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- Have you ever picked up a Marvel comic
and seen a small picture of Spider-Man's head in
the lower left hand corner and wondered,
Why is this here?
This isn't even a Spider-Man man comic, get out of here!
Spider-Manuary is over.
But seriously, what does this image mean?
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Hardcore NerdSync fans will remember that
we've already tackled this topic before quite a while ago in
a comment response video.
But I think this needs to be its own video because
of how interesting it is.
You might have noticed that the picture of Spidey
is placed over what would normally be the comic's barcode.
So now we have another question to ask.
Why don't certain comics have barcodes on them?
Originally, all comics had barcodes on them
and they were largely sold on newsstands.
If you recall, there was a system in
place where the publishers only got paid for
the issues that actually sold.
Marvel or DC might pay for 500,000 copies of a comic to
be printed and sent out to newsstands,
but if only 300,000 copies were actually sold,
then the newsstands could send back the remaining 200,000
unsold comics for credit.
Not a super ideal business model for the publishers.
The process of returning the comics involved
scanning the issue back into
inventory via the barcode on the cover.
Distributors at this time did not like dealing with
comic jobs because some would reportedly cheat this system.
They would buy new comics from the distributors,
sell them at full price to their customers,
buy them back from those customers for pennies later,
and then return them to the distributor for full credit.
All of the money goes to the vendor leaving the distributor
and even the publisher out to dry.
Again, not an ideal system.
It's one of the reasons why Marvel almost went bankrupt
before Star Wars saved it, we talked about that right here.
Thankfully, in the early 1970's a school teacher from
Brooklyn named Phil Phil Seuling proposed a solution.
Seuling had launched and organized big comic conventions in
New York so he was very aware of
the power of us comics fans.
Well not us.
I wasn't born in the 70s.
I'm a child.
Seuling suggested that the publishers take advantage of
these specialty shops
and create the direct market distribution concept.
The idea was that comic book shops would get perks for
ordering comics directly from the publishers instead of
going through independent distributors.
The catch was that any comics the shops didn't sell
could not be returned for credit.
To enforce this idea, direct market versions of
comic books would have altered covers with
either the barcodes crossed out, left blank, or filled in
with a small picture where the barcode should be.
In a lot of these cases for
Marvel the picture would be of Spider-Man.
However, some of the artists like Todd McFarlane would take
the opportunity to make little doodles in the blank space.
DC would typically fill theirs in with
messages advertising that DC "is where the action is"
or celebrating 50 years of their heroes,
or you know just things like that.
You might wonder what the advantage is for
comic shops to agree to direct market distribution.
Well, for one, it was faster, much faster.
New comics would be delivered to comic shops sometimes
weeks before the newsstands would get them.
There were even reports of certain comics
being delivered literally hot off the presses,
arriving only hours after they were printed.
The comics would also be cheaper to purchase since
they're effectively cutting out the middle man.
The downside is that meant that comic shops had to
guess how many copies of a comic they would sell so that
they could try to order exactly the right amount.
Too few and you miss an opportunity to
make an additional profit.
Too many and you waste your money on
a comic that didn't sell as well as you thought it would.
Thankfully the direct market also allowed for
comic shops to fine tune exactly how many copies of
each individual issue they wanted to order.
Each comic shop is going to have a different crowd.
If your customers love Batman but aren't interested in X-Men
you're going to have order more Batman comics
and fewer X-Men comics.
This was another perk that the newsstands didn't have.
Still, it's virtually impossible for the vendors to
correctly guess precisely how many issues of
a comic they would sell unless your local comic shop is run
by some sort of sentient supercomputer and or actual wizard.
And if the owners of these shops overestimated,
they had to just deal with all their piles of
unsold comics as they couldn't get their money back on
the remaining issues.
So what do you with all those extra copies of
comics you just have lying around?
Well, most stores will hold on to them,
hoping to sell them sometime in the future.
And this helped foster the development of
the growing market for back issues.
But you know, perhaps I'm not the most qualified person to
talk about back issues.
I think we're going to need some help here, Sal?
- Hi Scott, I'm Sal from ComicPOP!
And let's talk about back issues.
I find that back issues have influenced the culture of
comics in a big, bad way at
least from my personal perspective.
I find that back issues created an entire culture of
collectors out of fans because
when I first picked up my own personal copies of
comics, they came in a package of a number of comics,
out of sequence, at a grocery store.
And of course because they were out of sequence,
I only got some fraction of the story and I had to
go look for the back issues to fill in the gaps.
And as such I had to go find comic book stores.
And most of the comic book stores back in those times
were just full of long boxes that were just stuffed to
the brim with old stories that were cataloged, numbered,
and of course priced based on their exclusivity.
While I was a fan who was trying to complete my story,
because I was in that world and surrounded by
people who were of that similar mindset,
I wound up becoming a collector because
I wanted to protect my investment because
some of these back issues were, let's say, overpriced
or at least priced higher than their covers,
and I also found that I was getting caught up in
the culture of comics which, back then especially,
went hand in hand with collecting.
You see a sea of comic book sellers who have
long boxes and long boxes stuffed with back issues.
And so you think to yourself, the collectors market must be
alive and well and probably thriving.
But I find that that is not the case,
especially for the casual fan.
This is more of a holdover for people, kind of like me,
who fell into collecting because they were a fan.
Now you find a lot of fans who have the avenues to
get the stories they want without
having to become a collector
or break the bank to get these back issues.
Marvel Unlimited is an amazing example of
destroying the collector market by
simply paying one Netflixian fee and you get access to
an entire back catalog, so you don't have to
actually have to hunt for, search down,
negotiate the price for, and then ultimately purchase
single issues or complete runs of a character or story arc.
The days of searching for, hunting down, a seminal issue
or a monumental occasion through back issues
is kind of going the way of the Dodo.
Simply because a lot of those stories were more than
a couple issues long, so as such, they were probably
collected as a trade or if they weren't,
they're probably either in a back log for
a digital world like comiXology or Marvel Unlimited,
or they're on their way.
Most of the comic book stores that
I started going to were made of nothing but back issues.
Any comic book store I go to now that
doesn't have a ridiculous amount of space is just new books.
Or if they have some back issues,
they're usually a bunch of books that
they over-anticipated the need for
and then simply had in storage and wanted to get rid of.
I don't think that the retailers can afford to
make the space for them.
And it'll hopefully not be a catch-22 where retailers
and collectors start unloading their collections
and unloading their back issues
and then when people want them,
they don't exist anymore.
And then now all of the sudden you've created a new demand,
a new collectors' market, a new speculators' market.
I feel like in today's comic book climate,
the stories and the books themselves are becoming a little
more disposable than they were before.
There's a reason why I name my seminal show "Back Issues".
It's because I, in my heart of hearts, believe that
while the landscape of the comic book industry will always
be moving and shifting and changing,
there's always going to be a place for back issues.
As long as people want to know what happened.
As long as people have an interest in history
or in just what happened or have gaps in their stories
and they want to know what happened,
there's always going to be a place for it.
- Fantastic, thank you so much Sal,
this has been super interesting.
That little image where the barcode should be symbolized
the direct market of comic sales which helped encourage
retailers to sell comics at specialty comic book shops
instead of newsstands which also led to
the growing back issues market which then started turning
fans into collectors and if you remember,
from one of our previous videos, collecting comics is what
almost killed the industry in the 90's.
There's such a large amount of
history behind that little picture.
Special thanks to Sal from ComicPOP! for
helping out with this video.
If you haven't checked out his channel yet,
do yourself a favor and subscribe for
great comic book videos like his series we alluded to,
called "Back Issues", that reviews
and discusses comics from yesteryear.
- I want to thank you for having me
and you know keep up the great work, man.
- Thank you, good sir.
You can also watch some of our other videos exploring the
fascinating history of the comics industry like
perhaps this one about how collecting comics
completely ruined the comics industry.
It's an oldie, but a goodie.
Or this one, discussing censorship in comics.
That's a fun trip through history.
Click on one video to choose your fate.
There will also be links in the description.
And make sure you hit that big, sexy subscribe button
so you don't miss out on all the new videos we make for
you every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday that
explore the history, science, art,
and philosophy behind your favorite comic book superheroes.
My name is Scott
and I will see you right here on Friday for another video.
See ya!