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Valiant Denies Buyback Rumors, Blames Sour Grapes

• Written by Jude Terror on Thursday, June 21 2012 and posted in News and Satire

Valiant responds to claims they boosted sales numbers by offering to buy back unsold issues.

In an interview with CBR, who are totally gonna let us come on their yacht at San Diego Comic Con, Valiant executives Publisher Fred Pierce, CCO Dinesh Shamdasani, Executive Editor Warren Simons, Sales Manager Atom Freeman and Marketing Manager Hunter Gorinson talked about the relaunch of Valiant comics. Of particular interest to us drama-queens was that CBR asked about the rumors that Valiant achieved sales success - 45,000 copies sold of

X-O Manowar - by offering to buy back any unsold issues from retailers. Here's the response, quoted from our best buds at CBR:

Pierce: Well, at the end of the day, it's silly. We have such a small, contained industry that had we done anything like that, we'd know it would be mentioned right away. This was mentioned off-handedly, and the second it was mentioned, people looked into it. It was a 45,000 number. In order to affect that tremendously, we would have had to have bought so many copies that you wouldn't even be asking us that question. You'd be telling us who did it. In truth, the numbers were so diverse across so many different comic book stores that that's just a silly question. We answered the question, and I think it was a bit of sour grapes. You've had guys who were in the industry for a very long time who are not selling as well as we were, and at the end of the day, we're launching a new universe, we have great stuff coming, and people got behind us. So I think you're right about it being sour grapes. And the guys who started saying that, I actually love. But what are you going to do?

Gorinson: Simply put: it did not happen. I've been working here for almost an entire year, and my job for about eight months of that year was to promote "X-O Manowar" #1. That's a very rare circumstance in comics where you have so much time solely focused on promoting one release. Everyone in this room spent an exorbitant amount of energy promoting the book, and the sales number we got is truly a reflection of that. It's a reflection of fan interest and the backing of retailers.

Shamdasani: And we had that support not only on "X-O," but on "Harbinger" and "Bloodshot" as well. The retailers have come out to support us, and any other idea is a ludicrous statement. We didn't spend a year building this to buy our own books.

Head over to CBR to read the full interview, which is quite in depth. 



Source: CBR + TOH = BFF
Written or Contributed by: Jude Terror

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