Marvel Bribes Retailers to Destroy DC Comics

[Morg]

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/08/the-great-marvel-comics-rip-off/

Marvel Bribes Retailers to Destroy DC Comics

Why does Marvel want to rip off this cover? It obviously makes Batman mad.

This week it came out that Marvel Comics is offering retailers a variant cover of “Fear Itself #6″ by artist Ed McGuinness. But, there is a catch: To get the coveted cover, retailers have to rip the covers from 50 copies of any No. 1 issue of DC Comics Flashpoint tie-ins. This is not a figure of speech, they literally have to tear the covers off and send them to Marvel to get the special edition, rendering the issues unsalable.

Make no mistake, this is perfectly legal. The comic-shop proprietors would be destroying their own property, and it is their right so to do. However, this seems little different than someone buying books to burn them.

They would destroy a work of literature with the express intention of preventing another person from reading it. Anyone who does this is engaging in censorship, and Marvel Comics is agent provocateur.

This is not the first time Marvel Comics has tried this, and, according to them, previous efforts have netted tens of thousands of covers. According to the letter from Marvel announcing the new deal:

“In these tough economic times, [we] feel it’s our duty to help,” explained David Gabriel, Marvel Senior Vice President of Publishing, Sales and Circulation.

I can’t think of anything less helpful to the economy than destroying potentially thousands of copies of a comic. You can read the rest of the letter on ComicsBeat.com, but the entire thing reads like a melodramatic comic villain’s twisted view of reality where bad is good, and they are just trying to help everybody out anyway.

Even the name of the program, “Comics for Comics,” tries to sanitize what Marvel is doing.

No matter where you stand in the DC vs. Marvel debate, Marvel Comics is engaging in what can only be be seen as an underhanded trick to prevent you from reading comics from their chief competitor.

I won’t get into the debate about who is ripping off whose story lines (figuratively speaking) and who is selling more comics (it’s been Marvel for several dozen months in a row with only a few exceptions).

What matters here is the amazingly uncivil manner in which Marvel is acting, surpassed only by the incivility we are seeing now in the U.S. government. And like Republicans and Democrats in Congress, now is the time when Marvel and DC should be working together for their common good.

The comic book industry is in trouble. Big trouble. Any sale is a good sale if it keeps the medium alive.

Marvel might see this as a clever way to take a bite out of the sales of its chief competitor, but somehow I doubt it will succeed. If anything, the added attention may put more bodies in shops to see why Marvel is so scared of the Flashpoint series. But, I doubt that too.

More likely, this will just further damage the comic industry’s reputation in general as a bunch of geeks only interested in scoring cheap shots.

 

[hippie_hunter]

Marvel's done this before with a Deadpool variant of Siege for Blackest Night tie-in books.

 

[runawayboulder]

They offered Deadpool rings for full copies of Blackest Night tie-in as a spoof of all the rings from the event.

This though....? Marvel is being a bunch of scumbags here to have somebody destroy a comic for a trade in.

Nobody hold your breath for Avengers/JLA part 2....

 

[Themanofbat]

DC is just mad because they never thought of this first...

It probably works better for the shop owners, because if they happen to have an extra 50 copies of comics that will either never sell or sit in a half price bin for months, they can sell that varient for $100 and get a more immediate return financially.

Anyways... just a dumb article written by a pissy DC fan... lulz...

 

[Drz]

DC is just mad because they never thought of this first...

It probably works better for the shop owners, because if they happen to have an extra 50 copies of comics that will either never sell or sit in a half price bin for months, they can sell that varient for $100 and get a more immediate return financially.

Anyways... just a dumb article written by a pissy DC fan... lulz...

Thats on the basis that some people are willing to pay that much for an variant cover to quarentee a win.

 

[WOLVERINE25TH]

I miss the days when there was a friendly rivalry between the companies. Marvel'd jab DC, DC'd jab Marvel, but you could tell it was all good-natured fun, emphasized by the fact they came out with the occasional crossover.

 

[8Diagrams(WU)]

A HUGE *****e move by Marvel. Im very dissapointed. They are turning the market into a childrens game. I cant believe they need to show how little class they have.

Beat your competition by merit and by quality of work. Not by destroying comics.

 

[moraldeficiency]

Yet another reason why anyone that gives a **** about varient covers should be shot in the face in front of their families. Does no "collector" not understand that these are not going to be worth anything in the future because too many people are collecting them for them to actually be rare? And for Fear #6? Is that going to be so incredible looking back in retrospect? Make no mistake I hate what DC is doing and hope it fails miserably just so they don't keep doing it over and over again, but that's just stupid.

 

[Wolfwood]

The Deadpool idea was funny, this is just...lame. Also the Varient cover is rather boring.

 

[SpideyInATree]

Eh. Just seems like a waste of a comic. Why don't they try and focus on maybe more programs like free comic book day to help circulate comics to people and maybe get a new generation of kids into comics.

Ed McGuiness is a cool artist and everything but to rip 50 comic covers off is a bit much for that. Why couldn't it be like 5 or something? Why 50? Couldn't they have offered something more rare than that varient cover?

Honestly, as a comic reader if I know one of the shops around here are going to do that I'll take those comics off their hands with the torn covers. Don't need a cover to read the comic and if the story is good and the art is good it's a win for me. If not can always give them away to the kids in the neighborhood.

 

[Ipodman]

Yet another reason why anyone that gives a **** about varient covers should be shot in the face in front of their families. Does no "collector" not understand that these are not going to be worth anything in the future because too many people are collecting them for them to actually be rare? And for Fear #6? Is that going to be so incredible looking back in retrospect? Make no mistake I hate what DC is doing and hope it fails miserably just so they don't keep doing it over and over again, but that's just stupid.

That's what I'm worried about... all this collecting and no one is gonna care because EVERYONE who cares also has all these "rare" issues...

 

[moraldeficiency]

That's what I'm worried about... all this collecting and no one is gonna care because EVERYONE who cares also has all these "rare" issues...

The only time something becomes truly collectible is when no one is collecting it. The only people that would pay for something like this are already paying for it then storing it thinking it will have value in the future. It won't. And really all this for just a different cover. Isn't that silly? Does the cover of a comic really matter? Does anyone here actually spend anything more than a minute just staring at a comic cover?

I wouldn't even care about these things, I don't collect comics. I read them then give them away, it's just the story that matters to me, but people that do are the ones that help influence behavior like this.

 

[runawayboulder]

You know it's a funny thing about special covers......

Check this out, remember this "special issue" of ASM???

You know what was so special about it? Nothing. It had a photo cover. The book itself was a throw away issue. It was a fill in issue by Bob Layton to give the regular crew a breather after a big Hobgoblin story. You know what this thing is worth today mint condition...?

$8

 

[moraldeficiency]

What's amusing to me is that this tactic if successful will actually make those DC comics worth more and be more collectible than these collectible marvel comics.

 

[November Rain]

doesn't dc still get its cash though by the time it gets to the comic book stores.

and doesn't it mean the owners are going to have to purchase an extra 50 copies of dc comics to get the variant?

I'm not sure of the economics of this venture.

or do they hope by stopping it getting to the fans, they are likely to buy further installments of the book?

 

[moraldeficiency]

doesn't dc still get its cash though by the time it gets to the comic book stores.

and doesn't it mean the owners are going to have to purchase an extra 50 copies of dc comics to get the variant?

I'm not sure of the economics of this venture.

or do they hope by stopping it getting to the fans, they are likely to buy further installments of the book?

The idea is simple, to take books out of the hands of the consumers. If you lose the new jumping on point issues then what's the point of doing all this? As most of these #1s are going to explain the new status quo and without that the idea is that #2s are going to be even more confusing to everyone than just continuing with things the way they are. The #1s are supposed to hook new readers and gain new interest, without people actually reading them it doesn't matter if DC does well on those sales, the gimmick won't stick. Apparently Marvel is rather worried that DC's stupidity is going to play well.

 

[November Rain]

oh, it's a numero uno copy.

ah, makes some more sense then

thanks

 

[Tron Bonne]

Well, actually, these #1's wouldn't be serving that purpose. The books they are doing this for are FP tie-ins and those only address the alternate continuity of Flashpoint for short, three issue minis. If they were doing this with the #1 issues for the upcoming relaunch/reboot, maybe you could make a case for that, but as is it's really just a shot, in a long series of shots, that Marvel has been doing to 'punk' DC in the last couple of years.

It is kind of silly, honestly. I don't know what shops would actually do this, unless they know they can sell the variant in question for a significant profit.

 

[TheCorpulent1]

Whatever. Marvel and DC are both out to make money and f*** the competition when all's said and done. Blame commercialism.

 

[Will Nolte]

A friend of mine owned a comic shop back when Marvel did the Blackest Night thing. He actually considered sending the books off cause he had so many of them. DC hyped up the event so much and BL sold a whole bunch of nothing.

 

[Marvel]

Beat your competition by merit and by quality of work. Not by destroying comics.

But Marvel can do both!

I often round up all the DC comics at Barnes & Noble, place them to the side of the newstand and urinate all over them.

 

[WolfCypher]

The issue up for grabs is Fear Itself.

That's already strike one.

Then I took a gander at the variant cover.

That's worth 2 strikes in one.

No thanks.

 

[kguillou]

So when exactly did Marvel and DC become such fierce enemies? I know it was sometime during the last decade but i cant for the life of me figure out why after 40+ of being friendly competitors they're suddenly at each other's throats.

 

[Tron Bonne]

I think it was about the time that Joey Q was coming into the EIC and the Ultimate line came about. Seems like that's about the time when all the shots and nonsense like that started happening on a really blunt level.

 

[runawayboulder]

I think another factor was the exclusive deals Marvel started doing and their talent raid on DC. I don't remember anything like that prior - things seemed pretty peaceful between the 2 throughout the 80's and 90's.