Somebody at Marvel PR has taken to writing comedy. Here's the first line of the press release announcing that Captain America #600 is going back for a second printing:
This week, there's no bigger super hero than Captain America and mainstream media frenzy caused CAPTAIN AMERICA #600 to sell out immediately (though copies may be available at the retail level).
I must lead a more sheltered life than I realized, because I completely missed the media frenzy on this. It's good to know, though, that despite CAP #600 apparently being the only thing they were talking about on the cable news shows, and despite its instantaneous sell out, you shouldn't have any trouble finding it available in actual stores.
Posted by Doug at June 18, 2009 5:08 PM
Heh. It's jargon, of course: "sold out" means that Marvel/Diamond don't have any more. If the retailers were actually out, it would be "sold through". But it does make for a fairly opaque line when parsed in normal english.
They probably mean that Captain America # 600 betrayed its early indy sound to record an album with more commercial appeal.
What, you didn't see all that footage of all those people in Iran out rioting because they couldn't get their copy?
Jason: You may be right. I've got the "Wow" and "Flame On" singles, but I just couldn't get as excited after they started calling themselves Eugenius.
Jerry: They should drop by the comic shop I patronize, where there are still plenty of copies.
Doug: Or they can drop by Wizard World Philly, where one booth has stacks of them on sale currently for $2 each.
Over at CBR, Brian Hibbs writes a fairly good description of the impact on retailers of the Cap 600 fiasco.
I like how Hibbs goes from "They shouldn't have kept the fact that Cap was returning in Reborn a secret because we all knew Cap would be returning." to "It was hard to order properly because we didn't know that Cap was returning" in the space of two paragraphs.
I'm not so impressed, Jason. He could've done it in a single paragraph if he'd really given it some thought.
I'll go read Hibbs' column now, but I would guess that his first quoted sentence has an implicit "eventually" tacked onto it.
That is, concealing Cap's return isn't useful because everybody knows he was coming back eventually, i.e., it's not a surprise. The effect of concealing Cap's return in #600 specifically is therefore limited to screwing up retailers' ability to order, since it doesn't preserve the surprise.