New Brevoort Formspring

Sure. You need to understand the way that comics were sold back in the day as opposed to how they’re sold now. back then, a newsstand or a candy store or whatever would place an order with their distributor for,say, 300 Comics. Eventually, this would get more specifically broken down into, say, 150 Marvel Comics, 100 DC Comics, 50 Archie Comics, etc. But beyond that, it didn’t really matter–because all of the books were returnable. Everything that sold, sold, and everything that didn’t was returned for credit and destroyed. It was a woefully wasteful system, one that meant you were often printing three copies, selling one, and destroying the other two after shipping them all over the world. But what it did mean is that you would get copies of issues of books like MARVEL TEAM-UP onto the stands. And the audience in general that frequented those newsstands didn’t really concern themselves with who the creative team was, or whether the story was going to “count”–they would buy the book if it had Spidey teaming up with a character they liked, or if the cover was eye-catching, or whatever. In contrast, in the Direct Market, everything is ordered specifically–your retailer will specifically order 5 copies of MARVEL TEAM-UP–and none of it is returnable as a consequence. So you only ever order what you think you can sell. It really is gambling with your money in a way, being able to predict what the readership is going to plop down their money for ahead of time. And, of course, that readership is infinitely more concerned nowadays with who the creative team is, and whether the story will “count”–and team-up books seldom meet that second criteria. So they tend to be ordered relatively poorly, and they tend to sell through equally poorly even for the copies that are out there. And it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about TEAM-UP, TWO-IN-ONE or BRAVE AND THE BOLD, this holds consistent.