Sink your Vampire Teeth into Buffy Season 8

Well, it seems some Buffy fans are becoming comic fans with the release of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 in comic form. Include me in this category. I'm been familiar with comics for a while and understand the different formats well enough. I used to peruse Spider-man comics as a kid, but Buffy marks my first foray into actually buying comics. Until this venture, I have only purchased Neil Gaiman's Absolute Sandman volume one. Now I get to explore the wonders of bagging and boarding, subscription services, variant covers, and debates on the best method of storage and preservation.

As a long time collector of Star Wars paraphernalia, I joined the Ohio Star Wars Collector's Club about 2 years ago to help create contacts and improve my knowledge of the collecting hobby. This amazing group of people are great at discussing the various available items and commenting on what actually makes a collection valuable to actual collectors. Through this club, I've learned a lot about the hobby and about building value into a collection. Now I am hoping to take this knowledge, plus knowledge gained from conversations with D-train, and apply it to the Buffy Season 8 series.

Currently, I have acquired all the essential pieces to make this a very valuable collection, including promotional posters and the limited 1 of 1,000 sketch variant cover of the 1st printing of issue 1. I decided to pay an additional $0.25 to have the comics bagged and boarded before they even reached me so that the ones I don't read will be as near to mint as possible. For some fans, this paragraph probably doesn't make much sense and may sound like a bunch of comic book jargon. It still kind of does to me too. I've decided to chronicle my foray into this new direction of collecting and share my information and assumptions with fellow fans. For folks knowledgeable in comics reading these posts, please feel free to comment with suggestions, etc to help me with my collection or correct something I am misunderstanding.

Here is the gist of this collection:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 continues the TV series in comic form. The series is reportedly up to being scheduled for 52 issues (unconfirmed). Joss Whedon is overseeing the entire story arc and actually writing several issues himself. The other issues will be written by other alums of the Buffy TV series writing staff.

The collection will contain a variant cover for each issue. These variants are being offered in a 1/4 ratio to merchants. This mean that for every 4 copies the merchant orders, one variant will be included.

Issue 1 also has a limited edition sketch variant cover. This LE variant is 1/1000 and was only provided to Dark Horse retailers that entered the Buffy contest. Each retailer who won in this contest received ten copies of this LE variant. Also of note, Issue 1 has already run its first printing and is now on its second printing to accommodate the large number of orders Dark Horse is receiving. That makes any Issue 1 first print a LE of 1/100,000. So currently, that brings Issue 1 up to 4 covers in the first week of release. To promote this series, Dark Horse released two promotional posters. The first was given away at recent conventions and is a 11" x 7" poster featuring the regular cover of Issue 1. The second was released in Buffy and Angel magazine #29 and was also given away at recent conventions. This poster is 36" x 24" and features the regular cover for Issue 2. Both posters were factory folded. The following is the current offerings:

Issue 1: