They’re on whatnot now running auctions for trade/virgin sets. Selling for $1k+.
Yup. Hard pass.
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Saw the first one go for $1000 and I was out of there.
Someone commented and said “this is not original art!”
That made me chuckle.
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Wtf are sellers thinking ??? No way those are selling
1.) Its not that good of a cover
2.) None …NONE…of Quintana’s covers are selling above $400 (if even that high…)
Hell, his Absolute Batman #18 store variant sells for $200 or less
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This type of crap is the reason I’m slowly drifting away from this hobby…
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I wonder who bought the OA for abs batman for six figures. Mental is going to make way more money on the exclusives over time. Kind of makes me wonder a bit. 
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The Quintana? I think it was the guy who owns Red Hood Comics in Las Vegas.
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Oh yeah, it sure is Red Hood. I still need to visit the shop some time. I read his insta post and I’m not sure what he is smoking. I feel like Quintana is just the next artist in the hype rotation. I guess if I spent $100k on it I’d say he was the next Frazetta too.
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The shop is cool. It’s in a very non-descript strip mall, not where one would expect high end collectibles. Literally wall-to-wall slabs and high grade back issues. Original costumes for Jack Nicholson’s Joker and the original art for the Red Hood are on display, which is honestly very cool (and brave) of him to share publicly.
I agree that he vaaaastly overpaid for that AB cover, but it’s his money and he’s unbothered.
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Lol the OP is cross posting his thread on every comic book subreddit. 
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- “Retailer” sells a small amount on webite/whatnot
- Sold prices on Ebay go up
- “Retailer” uses a fake-name Ebay/Whatnot account to sell remaining copies at a higher price
Been this way for a looooooong time
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I didn’t get any Quintana. I’m not mad. It is what it is, but objectively speaking, the drop was not done for the benefit of collectors and I think sheds a poor spotlight on those involved:
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No real transparency. The only thing that was “clear” was the date and time (although even as to time nothing dropped on their website until at least a few minutes after the stated 5pm drop time). Neither the price, print run, or that there was to be 2 versions was made known. The original announcement also stated copies would be available on Quintana’s website, but it never was. Everyone also assumed the entire print run would be dropped on the show (which proved to be wrong).
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Confusion. Sometime after their stated 5pm drop, the website finally dropped trade foils at $24.99. After a few minutes, there was a drop of trade foils at $74.99. Around the same time, they also dropped virgin regulars at $74.99. After about 5 minutes, they dropped a set of both the trade foil and virgins at $149.99. As you can imagine, they all sold out within seconds. It wasn’t until later in the Whatnot show that the store owner stated he dropped 25 copies of the $24.99 price at Dan’s request. He also said something about dropping 25 or 50 (can’t remember which) of the other 3 options. People instantly complained of price manipulation.
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FOMO / Price manipulation. There was a total of 150 books dropped on the Whatnot show. This, combined with the website drops makes it a rough total of about 400 total books dropped (I’m rounding up). After dropping the total of 400 books, the store owner announced no more drops. As you can imagine, the buyers became livid (at its peak I saw about 1.4k people on the show). One can definitively argue that they self generated FOMO and engaged in overt price manipulation. It’s not even about the method of their drop (lack of price transparency, staggered website drops, and only dropping 150 total copies on Whatnot), it was the excuse that Quintana was in the “fine arts” industry and that there are thousands of followers outside of the comic industry who desire his work which prevented (or led to the decision?) to only drop about 10-12% of the books (I’m assuming a 1,000 per book print run … he wasn’t clear whether it was 1,000 total or per variant). The argument makes no sense to me but in any event, that was immediately followed by him selling copies of the drop at auction which subsequently easily went into the $1k territory. They didn’t even try to hide the fact that they had essentially become third-party resellers, they just did it during the drop! If dropping only 10-12% of the books at $25/$75, followed by selling the rest of the day via auction is not creating FOMO and market manipulation, I don’t know what is.
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Well put. I was traveling at the time (on the road in mountainous territory) and connection was spotty…but pretty much aligns with what I observed and felt was happening.
It was a recipe for panic buying. Everyone trampling over each other for the next shiny object…literally!
I couldn’t even find the listings on the website until a literally typed it in almost in full in their site search engine…no pre-advertising on the site to know where to go. And I also was a bit confused how none went up on Quintana’s site after it was announced it would.
There was A LOT of negative/angry/stressed commentary in the live stream…like 100% of the posts unless it was Heavymental posting…
I wonder how much Quintana got in kickbacks for this, if any…not sure this will be good for him long term.
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People who are addicted to exclusive chases have themselves to blame. I don’t give a shit about any exclusive and they cause me zero hardship. Blind bags and exclusives are late-stage modern comics, lol.
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Honestly, if we all just take a step back…. is this really worth paying what people are paying? No way. Talk about getting sucked in during the heat of the moment and chasing nonsense. For the amount of money people are forking out for a retailer exclusive modern comic book, you could buy a nice classic key book that will probably retain its value. These sort of books become long forgotten over time and nobody in the future will pay anywhere what people are paying right now. Absolute Batman is cool and all, but it is also absolute saturation with variant covers at this point with no end in sight. I’ve never seen over saturation ever work out to higher prices long term for things.
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Yeah it was pretty ridiculous. So little self awareness present in many of these retailers who do stuff like this.
The only thing I liked was when Dan confirmed that DCeased #1 and not Detective Comics #1006 is his first published comic cover. People in the chat who were paying up for Tec #1006 seemed confused by this. Even funnier, the seller (heavy mental) had no idea and used his copy of DCeased #1 as a giveaway. It was only after the giveaway that Dan confirmed that DCeased was his first published cover. I feel confident saying that had the seller known this before, he would have ran it at auction instead, and the buyer would have overpaid by a lot (there are copies on eBay of everything that sells on whatnot, usually for way less).
Quite glad I missed the whole thing. I like Quintana’s work, but not that much (I was an underbidder on the Absolute Batman OA - by a loooong way, thought it was a nice $12k cover, didn’t really understand it over that, except as a product of AB FOMO).
I think Felix is doing pretty well at putting out exclusives where artists can get paid, and collectors don’t feel like they’re being gouged - and I would hope that newly hot artists would get enough feedback from their fan base that they move away from sellers who don’t aim for that.
I feel like if they could they would offer exclusive digital copies of the art for like $99.99 and by digital copies I simply mean jpgs of the cover.