Hey guys, wanted to hear your thoughts on this story that’s been brewing this past weekend. Apologies to Monopolyjackson if this has already been posted but I haven’t seen it posted yet and it appears to be a giant story that can impact the industry of retailer incentives moving forward.
Hopefully BJ can chime in with more details but unfortunately he has self exiled himself from CHU. We can only put pieces together based on reports and scuttlebutt. For those that don’t know Penguin Random House has sent out a statement to retailers that if they ordered 50 copies of the upcoming Bloodhunt Red Band 1 2nd print, they will qualify for the recent hot incentive of the Bloodhunt 1 Red Band 1:25 Leinil Francis Yu Bloody Homage Variant
No, not a reprint but the actual retailer variant that set the market on fire recently. On the surface this sounds like great news for retailers and collectors who want this cover. Diving deeper it opens up a can of worms and what it means for the market of retailer incentives moving forward.
I have heard scuttlebutt about these retailer’s 1:50 incentive variants are not actually rare at all. The first time I heard about this was when I was watching the various Hot 10 shows and one of the hosts talked about how he met the creators of Strange Academy and saw one of the creators pulling out a giant stash of the 1:50 Opena variant under his table at a convention (Opena?). He left the show feeling some kind of way about these rare incentives but didn’t have any evidence at that time that there were any shenanigans going on.
In fact collectors have long suspected the print run of the incentives are not what Marvel/DC says they are. Fast forward to today and we somewhat have confirmation that Marvel has a giant stash of these Bloodhunt incentives. How will this affect the prices of rare incentives going forward? I’ve seen some talk about this and some people are really upset about it. Reasonable as if I was one of the people who paid big money for the Bloodhunt incentive and now Marvel is going to flood the market with these, I would be pretty upset and would be hesitant to pay big money for future incentives. The rarity isn’t what Marvel says they are.
Feels like a poor decision by Marvel that can have negative consequences for the collecting industry moving forward. Big deal or nothingburder?
This is very bad news for the market of variants of it is true. Tying a first print ratio Into a second print release will ruin the desire to purchase them to begin with. Better they just silently release them.
The thing is it’s a straight money grab by Marvel. In the past they can just sell off the “extra” incentives from Diamond’s retailer incentive sales. Now they are using these hot incentives to push sales of their second prints trying to drive up revenue. If this tactic becomes successful and there’s no reason that it won’t because the demand for this cover is there, Marvel can now print out a giant print run of future hot incentives and stash them away in their warehouse waiting to capitalize on this new trend.
This would infuriate me as well.
It’s why I ditch what tiny bit of “new” comics immediately if I guessed right on a hot incentive because was in a gambling mood that day.
My trust level in this hobby has eroded since just prior to the advent of the MCU to near zero from the bottom all the way up to the top (publishers) (and including the artists/writers).
I used to trust first, ask questions later.
Now I trust none; ask 100 questions first, investigate for a month, then buy… maybe
(Which is probably why I don’t get much of anything new anymore. I’m always late to the game investigating)
Agreed. How many 1:50 ASM 55’s (Gleason web heads) showed up in Walmart multipacks? Amongst other 1:100s and 1:200s incentives? A lot.
And we all know about the clearance sales @BJ has enlightened us to.
I for one am happy to hear this as I feel they inflate print runs in organically and just hurt the hobby long term. So this will hopefully be just more “incentive” to not buy in to the incentives. Go with cover A or another variant that’s about cover (eg cardstock/foil). Buy what you like. And don’t obsess over print runs.
This is another example of why I buy stuff cheap and sell it FAST before the bottom drops out/the other shoe drops/etc. I don’t hold onto much because there always seems to be some random trouble or drama that occurs. This defies the supposed purpose of the ratio variants applying to a specific comic and you do wonder what is sitting around in warehouses that is supposedly, “Rare,” or, “Valuable.”
I am afraid that this Bloodhunt 1 ratio incentive is going to cause a whole new open door scam for Marvel and something DC follows suite with. It took me a bit of time, but I learned that ratio variants are nothing but a sham minus a few here and there where they are truly under printed. I have seen so many 1:100 and 1:200 ratio variants take such a huge drop after they were charging $100 and $200+ respectively.
I think like many have said, buy what you like as always, but Cover A is always a sure fire bet.
I’ve been feeling this way about Boom selling ratios on their website for some time. The assumption (right or wrong) used to be that publishers only printed the amount of ratios they needed to meet orders, rounded up a bit, and with a few extra copies for damages, artist comps, etc. so for low-ordered issues the incentives could be fairly rare.
If publishers find that they can (say) double the print count and then sell the extra themselves, or use them to incentivise retailers to purchase subsequent printings, then I have to say it feels bit shady, and would significantly reduce the appeal of incentives - and maybe that’s no bad thing, can’t help but think that the marketplace would be easier for retailers if they didn’t feel that they needed to chase incentives because collector appetite has been focussed there, and away from regular copies, so they end up with a large amount of inventory that’s difficult to move in the process.
Also at some point we’re going to need to pay attention to the environmental impact of business policies designed to inflate orders of a product for which there is no consumer demand, and which will ultimately end up in landfill.
Also does this make Retailer Exclusives actually more trustworthy when it comes to print count? I can’t think that Marvel is overprinting them because how would they distribute them outside of the same store? They wouldn’t be able to attach them to a second printing, it would be too obvious.
I thought that was already established that EVERY marvel book has at least 5,000 copies floating around minimum. It costs them probably 10 cents to create another copy once they are setup to print… They could easily put a number on each copy but won’t because they make a lot of money when people keep the scam going and people think they are scarce. Marvel never said they are scarce, suckers…
