2002-10-23 - 11:55 p.m.

Bat-Frenzy!

One of the bad things about my stressful Tuesday junkets to Brooklyn is that the very next day I have to get up early to go get the comics. Today I woke up not exactly feeling like a ray of sunshine.

Well, so what? No matter how I'm feeling, I still have to go get the books.

I got up a little earlier than usual, and actually got on the road a little earlier than usual. However, when I got to UPS there seemed to be nobody else there, none of the usual pre-opening crew, not even Bob from the comic store in Troy. I doubt that I actually beat him there, I bet he was already there and gone. This week's load was very light - only five boxes.

And now it's time for some more comic reviews. Yay!

Batman #608

This is the first issue in a new year-long story arc called "Hush" and it teams up popular writer Jeph Loeb, who has had a lot of success writing Batman mini-series (The Long Halloween, Dark Victory) and artist Jim Lee, best known as the creator of Wild C.A.T.S. and one of the founders of Image Comics.

The story is good, and in typical Loeb fashion it includes a number of favorite Batman villains - Killer Croc, Catwoman and Poison Ivy.

Back when Jim Lee's art first started appearing in the mid-to late 1980s I was struck by how gorgeous his panels were and how exacting his draftsmanship was. However, as he became a "hot" artist his weaknesses became obvious: he couldn't tell a story to save his life - often his pages were hard to read because he seemed to favor artistic flashiness over maintaining any narrative structure. Still, pretty pictures are nice to look at.

So this is a pretty good comic. There was some buzz about it, and we made it one of our featured comics of the month. Batman has been doing so-so recently, and he could certainly use a shot in the arm. We ordered about 130% of our usual numbers, putting Batman close to X-Men numbers.

Well, as it turns out, we ordered far too conservatively - we were sold out of this book by 3 p.m. today. The main reason for that is that we were hit by a number of speculator multiple buys - some people were banking on the book going up in value, so they were buying three, or five, or ten copies. Therefore, we are now totally sold out.

I really hate when that happens. We bought extra copies to get more regular Batman readers, but these guys aren't readers, they're just whores. They aren't going to buy the second issue or the third. An old friend of mine used to call these guys "Speculeeches." Meanwhile, people who are curious about the book won't have any copies to read, and so will probably wander off and forget about it. Meanwhile, these "speculator buys" are mainly a waste of money - most people hold the book too long and try to sell it when nobody is interested in it any more. It is nearly impossible to make money speculating on comic back issues.

Reasonable questions would be: "Why didn't you know this was going to happen? Why didn't you order more?" Well, like I said we did significantly increase our orders, but it clearly wasn't enough. If we'd ordered enough to still have newsstand copies two weeks later, we'd have to more than DOUBLE our previous numbers, which would probably make Batman #608 the best selling comic of the entire year.

In spite of the creative team, that would have been an awful ballsy prediction to make. Would YOU be willing to bet $70 that this book would be a huge hit? It's an utter crap shoot. If the book was only a modest hit (a much more likely occurrence) you'd be stuck with a pile of comics, because all the books comic stores carry are non-returnable. While the books hit status is something that could have been predicted, there were also reasons that the book could flop. Jim Lee hasn't done much artwork for the last couple years, and the occasional jobs he has done have generated little interest. The age of the "hot artist" is well and truly over.

This sort of thing used to happen much more frequently in the first half of the 1990s when there were a lot more comics speculators. These days such rushes are few and far between - another reason why such wagers are a bad risk.

Luckily, this is not really a disaster. Batman's publisher, DC Comics, is a well-run company and pretty on the ball. I bet they are already working on getting a second printing out. However, if this was a Marvel book, that would be the end of it - Marvel never overprints, and are really slow to react when they have a hit book. Mainly because they're morons and cheapskates.

Well, I shouldn't complain. We have a hit book with a lot of buzz, and I'll probably be able to get second printings in a couple of weeks.

Global Frequency #1

This book is the latest project from Warren Ellis, the twisted genius behind The Authority and Transmetropolitan.

Global Frequency is an international rescue agency that specializes in cleaning up the messes of "the way we live now," i.e.: supersecret weapons of the cold war. "Unexploded bombs" is another way of putting it. There are 1,000 members of the Global Frequency, spread all over the world, specialists in all sorts of disciplines.

In this issue, a former Soviet agent living in San Francisco is a walking atomic bomb. He was placed in deep cover with the ability to instantly transport an atomic bomb from Siberia to wherever he was. He was never used but unfortunately the metal disc inside his head is decaying, and he may wind up nuking San Francisco even though he doesn't want to.

While the story is good, the art, by British vet Garry Leach, is breathtaking. Twenty years ago he teamed up with Alan Moore to produce Miracleman and since then he only seems to have gotten better. It's odd that we don't see more of him, but all I've seen of him in the last few years is inking jobs on books like DC's Hitman. It's a great pity, and I hope we see more from him soon. Unfortunately, we won't see more of him on Global Frequency - every issue is going to have a different artist.