I went to the comic book store last night to get my books. I usually go every 2-3 weeks and was planning to go last night before the big news broke. I’ve been reading Captain America as it gets collected in paperback format, and it’s honestly one of the best single character books Marvel is publishing right now, if you like the character. Anyway, the man at the store said that he’d had quite a day, and that the phone had been ringing off the hook. This was about 5:45 or so, and he already didn’t have any copies of Captain America 25 left on the shelves. He said if I really wanted one he had a stack of about 10 left, but they were otherwise being held for people who’d called in earlier that day. I said I’d wait, as I’ll end up buying the trade, anyway and I already knew what happened. (In addition, this week’s Civil War: The Initiative reprints a portion of the issue, but I wouldn’t recommend buying it overall.) He said that Marvel had overprinted this issue, but at 9:00 that morning had announced they would not be doing a second printing. By 3:00 they’d changed that to “probably not” be doing a second printing, so it’s quite possible that they’ll have more on the shelves but not until the hype has already blown over.
Brian Hibbs, comic retailed blogger, has this to say about it:
I wish Marvel had laid out the score for us a lot better — certainly when Superman was killed, we knew MONTHS in advance, and it resulted in millions of copies ordered. Even with the supposed generous overprint, I’ll be surprised if we end up with even the same number of copies of CAP #25 on the market as CIVIL WAR (ie, nowhere near enough). The REAL problem is, because (I’m guessing) the reorders are going to fill from newstand copies, and because of the way that Diamond and Marvel work with OSDs (over-short-damage), it seems likely that reorders won’t arrive for 2 more weeks. That’s going to be way too late, I think.
A slow news day meant that the book got lots of media coverage, and Captain America’s an old school wartime hero, so interest seems to be higher than it would otherwise be. Still, I like to see how these things look to people who don’t read comics. For one, it’s common knowledge that characters don’t stay dead. All of the major media coverage of Steve Rogers’ death include comments about how characters come back from the dead frequently, and Joe Quesada remains flippant about it in each story. I’d say it’s quite possible he will stay dead, but it’s also possible in the very next issue we’ll see that the assassination was a cover to get him back into the field and escape trial.
Also, it’s interesting to see which characters in each publisher’s stables are big enough for people to even know who they are. In terms of public consciousness, DC Comics has Batman and Superman, then Wonder Woman, and that’s about it. Some people know a few more from Superfriends or more recently Justice League. For Marvel, you’ve got Spider-man and the X-Men on the top tier, then the Hulk and, I guess the Fantastic Four. Iron Man’s getting a movie next summer (which might actually be good), but Captain America hasn’t had any film coverage in years, excluding a few direct-to-DVD cartoons, which is odd because, in my opinion, he’s really their third-best property after Spider-Man and the X-Men.