There was a news piece on ICv2 the other day that seems to have been flying under most people's radar. I can't find anyone discussing it at any rate. An unnamed but "major" comic retailer shared some sales information with Milton Griepp and what they noted was that, over the past six months, 34-43% of their revenue from new comics came from selling variant cover comics. And in terms of unit sales, variant covers accounted for 29-37% of all new comics sold. That's Marvel, DC, everybody.

Let's break down those numbers a bit. Revenue is how much money is coming in the door. For our purposes -- talking about selling new comics from a comics shop -- that's basically the cover price of every comic sold. If a comic has a $4.99 cover price, that's $4.99 in revenue when you sell it. (There is a little more to it than that, but for the sake of this post, that's close enough for the sake of avoiding extended explanations.) The other metric that's mentioned is unit sales. These are just the number of individual comics they sold. If you sell the latest issues of Action Comics, Superman, and Batman, your unit sales would be three. Simple, right?

The ranges provided for each of those metrics comes from different publishers. The retailer broke several of them out individually. I'm not going to get into the specific math to work out how much that comes out to as a true average, when you'd need to weight the individual publishers against the overall numbers, but for the sake of simplicity again, I'm just going to round off both the revenue range to 40% and the unit sales range to 33%.

What these numbers are telling us is that one out of every three comics sold there is a variant cover, and that variant cover costs the reader 7% more than a regular issue. What some might take this to mean is that for every person going to buy their regular issue every month, someone else is going in to buy both their regular issue AND a second copy of the same issue with a variant cover. However, that's an assumption we cannot make here.

Not every comic collector is a completist. There are no doubt more than a few readers who see an issue with one or more variant covers, and just purchase the one that is the most eye-catching to them. Or is by a favorite artist. This is how I often buy variant covers. I only want one copy of the issue and, if there are multiple cover versions available, I choose the one that is the most visually appealing to me. That might be the 'regular' cover one month, 'variant B' the following month, and 'variant D' the month after that. In looking at the comics I got just yesterday, four had 'regular' covers and four had 'variants.' One happened to be marked as 'variant J' meaning that there are at least nine other cover options to choose from for that one issue!

However (again!) not everyone is going to be buying that way. There is almost certainly some percentage of people who do indeed buy every version of each issue. And there are almost certainly some percentage of people who always buy the regular cover, but then also buy a variant if it's by a particular artist. My point here is that while not every customer is going to be buy multiples of every issue, there is a non-zero number of people who do.

The question, then, is: how many of those people who bought variant cover issues would've bought the regular cover version if that were the only one available? Those variant cover issues I got yesterday? I still would've bought all of them if there were only a regular cover available; I'm most interested in the story and my choice of alternate covers was basically just wrapping paper. The retailer would've made just as much revenue from me regardless of whether or not there were variant covers to buy. However, remember when Marvel did those Muppets variant covers several months back? My brother got all those... and he doesn't even collect comics! He's a Muppets fan. That's an additional $40 in revenue (8 issues times $4.99 each) going to retailers that normally would have not been there at all. How much of a retailers' 40% of revenue would still be there if it weren't for guys like that?

In order to properly answer that, you'd need to look at a retailer's sales on a title-by-title basis. How many copies of Amazing Spider-Man get sold every month under normal circumstances and how many more copies get sold when a variant cover is available? We don't have that data. At least not relative to this particular retailer. At a rough guess, I'd throw out half. Half of that 40% wouldn't happen if there were no variants available. That'd be 20% of a shop's overall sales explicitly from variant cover sales.

Regardless of who is buying those variant covers and why, that's an exceptionally cyncial approach to making comics. Whether they're selling to speculators or milking dry all the completionists or dragging in fans from tangental fandoms, they're selling that 20% on something other than the content the comics are ostensibly about. I wrote about this from the publisher side a couple years ago, but this cements it from the retailer side as well. These are companies trying to make as much money as they can, and they're focused at least as much on cynically extracting as much money as possible as they are about telling a good story. That is how 21st century capitalism works, but I don't think most people recognize that.

If you like the Muppets covers or you're picking up every cover by your favorite artist or whatever, that's fine. Just recognize what these companies are actually doing, and know that you're agreeing to play their game -- at least to some degree -- if you're giving them additional money you wouldn't otherwise.

I got my first piece of original comic book art a little over a quarter century ago. I had just had several good online interactions with Salvador Larocca, and I bought a page to commemorate the discussion. At the time, preview material wasn't nearly as common and I was able to reserve a splash page before Larocca's art agent was even aware of it! I've since collected a few dozen pages from various artists and, while I have snagged a few just because a good opportunity presented itself, most were pretty deliberate and considered choices.

The piece I have pictured here is one I just acquired; it's from Fantastic Four #309, page 4 by John Buscema and Joe Sinnott. I got it for two reasons. First, it's by John Buscema, whose work had a pretty sizeable impact on what I like in comic book art. I've long wanted a John Buscema page just to see how he 'built' his pages out, relative to what's depicted in How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. Secondly, it's from the Fantastic Four, which has long been a favorite series of mine. Granted, the page isn't exactly action packed and of the two FF members it depicts, one of them is a replacement member. But, compared to most John Buscema pages I've seen over the years, this was positively dirt cheap!

Many of the pages I have are FF related pages by artists that I've really liked over the years. I've got ones by Sal Buscema, John Romita Jr., Stuart Immonen, Mike Wieringo, Mark Bagley, and Paul Ryan among others. I've also got several pages of artists that I really like, but either didn't work on the Fantastic Four or whose FF pages are just waaaaaay above my pay grade. John Severin, John Byrne, Ramona Fradon, Ron Frenz, Humberto Ramos...

Then I have a few pages that are kind of odd grail pieces for me. Pages that, for one reason or another, absolutely burned into my brain when I first read them. I didn't actively go hunting for these, but when I did come across them for sale, it was a "here take my money" kind of situation. A Jimmy Olsen page by Kurt Schaffenberger. A page by Tom Morgan from one of the backup stories in an FF Annual. An obscure piece from Monsters Unlimited by Win Mortimer. A Bob the Squirrel strip by Frank Page. A Scott Kolins page for Freakshow. Most of these pages are relatively unremarkable among each artist's body of work but, as I said, something about them -- something in the craft of the page -- really struck me.

With the addition of this new John Buscema piece, I don't have much left I'd be actively looking for. A Curt Swan page from one of his Superman comics I read as a kid. A Ron Lim Silver Surfer. An actual FF page by John Byrne. A Jack Kirby page if I'm beng pie-in-the-sky optimistic. And that's about it. I mean, it'd be great to have a Neal Adams Green Arrow or a Winsor McCay Little Nemo. And I'm generally happy to buy new art directly from comic artists to help support them. But I have more of an artistic interest in original art than I do with just comics, so there needs to be a deeper connection there for me. And, sure, part of that is because I have to justify spending a LOT more money on a page of original art than just a regular, monthly comic book. But part of it, too, is legitmately being able to study the craft directly. To see how the artist moved their pencil across the page, what they had trouble with and had to repeatedly erase, what notes they left for other creators further down the process line...

It's a fascinating hobby somewhat tangential to comics themselves, but the added costs almost necessitate that you need to be more critical and judicial with your purchases, and you really have to put a decent amount of conscious thought into what you're looking for before you crack open a retailer's portfolios!

I knew of Marsupilami originally from the 1990s' Disney television show. I never saw a single episode, but I do recall some of the promo clips that would air around then. Since I didn't really pay attention then, it would only be years later that I learned the character was originally created for Spirou decades earlier. But I never tracked down any of those stories either. So my background here is little more than the general visual of the character, but I picked up Magnetic Press' book The Beast almost entirely on the strength of Frank Pé's name.

The premise of The Beast is simply a "realistic" origin story for the character. He was basically captured by accident by some shady animal traders and managed to escape once their ship docked in Belgium. He was found -- nearly starved to death -- by a young boy named François who has a penchant for bringing home stray animals. But upon bringing the creature to "show and tell" in class later in the week, the resident bully provokes "Longtail" into biting him, and it's not long before the authorities show up to collect François' menagerie. It's then up François to rescue his animal friends and keep a famous (and also somewhat sketchy) cryptozoologist away from Marsupilami after being tipped off by a local vet.

As I said, I'm unfamiliar with any previous Marsupilami stories in any form, so I don't know how much is borrowed and how much is totally new and I can't make any comparisons there. But the story stands on its own very well. It actually mostly focuses on François and his mother, who have a surprisingly deep background. With the emotional focus on the two of them, it stands to reason that Marsupilami takes something of a back seat in the story, not even making a full appearance until halfway through the first book. His presence drives the story, to be sure, but he's not the main character.

Zidrou imbues the story with a lot of heart. All of the characters seem well-rounded, even the ones who are only ancillary to the story. For as much as it's ostensibly an origin story for Marsupilami, and there's enough in it to make it unique to that character, it's more about just being a good person and treating all living creatures with respect. And it should almost go without saying that Pé has turned in some amazing visuals. All of his figures are brimming with life and energy, and their movements all seem exceptionally natural, even when he exaggerates them for comedic affect.

Once again, I can't say how this compares or doesn't against any other Marsupilami story, but it's an excellent work on its own merits, and is well worth the read. My only complaint is that it took six years to get it translated into English and published in the US!

The second and final book came out last week from Magnetic Press. Book one was released earlier this year, so both should be pretty readily available through your favorite book store. Each of them retail for $24.99 US.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Times Like These Review
https://ift.tt/vQnj1Pq

Kleefeld on Comics: How Much Research Is Too Much?
https://ift.tt/K6WqCT8

Kleefeld on Comics: ... and Jack Kirby as Officer Day
https://ift.tt/cF8mPUq

Kleefeld on Comics: Electric Timing
https://ift.tt/qDmcVwg

Kleefeld on Comics: Reflection on Mainstream Respect
https://ift.tt/V6mq5jB

I ran out to do some errands after work yesterday and when I turned the car on, the radio was in the middle of NPR broadcasting a piece about Marjane Satrapi's passing. (If you're reading this blog, it's news you've almost certainly already come across.) It wasn't a particularly long or detailed piece, much the same as they'd offer up for a movie director or professional sportsball player. They of course made express mention of Persepolis, both the book and the movie, and spoke a bit to her advocacy.

This was, as I said, after I got off from work, so I had already seen/heard the news from a dozen or so different outlets. Mostly comics and pop culture related sites. Although the first place I read about it was Le Monde, the French newspaper. Which makes sense, given that Satrapi had been living in France for decades and they're several hours ahead of any US-based outlets.

What struck me about the NPR report, though, was they used a few snippets from interviews they previously had with her. One from 2007, and another from 2024. Not just clips they found with her speaking, these were interviews from their own archives. The idea that a graphic novelist's death might even get mentioned on a mainstream news outlet was unheard of when I was growing up. But here we have them not only providing a respectable obituary, but an obituary for a graphic novelist who they had held in respectable enough esteem to have done previous pieces about her for two decades!

I went back through NPR's archives. They did indeed have an obituary for Will Eisner back in 2005, but they didn't have audio clips of him. I can't find an NPR obituary at all for Jack Kirby, who died in 1994.

When I was school, I was pushed into lockers and generally bullied for liking comic books. Much has been written over the last couple decades about how that's changed and comics are now an accepted part of mainstream culture. With the primary evidence often being the string of superhero movies in the 21st century, many of which have individually grossed over $100 million each. But I think Satrapi's obituary here is a better, more significant, reflection of the change. Not that NPR is the epitome of mainstream culture and not that her passing was higlighted, but that they had twenty year old interviews from their own archives to draw on. She had been given serious thought and consideration for decades that goes well beyond the marketing hype around the also-from-2007 Spider-Man 3 and Rise of the Silver Surfer.

I expect many comic fans, if they're familiar with The Electric Company, are most familiar with the regular appearances of Spider-Man. As a Gen Xer, I grew up on the show and watched it regularly; while I still recall bits besides the Spider-Man sequences, those are definitely the ones that are most prominent in my memories.

I happened across the first episode where Spider-Man appears (full video here) and I was surprised to see it wasn't actually until Season 4, meaning he appeared in at most half of the shows. And, if you watch that clip I just linked to, you'll see that it's actually a Spider-Man comic that actually appears before Spidey himself. Unlike the custom-made comics often used for the Spidey intros, this was a published issue -- Amazing Spider-Man #132. The specific comic has nothing to do with the episode, so they probably just grabbed the latest one off the newsstand shortly before filming.

Which got me to thinking about timing.

Amazing Spider-Man #132 has a cover date of May 1974, and was on the stands a few months before that, as was the standard practice at the time. In fact, the Library of Congress has record of the issue shipping out on January 8, 1974 and Comic Reader #103 lists an on-sale date of February 8. So the opening sequence was likely filmed in February/March of that year. The episode then aired later in the year -- specifically on October 21. No major surprises there.

But here's the interesting bit. As you might know, Marvel published a Spidey Super Stories comic to coordinate with the show. You'll note The Electric Company logo featured prominently in the upper right corner of every cover. Spidey Super Stories #1 has a cover date of October 1974 and was so successful in its own right that it continued to be published for several years after the show itself was canceled!

But recall what I said about cover dates tending to be a couple months after the issue was actually available? Again, we can look at Library of Congress records to see the issue was shipped on June 18 and Comic Reader #108 lists a July 16 on-sale date. By the time Spider-Man was actually appearing on The Electric Company, there were already three issues of Spidey Super Stories out, with a fourth coming out literally days later.

So from an audience's perspective, J. Arthur Crank's disbelief at Spidey's appearance on The Electric Company is three months out of date! He'd already been seen in conjunction with the show -- via the brand new comic -- since the summer!

It shouldn't surprise you to learn that comic legend Jack Kirby has an IMDB page listing a slew of credits. He of course worked directly for Hanna-Barbera, and helped create and/or develop a number of cartoons for them. And he's been given on-screen credit for creating many of the characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not to mention that he's shown up in a number of comic book documentaries, talking about himself and his craft.

Less well known is that he has a few acting creits to his name. He notably appeared as a police sketch artist in the 1970s The Incredible Hulk show with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, and later had an actual speaking role as himself in the 1990s sitcom Bob.

But the credit that has me curious is from a 1976 episode of Starsky & Hutch in which he apparently plays the part of an "Officer Day." So I sat down to watch the episode and while there is a credit at the end for an Officer Day played by Jack Kirby, there's no character named as such on screen and I don't see anyone who clearly seems to be Jack. The closest I can see is there's a uniformed officer seen helping another cop who was just shot; it looks like it could be Jack but we never get a good look at his face...

I don't see any other names in the credits that I know to be linked with Jack in any way, and the show itself doesn't really have any comic book themes to it. There is one character shown reading a copy of Werewolf by Night #34 but that's entirely incidental to the entire episode.

So I'm wondering first if that is indeed Jack Kirby in that uniform and, if so, how did he find himself in it? Or are we talking about an entirely different guy who happens have the name "Jack Kirby"? There is another unnamed, uniformed police officer in the episode who actually has speaking lines -- is that the "Jack Kirby" in question?

It's an obscure, barely-even-comics-related question, but does anyone have any knowledge or insights about what the deal is here?