A funny thing about scarcity...

[shaxper]

One of the things that supposedly makes Usagi's earliest appearances so valuable is the percieved scarcity. Albedo #2 only had 2000 copies. If I recall correctly, Albedo #3 had something like 6,000 and #4 had something like 4,000 (or am I way off on these numbers?).


Well, according to Diamond Distributors, the current issues of Usagi are only running about 6,000 copies. I'm not quite sure what my point here is. I just found it surprising. I always thought of those old issues as particularly scarce and of the new issues as particularly abundant.

[Todd Shogun]

Albedo NR 1 (5-color cover) June 1984 - 500 Copies
Albedo NR 1 (4-color cover) September 1984 - 1500 copies
Albedo NR 2 November 1984 - 2000 copies
Albedo NR 3 May 1985 - 10,000 copies
Albedo NR 4 August 1985 - 6000 copies

Interesting, considering in my interview with Diana Schutz, the info on the print runs for Usagi were proprietary and would not be made public....

[Steve Hubbell]

Albedo was a black and white anthropormophic anthology published by a new small press / publisher in 1984, just prior to the big b/w small press explosion. All of those factors contributed to it being aimed at a very limited audience when it was released and with a pretty limited life expectancy.

Stan has also commented that initially, they practically had trouble giving the comic away. Then the next year, they were hard to find and selling for big bucks.

The fact that a lot of issues were possibly trashed within the first month or two, before the TMNT driven b/w comic craze made anthopormophics, small press, or b/w comics the next big thing.

A year or two ago, we tried to see how many copies of Albedo #2 we could account for but never even broke a hundred issues. Not that everyone who has a copy bothered to reply to the census.

Abayo....

[shaxper]

Interesting, considering in my interview with Diana Schutz, the info on the print runs for Usagi were proprietary and would not be made public....

I got my info from here: http://www.cbgxtra.com/Default.aspx?tabid=1642 That's the amount of copies Diamond supposedly shipped, I believe.

Albedo was a black and white anthropormophic anthology published by a new small press / publisher in 1984, just prior to the big b/w small press explosion. All of those factors contributed to it being aimed at a very limited audience when it was released and with a pretty limited life expectancy.

Stan has also commented that initially, they practically had trouble giving the comic away. Then the next year, they were hard to find and selling for big bucks.

The fact that a lot of issues were possibly trashed within the first month or two, before the TMNT driven b/w comic craze made anthopormophics, small press, or b/w comics the next big thing.

I'd considered this, but I wonder how many of them would have actually been trashed. Anyone that didn't throw out the book that day and shoved it in a pile somewhere probably would have given it a careful second thought when pulling it out again a year later. Plus, Steve had a ton of these sitting around that he sold for premium prices once the Anthro craze was in full gear. Those stacks are certainly still around in private collections.

A year or two ago, we tried to see how many copies of Albedo #2 we could account for but never even broke a hundred issues. Not that everyone who has a copy bothered to reply to the census.

Two years ago, a similar attempt was made to track copies of Harbinger #0 at valiantcomics.com (Harbinger #0 is their "holy grail"). The total results accounted for something like 1%of the total amount printed, and those were never considered worthless garbage. They became instant collector's items within months of their release.

So I'm skeptical about looking to online census polls as a reflection of the amount of copies out there.