Charlie Balicki of Dreamland Comics in Libertyville, IL responds to the last minute appearance of President-Elect Barack Obama in the upcoming Amazing Spider-Man #583 (see “Spidey Meets the Prez”):

Just like the “Death of Captain America,” once again Marvel is going to leave retailers out in the cold.  Several weeks ago while doing the Marvel FOC I saw a line for Amazing Spider-Man #583 Barack Obama variant cover.  I had to sift through the Marvel Mailer to see if it was (1) an "order as many as you want" variant, (2) "you may order 1 variant for every X copies of the reg. cover" variant or the dreaded (3) "If you match or exceed your order of issue #X from months ago, you may order as many as you want" variant.  Much to my dismay it was a (3) or what I like to call Marvel's "blackmail" or "hostage" variant.  Seeing as my ASM sales have slowly plummeted the last several months, there was no way I was going to order 15%-20% more copies than I was currently selling just to match a book from two months ago in order to qualify for a variant I was also going to have to pay for.

So imagine my terror yesterday when I saw a USA Today article about it as well as a headline on the Yahoo! homepage: "Spider-Man meets Barack Obama."  I clicked on the article and to add insult to injury there was a giant picture of the variant cover (an image that we were NOT provided with when the comic was listed on the FOC).  

So my (rhetorical) question is, "Why does Marvel do this giant media push for a book that basically had limited availability and do it several weeks after retailers can do anything about it?

And yes, I know they are already soliciting a second print but it isn't scheduled to ship until February 11th, 28 days after the first print.

I'm already getting "The Calls..."