One Week Later Report for August 12th, 2020

Welcome once again to another installment of the One Week Later Report.

This week we’ll cover the books released on 08/05/2020, which was last week. Can be books we anticipated getting hot, total surprise winners and perhaps books that we hyped and ended up as duds. Also could be a good list to use when out picking up this weeks pickups..

We’ll start off with Robin King because last week was a great week for comics I think and Robin King should come to no surprise for you people who have not been living under a rock.

Dark Night Death Metal Legends of the Dark Knights #1 is a book you can easily make money if you can still find it out in the wild. I’d imagine for a lot folks it’s still in transit from the online orders since if you’re like me, you still don’t get out much due to the rising COVID cases and people acting like morons not wearing masks.

This one was a solid $25 to $30 book with secondary market pre-sales but is dropping (most recents are hovering around the $15 average range). You can likely make money but honestly, if you snagged a couple of copies, I say it’s likely better to hold for the long term gamble for this Robin King fella as I knew the market would get flooded. Searching Comics Modern Age on eBay for this book returns over 1,000 hits..

So if you missed out on pre-ordering this one and still want it, have a little patience, I don’t think we’ve seen rock bottom yet. A lot of folks bought a stack of issues and want to offload them. Let them continue to undercut each other and then buy and hold for the long term as if this character turns out to be anything like Batman Who Laughs, we’ll see it climb back over time when supplies continue to decrease and demand increases as they’re being tucked away into collections.

Now if you were able to snag the 1:25 for cover or cheap, we’ve seen these drop drastically from pre-sales peaks around the $500 range. Now you can snag them for under $200.



Overshadowed by Robin King hype, Batman #96 also hit store shelves and gave us our first glimpse of Clownhunter.

Can we say he was overshadowed or did shops just go super heavy on this one since Tynion was pumping this character and promised first appearance? I think it’s a combination of both.

So grab a copy if you find them and tuck it away. If this character ever becomes mainstream, this will be the book to own (and particularly the 1:25 Design Variant which is $20 now on the secondary market, with a bunch of auctions that are current and could end up even cheaper). I’m not even going to bother with checking secondary prices for the regular cover since you can likely still find this at your local shops and or most online retailers (after a quick check).

Ice Cream Man #20 was the winner coming out of Image Comics last week. With the awesome Dr. Seuss homage cover.

This is a solid $20 with some sales reaching as high as $30. It’s getting a second printing too with another kick ass Dr. Seuss homage cover, so make sure you pre-order it now so you don’t pay secondary market prices potentially.

Here’s the 2nd print cover for you all not aware (was not out last week, it’s the 2nd printing on the way):

Ice Cream Man #20 (2nd Printing)This next book was a FOC Highlight book about a full moon cycle back. Did you all order it then? Did you ignore me and said, bleh..  Agentpoyo is a moron, I’ll pick this one up later! Well, it’s now a $15 to $20 book, it’s the Star Wars Bounty Hunters #1 2nd Print that has a pretty kick ass cover of Boba Fett.

Also goes to show, talking about books pre-FOC does nothing to the secondary market potential. If you’re one of those blabber mouth speculators that thinks or preaches pre-FOC talk ruins spec, you need to get your head checked cause you’re WRONG!

Thor #4 (which is a $15 book itself on a good day) and Black Winter are still on fire. Everyone loves Black Winter. Who would have though a cloud could make so much buzz as a character. Alana loves Black Winter..  loves it so much she was willing to drop her 20 quantity she had in her cart at Midtown of Black Winter #5 (which is now around the $75 range, I know, I just sold one two days ago for that much) so others got a chance to love them some Black Winter.

Anyways, Thor #4 got a 2nd print that depicts the last page of Black Winter appearance on the cover. This sold out quickly and is selling well on the secondary market.

There was also Thor #3 3rd Print. Not as appealing to some since there’s no Black Winter on the cover but it is a cool design cover. Still worthy of a grab if you see them on the shelves.

That does it for last week in review. I’m sure there might of been a few others I could have mentioned but I think these were the more worthy of the books from last week.



19 thoughts on “One Week Later Report for August 12th, 2020”

  1. ‘Pre foc talk does nothing.’ Yeah right. You couldn’t possibly believe that if you understood supply and demand. Look how good Legends 1:25 is doing because nobody knew.

    1. Did you even read what I was implying? I did pre-FOC on Bounty Hunters and Captain Marvel #18. Both went on to sell pretty well on the secondary market.

      Pre-FOC does not affect true and actual demand. So, Jared, you’re WRONG!

    2. Legends is also on the decline.. the market is swamped cause all those speculators who went heavy, buying them all out before normal readers and collectors could nab them are now all undercutting each other to offload.

      So, what you brought forth still does not deny the fact that we told people to keep a watch on Captain Marvel #18 and Star Wars Bounty Hunters #1 2nd print before FOC and they still went on to sell pretty good on the secondary market.

      So, I do understand what Supply and Demand is, clearly you do not.

  2. Saw some guy on YouTube saying he bought 45 copies of “Legends” & my LCS didn’t even get their shipment for the week… ? so now my Batman run is missing Batman 93, nightwing 71, legends, Batman 96 & now I’m down 2 covers on dceased dead planet…I collect the movie & card stock variants

  3. People always misunderstand how supply and demand works when it comes to prefoc talk. Yes copies of bounty hunter 2nd print are selling for $15-$20 on ebay. Thats peanuts compared to what it could be selling for if there weren’t multiple copies listed aka less supply. There will also be more supply once online orders come through. If no one knows about a book and they were too late to grab it, you can bet there will be a huge demand for a book with such a low print run.

    If everyone knew about momoko spidergwen cover, it wouldn’t be a $500+ raw book. Same goes for jeehyung lee ghost spider which is a $700+ book. They are scarce/rare and are all based off of cover art/low print. Not compared to bounty hunter and thor 4 2nd print which have 1st apps/cover app/good cover art and was talked about multiple times in the community afterwards. Which you’d think with all of that going on they’d be a easy $30-$70 book. But since they were shared by many among thousands of speculators prefoc, the books are pocket change at the moment.

    I care more about Prefoc talk in big spec groups with THOUSANDS of people than I do articles/sites. A book goes under the radar and can be big money, but it only takes ONE to share it among multiple groups which causes the typical comments I see saying “Awesome I bought 5 copies” “This is gonna be hot! I went in and bought 20” ……so on and so on. Next thing you know there are pages among pages listed on ebay and are barely selling for much.

    Point being less copies to find, higher the price will be on copies found. And even if print run is small, doesn’t mean the book will spike, it just means theres a GREATER CHANCE of it being big money. Spec is sooo easy these days, marvel basically spoon feeds it to us, but because these speculators POUNCE once they see a post about a good spec book, there really isn’t much heat to garner on the book after that.

    Lastly I’ll just add a recent example. Thor 5 3rd print art was released about 3 days before its FOC. One person in particular decided to post the book among multiple groups saying “THIS IS GONNA BE HOT!”. In only a day I seen hundreds of comments posting about how many copies they all jumped on. Retailers see this and they up their orders as well. One group alone has 10,000 members. If only 1000 see the post and each buys an average of 5 copies thats 5,000 added to the print run. And thats low balling it. Times that by all the groups and speculators and retailers and you can see how easy it is to have a high print run. THE LESS PEOPLE KNOW PREFOC THE BETTER. After I could care less.

    1. “If no one knows about a book and they were too late to grab it, you can bet there will be a huge demand for a book with such a low print run.”

      Print runs don’t create demand. If that were the case, all the small indie books would not be tossed into the dollar bin at you local Half Price Books weeks or months later.

      Yes, supply vs demand plays a huge role in potential overall value but when speculator groups try to “hide” talk about a book, in a sense and in multiple instances, this is also creating false demand if it’s pass FOC. We call this pumping and dumping books. How many “hot books” are now cover price books months later? Was the demand instigated by actual organic demand or pumped by those who went heavy pre-FOC and didn’t talk about it and then start talking about it after FOC for their own gain?

      Simply put, yes, you can say pre-FOC might bump the print run but it still doesn’t destroy the potential value in a book either if the demand is there.

      Legends is the perfect book that nobody talked about pre-FOC. Speculators who were quick to order stacked copies (we got that one guy on YouTube who admitted to buying 45 copies) and are now driving the value down. Only those who pre-sold won…

      So there are a lot of factors involved but overall, pre-FOC talk does not destroy all chances for the value of a book if the demand eventually outweighs the supply.

    2. “Thats peanuts compared to what it could be selling for if there weren’t multiple copies listed aka less supply. “

      I also don’t think it would be that more valuable if it wasn’t mentioned in any FOC talk. Honestly, this is the type of book I think attracts two types of people, first speculators who wanted a quick flip, then the completists/collectors who must have every cover and additional printing, then the Boba Fett fans.. I would imagine most everyone else don’t care if they got the first printing.

      “If everyone knew about momoko spidergwen cover, it wouldn’t be a $500+ raw book. Same goes for jeehyung lee ghost spider which is a $700+ book. “

      And those are a completely different game changer since those were incentive ratio books.. Now you’re trying to compare books that were ratio with books that were open order.

      1. Well, the Peach cover also had (Popular Character on Cover + Artist Name Value + New Characters) x COVID lack of new publication distractions. Could probably throw in some FOMO for taste, but just my two cents.

    3. This is one of the dumbest comments I’ve seen on here. “Waaaaaa, FOC talk ruined my potential to pump and dump.”

      1. LOL i couldnt care less about the pre FOC chatter. I tell EVERYONE wherever i frequest because i want people to have the opportunity to GET THAT BOOK. Im not in it to mass sell. But from a seller’s perspective, i get his point. Im a collector. i would like to sell some books to afford new ones, lol, but nothing more nothing less.

    4. precisely why Hell Arisen 3 is speculator’s dream book. Announced officially as Punchline app. post FOC, stores under ordered cuz no one was pulling/reading Hell Arisen in the first place. By the time talk reached all corners of the interweb, it was too late. the print run on that book is only 35k too. not to mention a metric shit ton came in damaged cuz Diamond sucks.

  4. Here’s a good example of someone in the past canceling an order cause a book was talked about pre-FOC… http://comicsheatingup.net/2019/08/08/something-is-killing-children-foc-frison-variant-book-to-watch/#comment-107260

    Anyone remember the Frison Something is Killing Children #1 FOC Variant? Mmmm… hmmm.. pre-FOC killed this book. Yup, book is worthless.. 😉

    I sure hope Steve Laprade (sorry, no pun intended on using you as an example but by what you commented here on CHU in the past) didn’t actually cancel his orders a year ago.. He could be selling these for some nice profit. 😉

    1. I bought 2 copies and made a nice profit off SICTC #1. Didn’t deter me. It did take a bit to organically rise in price.

      Pre FOC talk doesn’t deter me in the least anymore. If anything, it helps remind me. And a lot of books seem to “disappear” immediately following FOC the. Suddenly re-appear with higher prices or “limit 1”…so if you don’t get in pre FOC, forget about multiple copies…maybe even have to scramble when Midtown or MCS post their copies…

      I wish someone would have made a bigger deal about Spawn 309 B cover. Pre FOC talk wasn’t going to slow that bus down…

  5. Comics are supposed to be fun. Collect what you like. If you wanna spec, spec. But people need to stop complaining or find another hobby. I have been having fun for 35 years and continue to. I miss key moderns that come out here and there and if I can chase them inexpensively great. If they get out of my price range so be it. But just this morning I had fun. I saw an article on the other spec site about America Chavez and her rare variants. The article luckily failed to mention Secret Empire #7 J. Scott Campbell 1:50 Variant. I bought one about a month ago on mycomicshop for $12!!! In 9.4 grade which I know means 9.8. So I went back this morning after reading the article and there was another 9.4 for $12. I scooped it up. I like J. Scott covers. It’s a good J. Scott cover. I collected what I like plus some spec mixed in. That’s fun. Have fun people. Don’t let FOMO suck the joy out of your life. Enjoy the small victories.

    1. Exactly. Who cares if CHU or other websites talk about a book pre-FOC and you think it ruined the potential value (which again, doesn’t). It’s not like FOC is some big hidden secret. The whole point of this site is about speculation along with other news, spoilers, reviews, previews.. etc.

      It’s like some groups want to hide in the bushes and jump out after FOC has passed to then spread the news so they’re the ones likely gaining from it since they loaded up on copies.. “Hey everybody, go buy this book, best book EVAR!”. It’s the same thing, week after week. Rinse, recycle, repeat.

      I could probably go deep into analyzing that those who try to manipulate the market by loading up on a book, hyping it after FOC and then trying to offload by controlling the secondary market does more harm than good than organic demand. Speculators who try to “not talk about a book” only then to say, hey, this book looks great (buy buy buy) after FOC has passed while they loaded up are the biznatches of the comic book world..

      CHU is a website providing information and 100% of it is already available on the internet. If you don’t like what we do here and you think talking pre-FOC ruins your own pump and dumps, then don’t even bother coming here. We’re doing nothing wrong by simply talking about comics and what’s coming down the release pipeline..

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