Posted in: Comics | Tagged: comic store in your future

Comic Store In Your Future – Lenticular, Foil and Black Bags

Published Fri, 19 Oct 2018 09:37:56 -0500

Last updated Wed, 15 Jun 2022 16:26:07 -0500

Rod Lamberti of Rodman Comics writes weekly for Bleeding Cool. Find previous columns here.

With the year starting to wind down the comic industry leaders seem to be getting lazy. The DC foil covers were hardly hyped by DC. I did not see what the actual product would look like till they arrived here in our shipment. The first week's round were meant with mostly "oh, they are alright." This last week people thought they were better. Artgerm's Supergirl's foil cover looked really cool. Wish they had done the foil treatment for his Catwoman cover that came out this month also. At least this year, to order DC's foil covers comic stores, I did not have to do the insane ordering requirements that Marvel required last October for their lenticular covers.

I looked up Marvel's lenticular covers from last year. I saw a bunch have second printings. Which seems odd with the first printings still being available a year later. The lenticular Thanos #13 cover of Marvel's from last year is the only one I find that is not available for order. Odd fact, I sold more of Marvel's lenticular covers this year than I did last year. Even Marvel's newer lenticular cover for Avengers #675 is available. I could have used more copies of it when it first came out.

Walking Dead Day was last Saturday. How many people knew about it? Not many. Truthfully I forgot about it. I saw the comics the week before on my invoice and didn't think anything about it. Then Diamond sent a few emails to let me know that the black bagged Walking Dead comics could not be sold until Saturday. I scrambled to hype Walking Dead Day wishing I had known about it the Saturday before so I could have told everyone about it during our anniversary sale. I did some quick posts about it on our Facebook page. Our Walking Dead fans that I talked with knew nothing about it. I had to explain everything about the day. That is it was to celebrate 15 years of the Walking Dead and everything about the black bags. I googled about Walking Dead Day days before the event and found very little about it. Mostly old articles about it from months ago. On Saturday I looked through a few comic related websites and did not see even a mention of the day. Pretty poor hype for something we could not just sell on new comic Wednesday. I am willing to bet I would have sold more of them on new comic Wednesday than we did on Saturday for Walking Dead Day. We did have people come in for it and buy some of the issues, just none of the people from new comic Wednesday returning. New comic Wednesday has more traffic than Saturdays.

I think Walking Dead Day could have been a good Saturday if there would have been more of push for the day. I didn't hear anything about Robert Kirkman hyping it. Image did not seem to care that their bestselling title was having an event.

I do not see the big three publishers of comics really trying currently. My comic order for November and December is amazingly low. DC's Heroes in Crisis event along with Marvel's Infinity Wars are selling low for being their events. I hope I am wrong though currently to me 2018 looks to finish with low comic sales.