Space Cowboy Butttext, Or: First Second Printing

Based on the comics news of the past couple of days, there have been thousands of comic readers who have wondered, based on the initial indications that it would be impossible to get Saga #12 on the iPad or the iPhone because of Apple’s App Store policies, and the subsequent news that Comixology had never submitted the issue to Apple for sale, how they would get their hands on that particular comic book. For a while, it seemed like the rarest comic book in the world on sale this week.

However, based on this picture…

…that clearly isn’t the case.

But before we talk about the misstated rarity of Saga #12, or any of the rest of the comics in that photo, let’s talk about this one, which seems to be a genuine Goddamned rarity:

That is a copy of Invincible Universe #1, which was released for the first time today. Which means that it is an initial printing. And yet if you click that picture to enlarge it, and look under the issue number, it clearly says, “Second Printing.” And while it might be an apocryphal story, the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and often tell me, “Rob, you are a long-time and valued customer, so long as I can’t prove you’re the source of those awful stains,” told me that his is the only comic store in America who received first-print copies of the issue with the “second printing” indicia stamped on it. And if he is correct, and / or telling me the truth, that means that that photograph is of a comic book of which there are only eighteen copies in existence.

I just bought a 55-inch TV, which is being delivered tomorrow. If you’d like to pay for it in exchange for a weird issue of Invincible Universe, ping me in the comments.

But anyway, regardless of comics that are rare because of Space Cowboy Butttext, or because of misprinted print issuance indicia, its still a pretty decent week for comics. We’ve got a new issue of Scott Snyder’s Batman, the second issue of DC’s Constantine, the final issue of Mark Millar’s and Dave Gibbons’s The Secret Service, the issue of Batman & Robin that supposedly gives us Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns Carrie Kelly as Robin, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But before we can address any of them, we need time to read them. Well, either that or read them and then slab them and slap them on eBay before a real second printing is issued, but one way or the other: until we can do that…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!