‘Jupiters Legacy’ is the new Mark Millar and Frank Quitely superhero comic book coming out from Image Comics soon. There was much hype on this book and it was even featured highly on the Diamond Comics Advance Reorder List for 4/7/13.
http://comicsheatingup.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/diamond-comics-advance-reorder-4713/
The combination pre-release buzz and advanced reorders usually lead to speculation gold (or at least silver or bronze), but Image has killed any chances of this getting big on the secondary market. Sure, the publishers, artists and writers, do not care about books becoming big money makers on the secondary market, but the heat it can generate can lead to more people picking up future issues. Books like ‘The Walking Dead’, ‘Chew’, ‘Saga’ and ‘Peter Panzerfaust’ all benefited from new readers picking up the books on the secondary market.
‘Jupiters Legacy’ probably will not reap the same rewards because of the distribution plan that they are using. The plan is this, retailers can order as many copies of the book as they like and return ones that do not sell as long as their order is above their ‘The Walking Dead’ 106 order. In other words, a retailer can order hundreds of copies, get all the variants, sell them at the inflated variant price, and return all the regular copies that do not sell. The total print run for ‘The Walking Dead’ 107 was in the 75,000 unit range. The total orders for ‘Jupiters Legacy’ is in the 150,00 range. This effectively kills the secondary market value on the regular covers, in fact this helps kill the variant market as stores who normally wouldn’t order so high on a new book have done so to get the variants, after all, they can return the unsold ones.
