Posted in: Boom, Comics | Tagged: just beyond, R L Stine

Now Disney+ Speculators Paying $40 for R.L. Stine's Just Beyond

Published Tue, 12 May 2020 10:30:24 -0500

It seems like every week we're seeing a new Boom Studios #1 explode with collectors & speculators. It could be graded copies of Bone Parish #1 selling for $120 , Black Badge #1 quickly rising to $125, The Red Mother #1 raising the bar to $175 or Once & Future #1 conquering them all at $200. Or maybe it could be raw copies of Something is Killing the Children #1 selling for well over $30 weeks ago and now rising to $90.

Now Disney+ Speculators Paying $40 for R.L. Stine's Just Beyond. Art from eBay.

While every one of Boom's "Must-Read" single-issue series seem like sure things right now, it's rare to see an original graphic novel from any company sell for much more than cover price because they just aren't considered collector's items. Maybe it's the lack of centralized grading services or that the format means books are more easily damaged. After all, even Ciudad, the Ande Parks graphic novel that inspired Netflix's biggest hit film Extraction, sells for $50, between two or three times its $20 cover price. Admittedly, this may be a case of an underordered book simply not having enough copies available or some speculators holding out for a bigger bump with the next sequel/prequel. The book can't even be ordered on Amazon right now.

Well, it looks like Boom has cracked the OGN collectors code with fan interest – from readers and speculators – as their Just Beyond: The Scare School OGN (with a cover price of just $9.99) has seen sales of Barnes & Noble signed copies upwards of $40 since it was announced as in production with Disney+ for a 2021 release. Now that Boom is the first non-Disney comics publisher to land a show on Disney's growing streaming service, speculators quickly realized that Just Beyond had an exclusive Barnes & Noble variant which features only 1000 copies signed by author RL Stine himself (these versions have a special sticker on the cover). While $40 will probably seem like a deal after this article runs, some lucky fans got copies for $35.75 or even $29.

Even the Just Beyond ARC – book industry code for "Advance Reader Copy" – which was available free to attendees from Boom at all the major 2019 book shows (ALA Midwinter, ALA Annual, BookExpo, etc) has been selling for $12.99 – even higher than the standard edition of the OGN. I'm hearing there were only 2500 copies of this ARC ever made, so expect it to continue to break new ground as the first OGN ARC to become a speculator item.

All eyes are now on the next big Boom launch in Faithless II #1 on June 10 – the sequel from Brian Azzarello and Maria Llovet to the book that launched the company on their meteoric 2019 rise and doubled orders at FOC for the debut issue. Will comic shops order enough copies to keep up with a new level of demand for Boom #1s? Or will Faithless II #1 sell out before the issue even hits stands? Either way, just remember that Faithless II #1 hasn't FOC'd yet so there's still less than a week to pre-order your copy and maybe even get one of those sure-to-be-controversial erotic variants as well.

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