks of 90’s stuff thinking they hit or have been sitting on a gold mine. They’re generally disappointed when they get offered 10¢ a book. To be honest, that is usually generous.

[Lorcan_Nagle]

I remember a friend of mine thinking he got a bargain/investment by finding a copy of WildCATS 1 for a fiver. He didn’t quite seem to get the whole market crash thing happened. Probably because neither of the comics shops in Dublin’s city centre closed.

[RonnieM]

I knew a guy that kept the first several issues of Spawn in a safe because he thought they were going to fund either his kids’ college or his retirement. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I used to see longboxes full of Spawn #1 setting in comic shops.

[garjones]

I remember a friend of mine thinking he got a bargain/investment by finding a copy of WildCATS 1 for a fiver. He didn’t quite seem to get the whole market crash thing happened. Probably because neither of the comics shops in Dublin’s city centre closed.

Thinking about it that rapid expansion and collapse model was mostly on the other side of the pond. The comic shops in Wales are exactly the same number as they were in 1990. I know a handful have shut in other parts of the UK but most of the ones advertised at the back of Comics International 30 years ago are still there.

[Lorcan_Nagle]

Here, there were two or three shops which closed before the crash, two which remained open and are still open today (one of which has two branches), a couple which opened and closed after short runs, one of which opened and closed in different spaces and eventually sold its inventory to a wax musuem(!), but that last one shared a space with a toy/model shop which is now its own comic shop with two branches.

[Andrew]

Ah, I thought he was saying the issue that just came out last month. I was pretty sure current comics didn’t hit those numbers anymore.

Many of those titles weren’t around last month.

If you look at the postmaster entries for Uncanny X-Men during the Claremont/Byrne era (thanks omnibus for printing the letters pages) the paid sales are around 110-130,000.

Fair enough, I didn’t know which number was more important.

March 1993, What if…? #47, early, pre-fame (?) Busiek, 270,308, 253,000 . “What if Magneto took over the USA? (Part 2)”, so that 253,000 is presumably for Busiek’s part one.

Paid sales (12 month average) 163,767.

November 1998 - Avengers #10, Busiek and Perez. 236,730, 213,500 . Very surprising as I thought this was a really popular run, the big re-reboot after the mixed results of the Heroes Reborn experiment.

Paid sales (12 month average) 166,903.

In 1998 a marquee title with an all-star creative team is selling only 3,000 copies more than very low-tier “What if…?” 5 years earlier.

And “What if…?” in 1993 is selling double what Byrne/Claremont Uncanny X-Men was 10 years earlier.