Quote:
Originally Posted by Otter
This was the exact same criticism of comics in the 90s, and was blamed for "ruining" comics. Hilarious that nothing's changed. Why not read a book for the story and be content with a single cover? Consumers clearly continue to support the practise.
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The biggest problem with the 90's and why the comic market ultimately crashed is mostly due to the changes that took place in distribution. In particular, Diamond Comic Distributors and Capital City Distributing lowered their requirments so dramatically that just about anyone could buy wholesale. The number of comic stores in 1979 numbered about 800. That grew to over 10,000 US stores and over 1000 overseas stores by the 90's and most of those new stores were inexperienced and extremely undercapitalized. Its estimated that at least 30% of all the comics that were published from 1990-1994 ended up as overstock in comic dealers inventories while publishers were being duped into thinking those comics were actually selling. And 2/3 of those stores were out of business by the end of the 90's.
As for the variants, things have only gotten 1000 times worse with modern variants as the variants in the 90's didn't cost anywhere near the money that modern variants are costing and there weren't anywhere near as many being made. Just look at Star Wars #1 with its 150+ covers or whatever the riduclous number is or look at Dynamite and the ridiculous number of variants that they released in total with their first run of Red Sonja (average of roughly 4 covers per issue for 81 issues = roughly 324 covers for an 81 issue run). Variants are being produced in FAR FAR FAR greater number today then they were in the 90's and people are spending FAR FAR FAR more on them. When the variant crash comes, and its definitely coming, people will lose 100 times the amount that was lost in the 90's, value wise.
Not to mention, comic companies are duping people by using ratio's now as opposed to actually having a stated edition size for variants. This is one of the most important details that has changed in recent years as people are spending significantly more for variants that are 1:100 or rarer thinking they are so much rarer than variants used to be, but their not. I guarantee many of the 1:100 and 1:300 variants will have just as many copies printed as the variants that used to be limited to 100-200. I purchased 5 copies of the Blood Red Turner variant for Vampirella Strikes that was limited to 100 copies and I pre ordered them for $19.99 a copy. I guarantee those would have sold for 5 times that price on eBay if Dynamite had used a ratio as opposed to a stated edition size. Switching variants to ratio's is one of the biggest dupes going on in modern comics.
Just look at these auctions that ended this week:
You have one guy who spent $1850 for a 1:2000 Venomverse #1, which is just INSANE by the way, and another guy who spent $870 and those sales took place in the same week for the same exact comic. Nobody really knows just how to value these comics since nobody knows exacty how many copies will be produced. Thats why your seeing such HUGE price discrepancies. That guy who just spent $1850 likely lost at least $1000 the second he purchased that book. And people that think these comics are actually going to appreciate in value are just fooling themselves. Just look at the 1:100 and 1:300 comics that were sold a couple years back. Many of them are already down to $10-$15 a copy.
