Garner Loudermilk had some really quizzical comments over on ICv2:

“I’m sorry, I do not agree with John Riley. I’m glad that Marvel hasn’t over printed this book. Has everyone forgotten the Death of Superman fiasco? A reported 4 million books printed. A great many times more than normal was printed, and now the book is barely worth a little over cover. If Marvel has learned from DC’s mistake then I for one am glad of this. If they over-printed the book then there is no chance of the book rising in value.”

Wow…just wow. Having enough copies to satisfy readers is bad? Underprinting books to juice the speculator market is good? Did someone invent a working time machine and drag me back to the early 90s while I was asleep last night?

“And if comic store owners didn’t see this coming, then they have lost touch with their product and their customer base. Don’t blame Marvel or Quesada, because you misjudged the market, the buck stops with you, PERIOD! Quesada obviously did an excellent job, on his part, making a story that everyone wanted. Where it went wrong is store owners failing to capitalize on it. Don’t blame the industry, blame yourself. You knew it was selling, you read three months ago in Previews when it said someone was going to die. If you failed to order up on it and are losing out on sales, it’s your fault.”

Retailers misjudged the market? Many of the people coming in to buy the book weren’t PART of the market prior the full court press media coverage that Marvel had planned in advance.

I do think that Joe Quesada did a great job getting a story like this to the market. But someone ABOVE the retailers screwed up the potential for this event. Marvel would have seen orders boosted if they simply revealed that they were anticipating a media push like they had on Civil War #2. That’s a fact.

A whole ‘nother nugget of info from ICv2 mentioned by Edward Sherman was overshadowed by his reactionary call for Joe Quesada being fired:

“I’d like to respond to John Riley’s comments on Captain America. Diamond was sold out of Captain America on Sunday night. I always do my re-orders on Sunday night and when I went to increase my orders on Captain America #25, they were already sold out. So obviously there were dealers who had inside information about this book. It must be nice to have inside information like that. There have always been extras on all of the Civil War books except this one. Hmmmmm! Sounds like a scandal to me. But that is the beauty of a one distributor system!”

(thanks to Kevin Melrose at Blog@Newsarama who pointed out the Loudermilk article)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Books, Comics, Culture, Figures and Collectibles, Kevin Huxford. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.