Market Spotlight Report:  Sunfire & Big Hero 6

Sunfire & Big Hero 6 have been speculator darlings for some time now, for lots of reasons.  Tops on that list being the fact that the property has an animated feature from Disney coming out in late fall.  Disney is a powerful horse to be hitched to, and the creative team is helmed by the Man of Action folks.  In the comics community, we know them as crazy bastards like Joe Casey, Joe Kelly, Duncan Rouleau, and Steve Seagle.

Man of Action is responsible for stuff like Ben 10, the Ultimate Spider-Man Cartoon, and Avengers Assemble.  They know how to transition comic book material into other quality media.  So Big Hero 6 seems like a pretty strong play on paper, and the returns have already been solid.  Alpha Flight (2007) # 17 is the first appearance, and that trades for around $40-$50 in nice raw condition.  The first issue of the initial mini-series sells for similar figures.

Those books do not have particularly large print runs.  These were niche books, and hitting right smack in the "we don't overprint any more" era of Marvel.  Again, on paper this has all the makings of a long-term speculator bonanza.

Having just watched the trailer for the upcoming movie...I feel like The Move is to cut bait on everything before the 2008 series and sell for whatever you can, as soon as possible.  Judging from the trailer, your POV character is Hiro, with his trusty balloon robot companion Baymax.  They're both great, but they bear little resemblance to those early Marvel issues.

In the Sunfire mini-series, Hiro wears glasses, appears a little older, and cobbles together guns to fight off secret agents.  Baymax is absolutely unrecognizeable as the same character.  In the trailer he's a dopey, harmless looking balloon blob.  In the comic, he looks like a giant angry lizard.

If you squint really hard, you can trace the lineage back.  Both Hiros are smart kids that program an artificial sidekick to take care of them.  I'm not suggesting that these early Big Hero 6 books have no future value.  I'm saying that when a kid comes out of that Big Hero 6 movie, the best case scenario is that they are very excited about what they saw.  When that kid gets to the early Big Hero 6 comics, he or she won't recognize the Hiro and Baymax on the covers, and they won't give a flying fig about no damn Honey Lemon or Sunfire.

So why would anybody pay big money for characters they can't emotionally connect to the thing they actually like?  Answer: I don't think they will.  I think the earliest issues of Big Hero 6 are not good long-term plays, and I would get out toot sweet.

Things get a little more interesting when you get to the 2008 mini-series by Chris Claremont and David Nakayama.  The Hiro and Baymax from that series visually "feel" much closer to what's going on in the trailer.  I think the movie audience might find some resonance in that series.  These books also do quite well in the current secondary market.  No single issue from that series approaches the $50 mark like Alpha Flight # 17, not even the first issue.  I have seen complete sets of the five issue series go for $100, though.

Should you sell those right now and avoid getting burned?  Hmmmm....I don't know for sure.  I'm fairly risk averse, and this feels like risk.  If I had one set of the 2008 Big Hero 6 series, I would get out now and make sure I'm in the black.  If I had multiple sets, I absolutely positively would sell at least one set now, and if you really believe the audience will feel that emotional connection between comic/movie, you can hold on to the rest for greater gains.  It's definitely something you should be thinking about now if you're holding this material for profit.

Other Books That Have Recently "Popped"

Hellblazer:  Phantom Pains

John Constantine has been a big earner for me in my history as a book scout, and I expect the upcoming TV series to increase those earning opportunities as demand outpaces the already limited supply.  Hellblazer is a perfect secondary market machine. It maintains a fervent, dedicated fan base, but that base is never large enough to entice DC into quick reprints.  Eventually DC does go back to press, they always do.  But there are often extended windows on huge chunks of the Constantine library.

Right now Phantom Pains is sitting directly in Crazy Town.  I recently posted a copy on Amazon for $80...the next in line for the "new" category is $225.  Now, I'm not suggesting that you're likely to ever sell that book for $200+, but I will say that listings don't get to that level unless the supply is severely stripped.  If you see this in your LCS, it's an insta-buy.  There are lots of Hellblazer titles that can make you money right now, (India, Laughing Magician, Roots of Coincidence) but that's the one I'd be most interested in.

Batman & The Monster Men

I've been waiting for this to pop for ages and eventually I'm always right.  This is not a tough thesis to crack - Batman is the most powerful force in out-of-print trades, and Matt Wagner writes a helluva Batman story.  Wagner handles the art chores on this one as well, so...double bonus!

This is an easy sell at $40 in nice condition, and as recently as last week your Amazon min for a "new" copy was over $100.  It would not surprise me to see a book like this trading at that level.  Wagner is a strong name, and Batman is the strongest brand.

Let me clarify that a bit.  Any volume of the Walking Dead is going to sell more copies than Batman & The Monster Men.  The difference is that Walking Dead is also going to stay in print, precisely for that reason.  If DC ever allowed Watchmen to go out of print, that would be a $100 book inside of a month.  Nosebleed prices happen at a magical little sweet spot between Some People Really Like This and We Don't Want To Print 5,000 Copies Because It Will Take Us Three Years To Sell Them. 

Scarlet Spider Volume 2: Lone Star

You've got a window right now on this book, and it just might be sitting at your LCS collecting dust.  This series had a decently sized cult following.  People liked the Yost concept ("All the power, none of the responsibility) and they really liked the Ryan Stegman art.

There are four collected volumes of the series, but the second has gone out of print.  Amazon mins for nice copies are trading for $40+, and there's a possibility this could go higher.  The bad news is that the Scarlet Spider series is cancelled, which makes it less likely that current readers want to go back for old volumes.  The good news is that Dan Slott is about to roll forward with "Spider-Verse", which will feature nearly every spider-character in some fashion or another.  It's going to be big, and if Kaine gets the right kind of spotlight, it could definitely drive more people toward this book.

The problem these days is that the newer material carries a pretty hefty SRP.  A copy of Lone Star at cover price is going to run you $19.99, which is a fairly steep investment if you conservatively figure a sale at $40.  If your shop is running a sale or you have a nice discount, there is room for some good profit on that book right now.

Miracle Keith Review: Vertigo Resurrected!

Vertigo Resurrected
DC Comics/Vertigo imprint
Scripts: Warren Ellis & more
Pencils: Phil Jimenez & more
96 pages for $7.99

I felt an intense desire to write this review after reading this, yet another dreck-filled, overpriced rip-off anthology with half-baked ideas and thin stories. Why did I feel this burning need? It’s the lead-off story, “Shoot” by Warren Ellis that has me hopped up with resentment and indignance.

This was the selling point for the solicitation of this issue; a short tale about a rash of school shootings that was supposedly going to press right around the time of the Columbine High School tragedy. DC/Vertigo decided to shelve the story for obvious reasons, and this is the first time it’s seen press.

I was deeply disappointed in Mr. Ellis’s main theme for this story, and deeply confused by some of the plot elements. We meet a woman who works for some unnamed investigative body who has become obsessed with a rash of school shootings around the U.S., while at the same time becoming obsessed with listening to an audio tape of Jim Jones preaching to his suicidal flock at Jamestown on that fateful day. We never get to know who this woman is; why should we care about her? Because she’s investigating the shootings? Because she loses sleep over video of kids killing kids? Because she’s obsessed with Jim Jones?

And what exactly does a suicidal cult have to do with school shootings? I guess the very thin connection would be some vague conceit about needless death? Wow, what a brave and innovative stance to take, Warren. And then, while watching footage of news coverage of all the school shootings, she begins to notice that a mysterious blonde man in a trenchcoat with a white shirt and black tie is showing up in the crowd at every school shooting.

A friend within the FBI sends her a locked file on a Mr. John Constantine, who of course ends up arriving at her office unannounced during one of her late nights. His message to her is a familiar piece of worn-out armchair psychology: that whole “it’s not the movies, the video games or the music” lecture that’s supposed to help explain a senseless tragedy like a school shooting.

Constantine tells us: “look into the eyes of the children; not the ones holding the guns, but the kids standing around watching it…look into their eyes and you’ll see that they have no connection to their own emotions because they’ve been raised by television...”

What the hell does this mean? Does Warren Ellis really think that the explanation for these shootings is a lack of emotional connection that’s fundamentally infected each child in the school? This premise is as lazy as it is insulting; I’m sure that no child in any school where another child has turned loose a gun has ever run screaming for their lives, or cried out in fear, or begged for their very lives.

I would wager that those children who were victims or potential victims have never felt more alive or more emotional in their entire short lives than in those terrible moments. Not to mention, the “real” reasons behind a school shootings are always complex and can only be speculated on by so-called “experts”. The personality profile on Harris and Kleebold pre- massacre is the same profile you could give to hundreds of high school kids across the country; the “reason” that they went to the ultimate extreme is unknowable by anyone but them. For Ellis to give this trite bullshit as a reason is so inexcusable, especially from someone as obviously smart as he is.

Excellent pencils by Phil Jimenez are wasted on this piece of junk story. It was buried for one reason, should have remained buried for a different reason.

The art throughout this whole anthology is uniformly good, but the stories are pretty thin and don’t really go anywhere new. The one story that almost satisfies is the Grant Morrison tale “The New Toys”. Morrison enthusiasts will recognize shades of his famous Wile E. Coyote one-issue story arc from Animal Man; here we have the first person tragedy of a young child’s G.I. Joe-like action figure, as he goes from wartime hero, to injured veteran, to lover (of a Barbie doll, natch), to transvestite, to a firing squad. Morrison does a serviceable job with the whole take-a-simple-childhood-object-or-pop-culture-character-and-give-it-postmodern-complexities thing, but the ending is very confusing and was lost on this reader.

The art by Frank Quitely is quite astonishing with a distinctive lack of superheroes or the infamous “garden gnomes” that Monster Mike has complained about in the past.

For $7.99, this is a waste of time and money. If you’re a Morrison completist, wait for this one to go to the bargain bins. If you’re an Ellis completist, you should get what you deserve for being an Ellis completist and buy it for full price.

- Miracle Keith

Chronic Review: Hellblazer # 268!

Hellblazer # 268
DC Comics - Vertigo imprint
Script: Peter Milligan
Pencils: Giuseppe Camuncoli
22 pages for $2.99

And here she is, the grand old dame of Vertigo. Sandman? Gone. Swamp Thing? Gone, then back, then gone, then back, and now gone again. Y the Last Man, Preacher, Transmet.....fuck, they're all gone. There's just Hellblazer.

For a little while, at least. Sales are hovering around the 10,000 level, which is absurdly low for a Big 2 book. Marvel would have pulled the plug years ago. Sure, they do (relatively) healthy trade sales, and that helps. I noticed they don't print Hellblazer on the usual glossy paper, either. It's on the old newsprint that is usually reserved for the DC Johnny titles. Perhaps that's helping to make the title more economically viable.

It would probably seem natural for you to look at this dying dinosaur and feel a little pang of melancholy. Don't.

Hellblazer does not need your pity. It's still around because the character is still as strong as ever, the stories are as strong as ever, the creative team is as strong as ever. Do not sleep on this book when you could just be reading it. For a little while longer.


The trouble in "Sectioned", of which issue 268 is part 2, is that John Constantine has finally gone shit nuts. He's been committed, he's being assailed with a freight train of phobias, he's cutting off appendages to still the voices in his head.

Pulsing beneath the surface is the unspoken recognition that something on the outside is causing all this. John, crazy bastard that he is, still lurks somewhere in there wondering what the hell is happening to him. There's still enough mage in there to try and enlist the help of Shade, the Changing Man, who should be very familiar to Peter Milligan fans.

Shade isn't the man he used to be, and he was pretty goddamned dangerous before. The issue ends with Shade demanding a kiss, which sounds about right, and next issue should be epic fun.

And that's why you should shed no tears for Hellblazer. She doesn't need them, because there's nothing wrong with her. There might be something wrong with the market. Nothing to be done about that. I will honor the book until it no longer deserves it. That old gray mare? She still kicks ass.

- Ryan