Posted in: Comics | Tagged: bad idea, hero trade

Cutting The Hero Trade #1 (Worth $860) In Half, Solomon-Style

The Hero Trade #1 is a preview copy of what will be a new Bad Idea Comics series, by Matt Kindt and David Lapham was sent to comic book retailers three to four weeks ago, pretending to be a small press title from a couple of nobodies, asking people to order more copies. Those that did, will be getting them, those that didn't will not.  This is what stores received.

With the message:

Dear comic shop, I am sending you one copy of my first self-published comic, The Hero Trade #1, free of charge. Please don't throw it away. I'd love it if you could put it on your shelf and sell it. If you would like to order more, please email us directly at theherotrade@gmail.com and include your store name/shipping address. Copies are $3 each [shipping included). Just let us know how many you'd like to order by no later than 9/13/20. Thank you in advance for your support.

Calum Johnston (no relation) tells Bleeding Cool

It's an ashcan, 16 pages of cardstock, black & white, 8 page short story that introduces the elements of The Hero Trade story and some characters, then some pages with fake bios of the creators, etc.

But then things went a bit mad online as collectors started paying more and more copies of the comic, the first Bad Idea print publication, so that The Hero Trade #1 preview recently sold a copy for $860 on eBay. With stores receiving multiple calls from people looking for a copy.

Which saw the Yegs & Bacon webcast of Variant Edition do something rather fun with their only copy, to address all the phone calls they were getting. They cut their copy in half.

They say "Over the past few weeks, we had a lot of folks looking for a comic called "The Hero Trade", most extremely polite, and a few… not so polite. We tried thinking of a way to make as many of these folks happy as possible. We settled on cutting the thing in half. This is an excerpt from the Sept 22, 2020 edition of Yegs & Bacon, the only weekly pop culture and comics morning show that streams at 8pm MST, every Tuesday." They explain the whole thing below… letting us know there are only 250 copies out there. Or 249 now. 249 1/2.

But the real reason they did what they did, is at the end of this clip…

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