I still feel like the essential point and issue with this situation is being lost among a ton of smoke and mirrors and discussion on modern variants/waste of money/FOMO/lawful practices, etc.
A product was advertised…a line was formed (which was the announced method of procuring said product). Folks (for whatever reason-money,influence, privilege) were allowed to change the rules of game/avoid the rules of the game to their advantage while negatively impacting others who were simply following the established rules.
Comics, concert tickets, cabbage patch dolls, black friday deals, trading cards, nike shoes. I don’t care what the hell the product is. It isn’t my concern what folks are willing to spend their money on. It’s also not my concern what they do with the product after they follow the established rules to procure it.
What my Type A personality gets irritated with is conducting shady practices to avoid playing by the rules and then blatantly flaunting it in doing so.
I think that is the issue and why folks like me are even more irritated than usual. I wouldn’t touch that book with a ten foot pole but if someone wanted it, and was willing to wait in line for it, they should get it.
So, they take unwanted books, throw an acetate cover over it, call it new and charge $100? And, people want this stuff? This feels like a fad that is going to burn out quickly. At least I hope so.
Maybe they should take the Ghost Rider books, burn parts of the cover, and call it the Ghost Rider Singed Variant. Separate lines for customers, influencers, and pyromaniacs that get to burn their own copy. CGC will only grade the books burned in their presence.
This whole thing just captures all of the things I hated about how some stores created exclusives and created false scarcity to promote them/raise prices. A bunch of people who aren’t actually fans of comics just taking advantage of fans (and some who ARE fans taking advantage of other fans).
Exclusives will never be a good thing to buy for investment. People need to stop falling for FOMO and all the hype people who try to make every con exclusive or “sold out” exclusive a hot item. Stick with cover a, maybe the rarest incentive, and call it good.
I’m not at all shocked at any of the people I’ve seen mentioned as taking advantage of it and buying hundreds of copies to flip. I’m also not shocked at Black Flag for finding a way to sell a dead exclusive. I am a BIT surprised at CGC grading them (but after the Bad Idea fiasco I expect them to grade anything that people give them enough money for). What I’ll be curious to see is what fallout (pun unintended) comes from Marvel. Modifying a variant like this without approval or a heads up was a rookie mistake.
You know, it’s funny. Being in tech, I’ve been asked by people who aren’t technical why does spam exist and how do we get rid of spam in our mail inboxes? I said the solution is very simple, if you can get everyone who has email stop opening and reading spam, then spammers will stop spamming. Until that day comes, we’ll always have spam.
Same thing applies with store variants. If we all just stopped buying them, then they’d have no reason to keep making them. That day will never happen though because most people with FOMO don’t realize they have FOMO. It’s a real disease I think.
Probably do nothing. Marvel would have I think a very hard time proving that this stunt actually hurt their business and cost them revenue/profit from it. When they crunched the numbers, the judge would probably laugh and dismiss the case…
I don’t expect them to do anything legally. But I could see them not doing as many exclusives (or any) with Black Flag for a while. Or giving them less preferential treatment on the artists who do their variants.
Or they could do nothing at all and ignore it like many of the other times some issue with their comic and direct market sales come up. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised at either.
Oh man this is getting good now…cbsi pooping on their associates exclusives. (Although I always knew CBE isn’t all of cbsi as much as some here want to imply it is, and that they are referring to a coverless reader comic they included for people to read and that timeline variant was 1000% CGC’s fault not CBE. - but where is the fun with the full context )
So Marvel has allegedly made it known this was a contract violation, and Black Flag (more like Red Flag ) is doubling down for Boston with more leftovers. Okay then.
If I was Crain I would be regretting my name being associated with all this. Plus, you know, terrible art covering my own.
Didn’t crain even give exposure to this variant on one of his Instagram posts? Think it was posted here…this whole situation is a huge yikes - though something good out of this situation is it is clear as day for who is in the wrong here and which artists and sellers/‘influencers’ to avoid from now on.
)
) is doubling down for Boston with more leftovers. Okay then.
