Reading Wizard magazine’s list of “50 events that rocked comics 1991-2008,” retailer Brian Hibbs notices a glaring omission in No. 3, “The Boom Market Implodes (1994-1996)”:
Missing is the sentence that says “Oh, and by the way, a lot of that was actually our fault, oops, sorry!”
I mean, this is the company that, as recently as last year allegedly capitalized on insider information and was Selling CAPTAIN AMERICA #25 on day-of-release for like $30, WITH ads for it on Marvel’s own site.
Words fail me, can I say?
The list appears in Wizard #200, but I can’t find it on the website.
April 9th, 2008 at 10:58 am
I don’t think it was WIZARD that made Valiant Comics publish limited Gold edition comics which were suddenly selling for $125, or that made publishers like Marvel come up with variant covers on books. I don’t think WIZARD created speculators so much as they fed them. And I believe the boom market actually imploded in 1993 the week TUROK #1 was published. I remember walking into a Los Angeles comic show that week and dealers had hundreds of copies of TUROK #1 on their tables for $1 each even though it was only a 3 day old book (with a $3.00 cover price). A year before they’d have been asking $10 for it because of the gimmick factor, but the gimmick factor had finally died.
April 9th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
I dont feel the speculators were just the comic book buying public, but the store retailers who believed the hype that the book they were buying from the publisher was worth what Wizard and Overstreet said it was. Many retailers would buy new books and claim they were sold out to only days later received copies sold at inflated prices. Eventually it caught up and they drowned in volume of unmovable back issues of a product they paid upfront to receive and could never sell. I dropped many book stores for doing that.