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Show us your Modern Newsies!
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3,015 posts in this topic

On 3/23/2021 at 3:39 PM, andyborehol said:

This is awesome! I signed up for this board a few years ago but hadn't really been inspired to participate until I stumbled across this thread...it's cool to see how many passionate newsstand collectors there are out there. About 5 or 6 years ago I realized that I had collected a copy of just about every US Wolverine and X-Men-related comic that had ever been printed. This actually made me quite sad..I felt like I no longer had anything to "hunt" for. One day shortly thereafter I was flipping through a dollar bin at my local Half Price Books and found high-grade newsstand copies of Wolverine #154 & 155. I already owned the direct editions but knowing that those issues can fetch a few bucks I scooped them up, thinking that I would sell or trade them. When I got them home it dawned on me -- newsies give me a reason to rebuild my entire collection from scratch! Since then I have acquired complete newsstand runs of Wolverine vol. 1 (1982) & vol. 2 (1988), a near complete run of vol. 3 (2003) [I'm fairly certain that issue #74 from this run was not printed for the newsstand market], and I'm just missing a handful of issues from vol. 4 (2010) and vol. 5 (2013). Also have complete newsstand runs of Wolverine: Origins, Wolverine: Weapon X, all of the issues of Marvel Comics Presents that feature the ol' Canucklehead plus a bunch of other minis & one-shots. I'm currently working on Uncanny X-Men (roughly 80% complete) and some other titles where Wolvie features heavily like New Avengers and Uncanny X-Force. In all I have over 1,400 books that I could share in this thread, but I'll limit myself to just some of the more unusual/interesting ones for now:

Iron Fist/Wolverine: The Return of K'un Lun #1-3 - For some bizarre reason, Marvel decided to re-brand these issues for the newsstand market as "Avengers Universe" #4-6. This is certainly not the only example of Marvel doing newsstand re-branding (I'm sure that the Daredevil, vol. 2 "Marvel Universe" variants are pretty well known to those of you interested in this topic) but it strikes me as particularly odd in this case when you consider that neither Iron Fist nor Wolverine had ever been an Avenger at this point. I also suspect that the general public would have been more eager to buy a "Wolverine" comic than an "Avengers" comic in the year 2000...maybe the Marvel marketing department was trying to test that theory? In any case, there is a 4th issue in this series but I have never seen a newsstand copy (a.k.a. Avengers Universe #7) -- if it exists and you've got one I would love to see it here.

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Wolverine/Punisher: Revelation #1-4 - This mini-series is unique because it's the only example I'm aware of where Marvel did 2nd newsstand printings. The series originally came out in 1999 and was released in both the direct and newsstand markets, then in spring 2001 they did a 2nd printing for the newsstand market ONLY. The 2nd printings are easily identifiable because they don't have the issue numbers on the cover (yet another strange choice by Marvel) and also the UPCs have a 3-to-4 letter month code on the side, whereas the first printings do not.

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Wolverine: Origins #6 -  The newsstand edition of this issue actually says "Direct Edition"...likely just an oversight during printing. The only way to tell them apart is the shape of the UPC itself.

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Wolverine: Origins #9 - The first 10 issues of this series had "50/50" variants in the direct market, meaning that there are variant covers with approximately the same print run as the "standard" cover. For just this one issue Marvel used what had been labeled as the "variant" cover for the newsstand market and even left the words "Variant Edition" in the corner!

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Wolverine Saga (2009) and All-New Wolverine Saga - In the direct market, these were both free giveaways to promote some newly rebooted Wolverine-related titles. When they went on the newsstands, Marvel charged $3.99 for them. Part of me wants to say that newsstand customers were treated like suckers, but then I remembered that several years after the fact I probably paid more than $3.99 each to acquire these...so I ask you, who's the real sucker here? :$

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Some great info I didn't know about, though I've been into newsstands for over 10 years now, thanks!     Also good to know that someone else has struggled to get a newsstand edition of Wolverine(2003) #74, have been looking for that forever and have never seen a newsstand copy.   

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On 9/6/2020 at 12:28 PM, Twinvirgos said:

Seriously, I too am wondering if there's any logical reasoning behind the different names placed near the UPC barcode on modern Marvel Newsstand editions. I mean why put "Marvel Classics" near the barcode for this "The Invincible Iron Man" issue 17? Ummm....is it supposed to be a classic?:S

IronMan17_newsie.jpg

From what I understood at the time, Marvel did this to save money. Apparently you had to register every new title with the distributor that was selling these through Barnes and Noble and there was a new title fee every time they wanted to sell a new series. So instead of paying the fee they would let new series take over older ones that had ended. They would ring up at the register as the title next to the barcode because that is what the computer thought they were. I have a bunch of Fantastic Fours that rang up as Astonishing X-Men because when it turned into FF, FF kept the Fantastic Four title even after Fantastic Four came back (like in the pic). I hope this helps.

Screenshot_20210328-215823_CLZ Comics.jpg

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On 3/28/2021 at 6:06 PM, bshowell said:

I just checked back in with this thread and thought I'd share some Newsstands I've gotten recently. Here are some X-Men. I know the Magneto War comic says Direct Edition but it has the Newsstand style barode, so I thought it was interesting.

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Very nice, been hunting this damn book for awhile for my error/stupidities collection

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