Marvel Looks to Exploit Blackest Night

From Newsarama:

Marvel Comics just released a press release saying that they’ll be allowing retailers to return stripped covers of unsold comics in exchange for a Deadpool variant cover version of The Siege #3. The promotion runs through February 16, just over a month from now, and will, according to Marvel, give retailers a chance to return over-ordered product in order to obtain what they call an “extremely rare” variant of their big event book.

The catch? All qualifying titles are DC Comics. Recent issues of Adventure Comics, Booster Gold, Doom Patrol, Justice League of America, Outsiders and R.E.B.E.L.S., which were ordered by retailers in huge numbers because of their connection the DC’s Blackest Night event and its related ring giveaway, are going to be bartered back by Marvel, presumably in hopes that they can embarrass DC with a press release trumpeting big numbers of “unwanted” comics that retailers felt obliged to order to get the much-in-demand rings.

The books in question all saw substantial sales gains in the month that they were propping up Blackest Night, both before and after the ring promotion month–but many retailers complained that the quantity they were being asked to buy in order to qualify for the rings was simply too high, and that while retailers bought a lot in order to get the rings, many of them ended up with too much product on the shelf. Given Blackest Night’s continued sales success, and a perception by some fans that Marvel isn’t dominating the sales charts in the same way as they had in recent years, the House of Ideas probably sees this as an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by promoting The Siege by attacking Blackest Night. Still, they’re asking for an awful lot of copies in order to get one comic back from Marvel, so one has to wonder how many retailers will just hang on to all or most of their leftovers and figure that selling them in the dollar bin might be a more economical idea.

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