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David Gabriel, The Prince Of Variants

Published Thu, 17 Mar 2016 16:30:28 -0500

James Vascardi, EIC of Comic Book has continued his conversation with his old boss at Marvel, SVP of Sales & Marketing, David Gabriel. And today they're talking variant covers and Star Wars.

Which is handy because today Marvel has also launched a sale on over 700 different Star Wars and All-New All-Different variant covers for 50% off the usual price, for retailers, including many that were previously restricted for sale. Expect a flood coming your way soon…

And he leads with the statement on the growing market for variant covers, saying

As long as no one is just taking advantage of customers and retailers. I think it is going to continue to grow for a while.

I'll let everyone else unpack that one. Because he moves swiftly on to a message targeted directly at Image Comics publisher, Eric Stephenson

It is also funny that the same individuals on the publishing side, that wanted to cry the use of variants do that within minutes of announcing the use of their own variants. Or they'll decry variants and then a few days later make announcements about variants.

And on the state of Marvel's sales,

I think everyone is seeing the same amount of growth in the industry. We are all seeing the same numbers. I know that just from looking at the store counts every week that over the past 12 months they have gone up.

Which does seem to ignore that in February's figures, a lot of their comics saw a massive drop off, far more than usual. From industry estimates, Vision dropped 15k. Contest Of Champions dropped 7k. New Avengers dropped 11k. These were on 4th and 5th issues…

Vascardi does raise an issue that we have had in the past – asking how healthy a Marvel without would look like now. Gabriel refused the point.

Well you pointed out the main point right there is that we did not add Star Warson top of what we were publishing. We took away from a regular title count, we took many of our top creators, away from that they could be doing that were specifically Marvel superhero titles and put them into the Star Wars universe. You have to look at the fact that we would be significantly down in title count if we just cut out those books. I think we cut something like 7 or 8 books a month out of our line to put Star Wars in.

You heard it folks. The existence of Star Wars killed other books at Marvel. Elektra, Invaders, Secret Avengers and Ghost Rider owe their deaths to Star Wars. And I feel an absence of the X-Force….

He also talks about what we've noticed, the success of the new Doctor Strange series and how well anything Deadpool has been selling.

Oh and there as this quote about the Essential line of Marvel Comics in the light of the adult colouring book craze.