If DC was hoping to get retailers buzzing about this month’s foil covers for select books, this probably isn’t what they had in mind. Retailers and customers across the country are reporting that nearly all copies of Batman #56, one of three foil-covered DC books this week, are arriving in stores damaged. The issue is significant crinkling/creasing around 1/8th of an inch from the spine, as evidenced in the photos below:


Photos by The Beat’s Brandon Schatz.

While the damage doesn’t hinder the reading experience, it’s certainly inconvenient for those who want pristine copies for their collections, and after the Batman #50 debacle DC didn’t need to give retailers another reason to be annoyed about the publisher’s top-selling book. This also comes hot on the heels of the Batman: Damned controversy, which caught a lot of retailers by surprise, though at least that was a book they could still sell without any damage caveats.

It’s interesting that only the foil Batman comic appears to have been impacted. The other two books featuring foil covers this week, Green Lanterns and Green Arrow, appear to have made it from the printer unscathed. The foil on those two books is silver, while on Batman it’s gold, so perhaps there was a different printing process used for Batman that ultimately resulted in the damage.

While retailers have already made the publisher aware of the issue, there’s been no word yet from DC on it, or whether a reprint will be offered. As of this writing the foil Batman #56 is still available from Diamond, though the non-foil variant cover has sold out. More on this as it develops.

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4 COMMENTS

  1. I’m sympathetic to this problem, but it’s odd that this damaged comic in particular is being presented as an exceptional case. Almost every issue of Batman arrives fresh on store shelves with a similar degree of stress points and creases along the spine. From what I saw at local shops and in images online, the entire print run of Metal #1 (also a foil cover) had worse creases along the spine than what’s shown here. That issue also had a problem with remarkably bad printing of the solid blacks on interior pages in many copies. I don’t believe DC did anything about that. It was a huge seller. I don’t imagine this issue will be any different.

    I haven’t looked at any of these new foil-cover issues, but the difference in damages might be down to the individual printers responsible. For whatever reason, for the last few years DC has had Batman, its top book, printed by the worst printers it contracts. For a while it was Vanguard, also responsible for the main Metal series, and then LSC, responsible for many shabby Marvel books. The best-looking DC books tend to be printed by Transcontinental Interweb.

  2. “Retailers and customers across the country are reporting that nearly all copies of Batman #56, one of three foil-covered DC books this week, are arriving in stores damaged. ” This is either poorly written or a complete lie. If this was even remotely true we would be hearing complaints on social media. I believe this is an isolated issue that certainly does not warrant this headline. I have three LCS’s in my area and have seen no such problem.Bleeding Cool has a retailer that does weekly new release video’s & the host showed the issue & cover in question & this problem was not mentioned.In fact this article is the only one I could find that has made such claims.

  3. My Shop received copies that were creased, had damaged spines with color breaks all along the spine, and some looked like a razor was taken to the back cover. Every issue I received had problems.

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