{"id":5771,"date":"2009-03-04T02:41:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-04T02:41:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-28T03:07:32","modified_gmt":"2020-07-28T03:07:32","slug":"when-watchmen-hit-stands-best-guess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/04\/when-watchmen-hit-stands-best-guess\/","title":{"rendered":"When Watchmen hit the stands: A best guess"},"content":{"rendered":"

Having posted a piece on Watchmen’s original sales rankings in 1986-87<\/span><\/a>, comments on The Beat<\/a> <\/span>led me to do some follow-up research into when the comics actually hit the stands.<\/p>\n

For this, I turned to Comics Buyer’s Guide<\/span>‘s “Comics in Your Future” column, beginning with issue #654 (cover dated May 30, 1986). “Future” was the equivalent of the shipping lists we see from Diamond Comic Distributors<\/span><\/a> today, and ran every two weeks in the weekly newspaper. “Future” still appears today, under that name, as part of CBG<\/span>‘s website.<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, CBG ran two dates: The date the books were to ship to distributors<\/span>, and the official on-sale date<\/span>. The ship to distributors dates were almost always Tuesdays in this period; the on-sale dates were the Thursdays 16 days later. However, my belief is that in those days, the on-sale dates related to the projected newsstand<\/span> availability date, and not the date that distributors could put the book on sale. In those days of warehouses near the printer and aggressive competition between distributors, the “ship to” date reads to me to be much closer to the real thing:<\/p>\n

Ship to distributors<\/span>
#1 \u2022 May 13, 1986<\/span>
#2 \u2022 June 20, 1986 <\/span>
#3 \u2022 July 8, 1986<\/span>
#4 \u2022 August 12, 1986<\/span>
#5 \u2022 September 9, 1986<\/span>
#6 \u2022 October 14, 1986<\/span>
#7 \u2022 November 11, 1986<\/span>
#8 \u2022 December 9, 1986<\/span>
#9 \u2022 January 13, 1987<\/span>
#10 \u2022 February 10, 1987 <\/span>
#11 \u2022 <\/span>(First scheduling) March 17, 1987
(Second rescheduling) April 28, 1987
(Final rescheduling) May 19, 1987<\/span>
#12<\/span> \u2022 June 2, 1987<\/span><\/p>\n

I also have, to backstop this, my own personal collection “accession list” records from the time. It records that on September 13, 1986, I purchased Watchmen<\/span> #5 (as well as Batman: The Dark Knight Returns<\/span> #4<\/span>) at the June Rd. Memphis Comics & Records<\/span> location, a store notable in comics history as perhaps the only comics shop located in a walk-up above a liquor store. That date is four days after the “ship to distributor” date, and it synchs with some of what I know of how the books were hitting shelves. With competition starting up that year (in the still-existent Comics & Collectibles<\/span><\/a>, which I see now has its defunct competitor’s URL), Memphis retailers were making runs to the Sparta, Ill., warehouses to pick up the shipments in person. So I would interpret those dates above as the earliest that anyone had the books; and that in one case, the book was on shelves by the next New Comics Day \u2014 which I think was Friday, for us.<\/p>\n

(Not coincidentally, that Sept. 13 entry is the very last one in my four-year-long accession record history \u2014 the next week I moved off to college, got a girlfriend and otherwise got a life. Haven’t used the life much since then \u2014 as this website clearly shows \u2014 but never mind…)<\/p>\n

Anyway, we see from the records that as of #5, an adult warning had been added to Watchmen<\/span>‘s reprinted solicitations. And while I initially thought from Capital’s records that #12 had shipped late, it was in fact, #11 that was rescheduled twice. #12, with its extra pages, does not seem to have been rescheduled \u2014 at least, I can find no different date for its shipping anywhere. Yet Capital reported orders for it twice, in April and May, and evidently did not report taking a different round of orders for #11. (And then, of course, it looks like #12 comes out in June \u2014 but it doesn’t appear in the Capital list for then. Remember, the charts rank preorders, so the rankings appeared before the issue even came out!)<\/p>\n

It also looks, from the #11 delays, that #10 was the last issue that Glenwood Distributors<\/span> got, and that #11 would not have been impacted as much by its loss, as the stores would have had more time to find alternative distributors by then. In any event, I have revised the tables on the rankings page to reflect the new (old) information.<\/p>\n

It’s interesting reading those old newspapers to recall what was going on in the industry. Watchmen<\/span> was first “cover-featured” on CBG for #658, the June 27, 1986 issue — in the form of a pictorial showing the covers from #2-4. “The covers of DC’s Watchmen are actually the first panel of each issue’s chapter, surely the first time an entire series of comic books has begun the story on the cover.” But many more of the pages of the year were devoted to the other issues of the day: Marvel<\/span> sparring over the return of Jack Kirby<\/span>‘s art, Frank Miller<\/span> denying all responsibility for the many Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle<\/span> clone titles, Spider-Man’s wedding, the collapse of Glenwood, and so on. Watchmen<\/span> had an interesting place in a very wild year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having posted a piece on Watchmen’s original sales rankings in 1986-87, comments on The Beat led me to do some follow-up research into when the comics actually hit the stands. For this, I turned to Comics Buyer’s Guide‘s “Comics in Your Future” column, beginning with issue #654 (cover dated May 30, 1986). “Future” was the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[19,114,113],"class_list":["post-5771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-1980s-sales","tag-ship-dates","tag-watchmen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5771"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5772,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5771\/revisions\/5772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}