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How Before Watchmen Ties In With Green Lantern #6

Published Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:32:13 -0500

Last updated Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:31:31 -0500

Before Watchmen starts in June with Minutemen, Silk Spectre, Comedian and Nite Owl. Bleeding Cool has mentioned the creators coming on board for variant covers, now we can see just how DC are using them to incentivise retailers to stock up in depth.

Jim Lee will draw 1:200 distributed variant covers for all the titles. And for the first four books in June;

Minutemen will have a 1:25 cover by Michael Golden

Silk Spectre will have a 1:25 cover by Dave Johnson

Comedian will have a 1:25 cover by Eduardo Risso

Nite Owl will have a 1:25 cover by Kevin Nowlan

If a shop orders enough of each title to match their sales of Green Lantern #6, which came fifth on the chart in February, they can order an extra 25% on "consignment". This means that the retailer only pays for those 25% extra copies if they sell them, stripping the covers and returning the rest.

If all retailers did this, on current performance you could see all four Before Watchmen books selling more than any comics other than Justice League and Batman, and pushing Marvel titles further down the top twenty. On ICV2 estimates, that would place them at around 125,000 sales, or approximately 150,000 including the UK, which is likely to proportionately order more than usual. Of course there will be the Avengers Vs X-Men books and whatever Spider-Men turns out to be, to contend with as well. But I can't imagine these books will be outside of the top ten. And we haven't even got to Rorschach's sales yet.

As well as the Before Watchmen books, DC are giving massive discounts off the Watchmen hardcover, one for every copy ordered of Minutemen and Nite Owl #1, massive discounts on the Watchmen TPB based similarly on Silk Spectre orders, similar discounts on Absolute Watchmen based on Comedian sales.

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