I’ve been into collecting Indiana Jones stuff for years now, but never got into the comics. I’ve got a couple here and there but that’s it. After trying a number of different comic shops I finally bought the whole set off of eBay. Yesterday they came and when I was looking at them I noticed that the covers are a bit different. I actaully got doubles of some of the comics.
One type, the most common kind I got, had a barcode on the cover, the other type hada picture of spiderman instead of a barcode and a price for Canada and the UK. Other then that I haven’t seen any differences, though I haven’t looked everywhere just yet.
So what’s the deal with the different covers? Also which ones are the harder ones to find? If figure I’ve already got almost a full run of the barcode type and a third of the spiderman type so I might try and get both if it’s not too hard.
They’re probably the same exact comics, aside from the cover indicia (barcodes vs. Spidey heads). The barcodes were shipped to newsstands, bookstores, supermarkets, anywhere that sold magazines, newspapers, or books – this was all when metal “spinner racks” were a lot more common. The Spidey heads were for the “direct market,” which were actual comic book stores that ordered their stock from distributors (middlemen between the publishers and the comic shops).
There shouldn’t be any real difference in value or rarity between the newsstand and direct market cover indicia. I’ve only met one collector in my 20+ years of collecting who specifically collected direct market editions, and turned down anything with barcodes. Most people wouldn’t care or mind one way or another. But if you decide to collect a lot of duplicates to resell on eBay as a group (just as an example), I’d try to remove all the duplicates with matching indicia, and keep as long a run as possible with the opposite matching indicia.
I seem to remember back in the early to mid 90’s that Marvel had newstand editions and then deluxe editions of certain comics. The deluxe editions were printed on high gloss paper, and the newstands were printed on regular stock. I don’t think that lasted long though.