And who knows if the chromium, die-cut variant of Pig-Knuckle Man #1 is going to pay for your retirement? 
Every comic shop Iâve ever spent time in that also buys collections from people get people that come in with stacks of 90âs stuff thinking they hit or have been sitting on a gold mine. Theyâre generally disappointed when they get offered 10¢ a book. To be honest, that is usually generous.
I remember a friend of mine thinking he got a bargain/investment by finding a copy of WildCATS 1 for a fiver. He didnât quite seem to get the whole market crash thing happened. Probably because neither of the comics shops in Dublinâs city centre closed.
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 kidsâ college or his retirement. I didnât have the heart to tell him that I used to see longboxes full of Spawn #1 setting in comic shops.
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.
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.
Many of those titles werenât around last month.
Fair enough, I didnât know which number was more important.
March 1993, What ifâŚ? #47, early, pre-fame (?) Busiek, 270,308, 253,000 . âWhat if Magneto took over the USA? (Part 2)â, so that 253,000 is presumably for Busiekâs 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 âWhat ifâŚ?â 5 years earlier.
And âWhat ifâŚ?â in 1993 is selling double what Byrne/Claremont Uncanny X-Men was 10 years earlier.
Iâm assuming he means Deadpool after he stopped drawing him and Nicieza stopped writing him. Heâs apparently working on a big Deadpool story for Marvel coming out in 2019 and he has redesigned Deadpool for it.
I can only assume heâs talking about Deadpool, that character that famously wasnât at all cribbed from Slade Wilson and who didnât start in a X-Men spin-off book.
Heâs not (he rules out Deadpool, Cable and any Image characters and then says he wonât ever say) but itâs just âvaguebookingâ of the most annoying kind.
I love Robâs Twitter personality usually but he can bugger off doing that nonsense. Or he could work for the British tabloid celeb pages âwho was that young blonde film star masturbating to a photo of Dennis Nordern at the Ivy recently? We couldnât possibly sayâ. Then shut the fuck up.
To be frank, I donât believe him. 27 years is an oddly specific number to use for that kind of rant and lines up with 1991, when Deadpool was created.
Maybe, there were quite a few around that era, he could be referring to Shatterstar or Omega Red or anything. Mainly itâs just pointless if he isnât going to say.
Really despite him being way from creative input from his Marvel characters for the majority of their existence it would be very out of character for him to infer that kind of thing for anything he originated. He has that magic window of a couple of years where creators got royalty share so he hypes them all relentlessly.
Deadpool today is quite different from the Deadpool of Robâs day though, with the big push over the past ten years or so taking him into space, and the heightened absurdity with Dogpool and Lady Deadpool and whatnot.
Ditto Shatterstar, who was already changed significantly when Loeb got his hands on X-Force.
Could it be Hellboy?
Doesnât really match the description of âborrowing from someone elseâ. Unless he means borrowed from hundreds of yearâs of folk lore and fairy tales?