Image Comics responds to Direct Market feedback with print run increase

Image Comics has slated the following issues of new bestselling creator-owned series—BITCH PLANET by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine de Landro, DESCENDER by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen, Shadowline Comics’ THE EMPTY by Jimmie Robinson, and RUMBLE by John Arcudi and James Harren—to subsequent printings in order to meet demand and will be increasing print runs for forthcoming publications.

BITCH PLANET #2, 2nd printing (Diamond Code JAN158230)
BITCH PLANET #3, 2nd printing (Diamond Code JAN158231)
DESCENDER #1, 2nd printing (Diamond Code JAN158232)
THE EMPTY #1, 2nd printing (Diamond Code JAN158238)
RUMBLE #3, 2nd printing (Diamond Code JAN158239)

The decision to increase overall print runs to accommodate increasing demand among bricks-and-mortar retailers comes on the heels of feedback at the annual ComicsPro meeting in Portland, Oregon last month.

“We’ve been listening to the feedback from the Direct Market, and we would like to take this opportunity to announce that we are now increasing print runs to make sure we don’t find ourselves and our creators in a position where we are constantly going back to press so quickly, or hopefully, at all,” said Corey Murphy, Director of Retail Sales at Image Comics. “We don’t want to spend our creators’ money carelessly, but that being said, we understand how essential it is to the health and wellbeing of our retail partners, the creators we work with, and Image itself, that we make the necessary investments in our series.”

Image Comics Publisher Eric Stephenson added: “This is an issue we’ve wrestled with for some time now, but in all honestly, we’d love it if this announcement was the last press release we ever had to send out about sell outs or second printings. It’s more important to us that these comics are in stores when readers come looking for them.”