The Comics Rack

Digression The First

One of the interesting things about working in a comic shop are watching what sells and what doesn't. Back when I was a store manager, everything was compared to the Claremont/Byrne Uncanny X-Men, which was the best selling comic during most of the 80s. We ordered more X-Men than anything else and the sales on most all other titles were compared to the X-Men. Occasionally, however, a book would come out of the pack and make a leap from the "near cancellation" pile into the realm of the X-Folks.

One of these surprise books turned out to be Daredevil as written and drawn by Frank Miller. Daredevil was near cancellation when Miller took over the book: first with Roger McKenzie doing the scripts and then Miller taking over the writing and drawing with inks by Klaus Janson. Sales started slowly as word filtered out about this new direction for the book and soon we found ourselves ordering Dardevil in numbers near X-Men. The emotional high point for the book occured in issue #181, where (Spoiler Warning)Bulleye killed Elektra (if you haven't read these stories, get ahold of them NOW!). Sales didn't flatten out as a result of this major plot turn, but stayed high and Marvel, always looking for ways to make yet another buck, allowed Miller to do a sort of coda to this storyline over in What If?, a rather uneven book that explored what would have happened if certain events in the Marvel universe had gone in a different direction. With Miller at the helm, and inks by Terry Austin, What If? #35 told the tale of an alternate universe, where Elektra didn't die, but went on to continue her relationship with Daredevil (again, a story worth reading). Needless to say, sales for this issue of What If? went through the roof and most comic shops were scrambling for copies to meet the demand. Prices reached a high level and, since Marvel didn't reprint books back in those days, the supply of newsstand copies was also soon exhausted.

Over at our store, however, we were able to keep What If #35 on sale for quite some time. Although we soon exhausted our copies from our magazine distributor, it seems that one of our book wholesalers had bought comics for a time from Pacific on a non-returnable basis and stored the unsold copies on shelves, where they were unsorted and forgotten. One day, just by chance, Richard happened to notice the cover to the comic in question sticking out of a stack and found a stash of around I'm not really sure how many copies. So, 10-15 copies at a time, we would pick up a fresh batch of What If #35 each week when we picked up our paperbacks and then put them out at cover price with a big sign that proclaimed "Rare What If #35. One per customer. Cover price." Since the book was going for around $5-10 a pop in other stores (cover price was $1), we had a good laugh watching the jaws of customers hit the floor as they saw this gem sitting on the open shelves along with the other comics.

Addendum: As I'm writing this, you can find What If? #35 on eBay for prices ranging from $.99 to $14.99 with one dealer offering 10 copies for an opening bid of $.99. How times change!