Reread issue 1 before I read issue 1 and I can't see where the criticism of incoherent is coming from. The first issue seems pretty straightforward.

That's a gross and wildly inaccurate generalization if I ever heard one. Coates himself is a self-avowed fervent fan of Marvel, even modern Marvel (Hickman is a particular favorite of his) and he won the MacArthur Genius Award so if he's lumped with not the brightest bunch, I am not sure what you would consider bright...

-M

So same as people who read comics through most of the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s...and a large chunk who read comics in the 70s and 80s...most readers only cared about what was going on in the books they read now, large chunks of people first encountered comics characters outside comics themselves-everything from the Superman radio show, to the serials to television show, Saturday morning cartoons, etc. and then started reading comics and never gave a whit about "geek culture" or comics history or the history of the characters outside the story they were reading at the moment, they just read what they enjoyed, sometimes because of the popularity of the characters outside comics themselves It's really only in the late Silver and Bronze age that the kind of mentality you describe first rears its head, and it's not really been a benefit to the industry as a whole.

This idea that there is a "right" kind of fan and a "wrong" kind of fan is killing the industry and the "he-man outsider-haters club" (to paraphrase the Little Rascals) mentality really needs to just die a painful death.

-M

I was talking to the guys at the shop I started my pull list at about this book. They had no clue how to order it in. They went conservative and ordered it at slightly above Captain America numbers, which is a mid-tier Marvel seller for them as they didn't get a lot of pre-orders for it. They sold out of #1 in 3 hours and couldn't get reorders of the first print because Diamond was essentially sold out* the day it was released by Marvel. None of the employees got to read it until the second prints came out. They reached out to a lot of local shops to see if anyone had extras to try to meet demand for those custoemrs of theirs who had missed out, and it was pretty much the same story around most places. SO it seems a lot of the sales were likely in the hands of the big retailers (Midtown, TFAW, Mile High, Westfield, DCBS, Lonestar etc.) who could up order for the variant thresholds and who had larger and longer windows of sales on the book, some of whom seem to still have copies available but are now selling them at inflated prices (such as Lonestar selling copies at $10 a pop for NM copies and $8 a pop for VF copies).

So 300K is impressive, but IA m not sure all of that is to end customers really, which is the unfortunate reality of the way the industry is structured right now. Sales are what retailers, not readers buy.

-M




* Diamond retains a number of copies on hand to replace damages, shortages, etc. the first few weeks, which if they have copies left over after damages are sorted out and dealt with they then release for sale as reorders again, so sold out is not necessarily sold out where Diamond is concerned, and what was unavailable the week of release might become available 2-3 weeks down the line, another fun aspects of dealing with tier monopolistic business practices).

Christopher Priest was a black writer writing Panther before.

Reginald Hudlin was a black writer writing black Panther before.

Heck, Billy Graham, who was the artist working on much of the early Jungle Action run was a black creator working on Panther.

None of those created the kind of buzz or sales bump on the character (although Hudlin being president of BET at the time did create some buzz and Priest's run was part of the Marvel Knights launch creating some buzz) that the Coates/Stelfreeze run is getting.

-M

I think it's more that Coates is so decorated a writer and so prominent in the cultural discussions of our times, he's a name that people in general are aware of not just people who are familiar with genre stuff or people of one certain ethnicity or cultural heritage. He's a writer who has a built in audience who follows him, and that audience following him is in part responsible for the bump in sales. Coupled with the sudden p[op culture presence of the character due to the Civil War film and you have heat on the character-not just sales on the firs tissue of the new book, but a sudden spike in demand (and prices unfortunately) on the Hudlin and Priest series, and the early Panher appearances in FF, Avengers and Tales of Suspense.

Panther and Coates have become visible to the mass culture outside the niche of the traditional comic buying audience and the result is the sales surge and the demand surge for key stories of the character form the past. Will it last? Who knows? But black writer on black character is only a tiniest fraction of the emergence of the Panther in the current zeitgeist which is fueling the sales surge. That alone has never fueled the kind of surge we are seeing, and it it were that alone again, it's doubtful we would see the kind of surge that is occurring. If one element is the same but all the other elements are different, and the results are different, it is not likely that the element that is the same that is the catalyst for the new results.

-M