And it’s never going to get old. I grin everytime I see it so far… 
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all jokes aside its wild we haven’t gotten almost anything but Mando.
mayhew exclusive for issue 3, i like it but he always releases different variants of his books after initial sale, plus he is pulling the limited to 800 crap when marvel has 3k minimum
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$40 f’n dollars,
Come on.
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if it wasnt for the fact he will release a virgin edition in 2 weeks i would be tempted
I think the bigger issue is that marvel makes stores buy 3,000 when it’s pretty difficult for any single store to sell that many.
Makes it hard for me to get upset with retailers intentionally limiting the number they sell. So much easier to sell 800 at $40 than 3,000 at $15. If I were them I would do the same.
If marvel let people order 1000 books when that’s all they’ll need then it would likely solve that issue.
but telling people its limited to 800 when you have 3k, is purposely manipulating the customer. your average collector doesnt know the minimum order number for publishers, they dont even acknowledge it, and almost none show proof of the destruction of the other copies. some one should ask meyhew what hes doing with the other 2200 copies
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You have to realize, this threshold is where Marvel is almost cutting it’s own losses more than likely. The more they print, the more discount they get from the printers. If they allowed much smaller print quantities, the cost goes up likely and eats into their own profits. Marvel is making pennies on the dollars while the stores are still making pretty decent cash, if they weren’t making money, they’d stop doing exclusives.
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I do realize that. But other publishers offer much lower print runs with much higher quality materials for exclusives. As far as I know only Marvel has exclusive limits over 1k issues. (to be fair I know nothing about DC)
Also Marvel charges more per book to stores on exclusives than they do open order books. So if they are only making pennies on the dollar on each exclusive they print then they are getting wrecked on every other comic they print.
That being said I get the reason why marvel makes the print run so high the same as I get why stores would rather sell 800 books in a week for $40 rather than 2 years selling 3000 books for $15. Financially it makes the most sense for both parties to do so. Especially when you consider time and money spent bagging, boarding, and packaging.
They usually throw them out. I know many think that every store who does a lower print run are liars and actually keep/sell them all, and that may be the case for some scumbags, but most shops throw the others away aside for some backups to replace any books that are damaged when shipping to buyers.
Seems like a big waste of ink/paper but there are no options to decline having all 3,000 printed as far as I know.
Remember, these exclusives still go through a distributor usually. $4 book being bought by shops at $2 on average, that means that’s $2 per book between the distributor and publisher.
Other publishers likely have different contracts with printers while also have much smaller payrolls. The indie books usually the creators get most of the money and they’re splitting between a team of 2-5 people on average, whoever worked on the book.
My pennies on the dollar comment wasn’t literal but trust me, the shops are making way more money and profit from their exclusives than the publishers are, especially when they’re charging $40 a pop for them and likely leaking the rest of the exclusives out in other ways (we all know they had to buy 3k, we all know most aren’t destroying the other copies or just not selling them).
We can make all the assumptions we want but I’m sure it comes down to costs and operating costs. It’s not feasible for a large publisher to waste it’s resources allowing shops doing exclusives with orders less than 3k. If they ever opened their financial books, I’m sure we’ll know the real reason why they have limits.
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Yeah im not saying Marvel makes more per book than the stores selling the exclusives. They can have tighter margins when selling at scale like that.
I am saying that I think Marvel keeps the print run that high to sell more books and make more money. Not necessarily just to stay afloat. Same with stores. A store that does a simple 3k print run Trade Dress exclusive can still make money. They just need to sell 40%-50% of them at $12-$15. Which even for large stores like TFAW can be difficult to do.
Im just saying, given the circumstances, I think it makes way more sense financially to do what Mayhew is doing. There is less risk and less overhead.
I do like it when stores split exclusives though. Mayhew partnering with 616, KRS, The Comic Mint, Mutant Beaver etc. makes a lot of sense to me. Each store needs less money up front and doesn’t need an enormous audience to sell enough of the books to make money.
I don’t think that’s the case. Disney doesn’t need comic money to stay afloat. It could be more to push publishing numbers up but I honestly think it’s based on if it’s worth the hassle or not.
Like when I got stickers and tumbler glasses made for CHU, it made more economic sense for me to buy 75 tumblers than 25 due to the costs involved. The same goes for printing and most other good then it comes to custom goods. Go get a custom T-shirt printed and look at the unit cost of one t-shirt compared to say an order of 50. It all comes to down numbers.
yeah i get that its cheaper to buy in bulk. Not saying otherwise. I get the economies of scale. (also I wasnt saying that I think they need larger limits to stay afloat. Was saying the opposite. That they do it to make more money than regular covers per book to justify their attention)
That being said when you get to the scale that Marvel is they are not getting different quotes for each comic assuming the same quality and quantity of materials are being used. Its gonna be a contract basis with set costs for printing with a client as large as Marvel.
I’d bet my left nut it costs them the exact same per book to print 1k virgins as it does to print 3k trade dress. No printer/distributor is going to haggle over a few thousand issues when the only change is swapping out the cover image. We’re talking at least 500k-1M comics printed each month. That’s a whale of a client and easy monthly recurring revenue for their vendors.
But regardless retailers have proven that selling a portion of their exclusive run can be profitable when as comic collectors do not shy away from $50 Virgin/Trade Dress sets or $80 sets with less being sold so the point is mute. They’ve made it work even with the high minimums so a change in the minimums is unlikely.
I haven’t bought a store or creator exclusive in probably 2 or 3 years myself. I think they’re a waste of money!
Until they show up in Walmart marvel 3-Packs.
Speaking of which…any sightings?
Nobody is throwing comics out ever. Even those particular “clowns” who said they destroyed theirs to make them “limited”…
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They’ll destroy a couple on video and make it look like a whole lot is getting destroyed…but they never go one by one and show every last copy.
It’s pathetic. And makes me think/believe if you’re trying that hard to convince people, you already know it’s wrong.
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Well, that stunk. Mayhew’s site sold out of the regular cover before I could check out entering my discount code for signing up for their emails. I hope she is on some retail covers for Mando 3.
just wait 2-3 weeks, he will be selling a virgin edition, why else would he call it cover A