Marvel Comics has been trying ot revitalize the sagging sales of their Ultimate Marvel Universe with an event, “Ultimate Endgame” that will wrap up a lot of the storylines first started with Jonathan Hickman’s Ultimate Spider-man. Unfortunately, it looks like their variant cover “blind bag” gimmick might have backfired for a complete financial disaster.
Both Marvel and DC Comics have been struggling to get sales going on their lines in recent years. The only books to move the needle were Ultimate Spider-Man by Jonathan Hickman, which promised a future where Peter Parker was married to Mary Jane and had children. While fans ate this up because they hate the way the Amazing Spider-Man title refuses to allow the couple to be together, the storyline slowed to a crawl, with not much happening for a lot of issues.
In typical Marvel fashion, they flooded the stands with tie-in books from Ultimate X-Men, to The Ultimates, to Ultimate Black Panther, to build out a universe that really wasn’t necessary for an alternate timeline storyline. Naturally, the books went incredibly woke in the process, which dropped sales across the line.
As a gimmick to try to get readers reinvested, Marvel announced the end of their Ultimate Universe with an Ultimate Endgame miniseries that would change the course of the universe forever! Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
It’s likely the result will be that it will relaunch the titles with all new #1 first issues for the “New Ultimate Universe” in another gimmick to try to get sales again, but for now, this miniseries is what they’re resting their laurels on.
Like many new series trying to get people to buy multiple copies of a book for speculation, Marvel instituted a “blind bag” variant cover scheme for Ultimate Endgame, where readers are not guaranteed to get certain covers, and so they have to try to open the right one for their speculative interests. While this generates a lot of sales (and not additional readers) for a collectability scam, this time, it looks like there are problems.
According to a retailer group insider:
A note about the Ultimate Endgame blind bags:
As has been confirmed by multiple retailers nationwide and also by Marvel’s distributor, Penguin Random House, essentially 100% of the comics inside the blind bags were damaged in the bagging procedure. Each comic has multiple color-breaking spine ticks. I opened one of my blind bags and confirmed this.
Because of this, I will NOT be putting the blind bags on the rack today. I will keep them behind the counter, and if you still want one, just ask me for one, but please understand, you are buying a book that is ABSOLUTELY NOT a 9.8 candidate.
This incident happened right at Christmas and multiple people who have the power to make decisions on this matter are still on holiday, so at the moment no retailer has received any guidance as to what Marvel intends to do about the situation. Rest assured, if you choose to buy one of these blind bags with a dinged book inside and Marvel decides to do a replacement printing, you will of course receive a replacement copy for free. If Marvel just decides to issue a credit to all retailers, you will receive a credit off of your next purchase for the $5.99 price of the blind bag.
I’m always a fan of full transparency, so use this information to make wise purchasing decisions. Caveat emptor!
This is a huge bungle for Marvel Comics, as if damages are that severe, it destroys collectibility and they’ll have to reprint a lot of replacements quickly. This will take all of the profit from Ultimate Endgame’s blind bag gimmick and evaporate it as they are forced to send out the new copies.
The book is releasing today to retailers everywhere, so we will find out the extent of these damages soon.
NEXT: DC Comics And The Fake Hype Machine Behind Absolute Batman
This is hilarious and totally predictable. Blind bag gimmicks are already pushing collectability too far, but shipping every single one damaged? That's operational incompetence at a scale that's hard to even fathom. The fact that this happend right during the holidays when decision-makers are gone makes it even worse - retailers are stuck holding damaged inventory with no guidance. Marvel's been leaning so hard on variant gimmicks to prop up declining sales that they forgot to actually QC the product. Guess specualtors learned an expensive lesson.