Comic books are getting gamblified now too.

11/22/2025

Marvel recently announced that the latest Daredevil series will have a new #1 in a blind bag. You know how trading card game packs will have a random assortment of cards from a certain set? Well, that's a growing part of comic books now, too. A blind bag will contain a variant cover, some of which are meant to be quite rare, some are foils, or whatever else. DC actually published some of the odds for their Batman #1 blind bag back in September. You could open up a 1:1000 Jorge Jiménez variant cover, which could sell for a lot in the future. Or now. Sometimes the fervor for these things is short lived; sometimes it takes 10+ years to kick in.

Having gotten back into the comic scene this year, to my knowledge this trend really kicked off earlier this year with Battle Beast #1 (yes, the Invincible series character), which went on to be a very hot seller. Apparently shooting past an insane 400,000 copies, it's also worth noting that this series reunited Robert Kirkman and Ryan Ottley, and Invincible is more high profile than ever. I would like to emphasize this is a ridiculously high number. Though, there have been other hits this year that have started putting up similar numbers, like DC's Absolute Batman #1 (which has continued to sell well for a full calendar year, as it's on its eighth reprint) and last year's Ultimate Spider-Man launched to eye-opening numbers for the industry. While information on what a typical monthly issue might sell is hidden in the shadows of distributors, we can see a few years back that 100,000 was a pretty strong number, but most comics fall under 50,000, or even 30,000 a month.

I can't definitively say that the blind bag format raised sales for Battle Beast. I can't imagine it hurt, though, as we've been seeing more and more of them since.

It sort of goes without saying, but the blind bag format encourages multiple purchases of the same issue in the hopes that you'll get a "hit." Or at the very least, you'll get a cover you'll like. A comic YouTuber I watch, had a video recently where he goes for his first blind bag after admitting he's not normally into it. This surprised me, to have the entire gambling mechanism unfold on camera like that. I'm sure that similar scenes have unfolded in comic shops across the country.

Comic fans are no strangers to sales stunts, gimmicks, and trends. The 90's saw an unprecedented amount of new #1 issues during an enormous speculator boom, after a record setting comic book auction in 1991. That trend eventually evolved into the modern day "relaunch for new writer" that coexists with regular miniseries. Gimmick covers also evolved into today's variants and retailer incentives. Much more could be said about how healthy the comic book publishing industry became after a lot of these things (and the destruction of comic distribution), but let's stick with the notion that this industry and hobby has ultimately survived, and that it's all fine.

The problem with blind bags, of course, is that they are part of a growing "gamblification" in our lives. You've seen me write about gacha games, but there's also been the gross introduction of legal sports betting with "services" like FanDuel and DraftKings. A lot of people lost a lot of money chasing what the next hit in cryptocurrency would be, with investment taking a weirdly similar turn. This Business Insider article has more stories and details. Gambling can be very, very addicting. A ten dollar purchase that could be worth, 60, 70, 80, 100 dollars probably sounds really damn nice.

Taking a look over at how Pokemon cards are doing, Best Buy has introduced a lottery system for Pokemon TCG products, where users are selected to be able to purchase the product. This is to help ward off scalpers and bots, but this says a lot, doesn't it? Thankfully, I do have a hard time imagining this sort of thing happening for comics, which are typically printed to retailer order and demand. When individual issues sell out, another printing is done. TCG products are reprinted too, but I imagine sheer numbers there and more manufacturing complexities make things more difficult.

The main question that remains for blind bags and comic books is this: How many are we willing to put up with? Are we entering a future where every major or minor series launch has a blind bag option? Are we going to be able to exit our local comic stores without gambling? I have a feeling that someone at Marvel is cooking up any excuse that would justify a Spider-Man blind bag. This trend is young, this is all happening right now.

For some in the comic hobby, it's mostly about gambling, as the world of comic book speculation did not die when that bubble burst in the 90's. People still look for first appearances of new characters. Taking a look at mycomicshop, the 2023 introduction of Hellverine (sarcastic side note: Marvel is truly the House of Ideas) seems to be a hot and healthy seller this year. There are no hard and fast rules about which modern comic books will hold value, for what reasons, and for how long. Speculation is not quite the same as gambling, but it's a close sibling.

I mention that because, anecdotally, there has not been a lot of pushback on blind bags from the comic community. But why would there be? There's a pretty decent subset of comic buyers that have positioned themselves to think of their pull list as a stock market watch. Healthy sales are good for retailers and everybody else. If gambling on blind bags becomes a significant part of those sales, is that going to form a recurring readership for those books?

We'll have to see. Short term, it is a good thing that people are going into their local comic shops, some for the first time. Big hits help sell other comic books off the rack, too. I do want that. I just don't want people to walk OUT of their comic shops frustrated that they didn't get the Ultra Rare SSR Iron Man cover after ten pulls. I'd rather not have even more gambling in my suite of hobbies that already really want me to swipe the credit card.

- Jane