Back in the day, ordering comics was an extremely analog and inefficient process. Every month we’d get a catalogue of everything that was coming out about two months’ hence. We’d have to go through and place our orders and lock them in, and those books would be delivered when the time came. There were occasional reprints and reissues or the ability to adjust amounts after the fact, but generally what you put down in the book is what you got, and that was it. So betting just how many books we could sell was an important part of the process.
Sometimes we’d have a good idea of what to order—for, say, the latest Batman or Spider-Man books, we’d know how many people subscribed to them on the pull list, plus we’d know how many we sold of the previous issue, so we could estimate with reasonable accuracy how many we should order. If a title wasn’t part of an ongoing series, however, we’d have to do some guesswork. The order sheets and solicitations were available to customers as well, so some would express interest in upcoming titles and we’d get a read on how popular a new book might be.
But in the 1990s, speculators had jumped from sports cards to comic books, and the industry was trying its best to profiteer off them. #1 titles of new series were a big business, because people would look at the first appearances of decades-old heroes and see those books going for big bucks. But of course, the reason those titles are valuable is rarity; kids read those comics to pieces and there just aren’t that many left in the world.
I remember my first day in the shop; I was taken on as an extra hand during the Death of Superman event, the comic storyline where Doomsday “killed” Superman. DC was pretending like Superman was dead-dead and wouldn’t come back, but of course nobody actually believed that. But everybody thought such a big event title would be worth a fortune one day, and DC published a special black-bag edition with a black armband and a bunch of other nonsense. I remember explaining to hundreds of people that day that no, this comic was never going to put their kids through college, pointing at all the other mooks in the line sealing it carefully into their acetate-free bags and boards for eternal protection.
Special editions were huge, and special edition #1s even more so. Every month there would be dozens of brand-spanking-new titles, some from established companies like Marvel or DC, and some from fledgling upstarts trying to carve out a piece of the market. As the number of special editions grew, they had to get more and more creative to try to stand out among the wave of noise.
The most lunatic example I can think of was a series of 18+ “biographical” comics about adult film stars. Without going into detail, I can just say that the ink the books were printed with contained a sample of the actress’s DNA. I’ll leave it to the imagination of the reader exactly how that was accomplished. Yes, it’s as fucked up as you think it is.
Most comics, fortunately, just went with gimmick covers. They’d be chromed, or prismatic, or clear plastic. Some would have two or three different cover images, sometimes with varying rarity. But the comics at the heart of this story were actually kind of unique. Jim Shooter developed his own line of comics, starting a company called Continuity. And his thought was, the reason comics lose value is they become damaged, so why not make them indestructible? So the first editions of Continuity Comics would have covers printed on Tyvek, the damage-resistant plastic wrap they use to protect buildings under construction.
I was immediately leery. The covers didn’t look that great, and we’d already had more than a few upstart #1s fizzle out. We’d only had three people put the three inaugural titles on their pull lists, so I upped the order to six copies total, and even then felt like I was betting on a loser. I finished up my order sheet and sent it in.
But at the time, Lion and Unicorn was a chain of stores, not just my single location. So my order went to the main branch, where it was combined with the rest of the franchise’s totals. The process was overseen by the owner, a man named Hunter. Hunter was an interesting guy; I was friends with him and got his particular sense of humor. But he was impulsive, and he had one hell of a temper. During a tabletop RPG he was hosting in the store, one of our more artsy players booped him on the nose in the middle of a scene, and we all thought we were about to witness a murder. He’d also threatened to shoot a company rep from Games Workshop once and I don’t think he was kidding.
Hunter had a tendency to adjust our order numbers if he thought something was going to be the New Hotness. And he thought these Continuity books would be more popular than I did, so he bumped my numbers up a little bit. (And there may have been some alcohol involved.) So two months later when the shipment came in, I opened a box and instead of seeing six copies of each #1… I saw two hundred fucking comics.
I immediately reached for the phone to call the distributor and tell them they fucked up, but one of the other guys showed me the invoice. 200 of each book was ordered, and 200 is what we got. Realizing what had happened, I groaned and hung up. We put the three copies of each issue in our subscribers’ boxes, and then I put an enormous stack of each book up on the wall. With a sinking feeling, I grabbed one of each to check them out, and they were god-awful. Muddy, dull art, terrible writing. The Tyvek cover didn’t take ink well, so it almost looked black-and-white. I knew these were going to be a flop, and I was right.
Typically, we kept each issue of a comic on the wall for a month, and it would cycle off when the next one came in. The first week, I saw a few people pick up the books out of curiosity, open them, and then put them back quickly. The books moved down the wall until the four weeks were up, and then I left them in place for an extra month, just trying to sell any that I could. Eventually, we took them off the wall, piled them into a long box, and buried them underneath the back issues table.
A year or two later, Hunter was in the store for an inventory. He was sitting behind the counter eating Chinese food while my assistant and I went through the books in storage, tabulating what we had. Mike pulled out a long box, pulled up the lid, and then went absolutely green and tried to stuff it back under the table. Unfortunately, Hunter saw him. “What is it?” he asked.
Cringing, Mike pulled out the long box and opened it, showing off a horde of unsold Continuity #1s. Hunter’s face darkened. “Count them,” he said.
We did. We pulled out all the books, counted them, then re-counted them to be safe. Hunter loomed over us. “Well?”
“197 of each,” I said. Of the 200 of each book we’d gotten in, the only ones we’d sold were to the three people who’d preordered it. Not a single person had picked one up off the shelf and bought it.
Wordlessly, he picked up one of the issues and opened the protective plastic bag, sliding it out carefully. He walked back to the counter, set it down next to his lunch, and opened the comic. He began to silently read the story, going over each page intently. We could only watch, seeing his face turning increasingly red as he went. He finally got to the end of the book, closed it, and then stared at the back cover of the comic for a full thirty seconds.
And then he grabbed it with a roar and attempted to tear it in half.
But… Tyvek.
The one thing Jim Shooter had gotten right was the Tyvek covering was very damage-resistant. Hunter crumpled the book and wrenched at it, turning purple, uttering a litany of swear words under his breath. He strained and he struggled, but the goddamn cover held. After what seemed like minutes of strenuous physical activity, he finally dropped it on the counter, whipped out one of those folding eagle-claw knives, and shredded the book into confetti. Piling it together, he took out a jet lighter and set the goddamn thing on fire.
As it burned, he sat back down and returned to his meal. “196,” he said.
It’s just one of those days
