The new hot books: What is going on with D’orc, White Sky and more?

It’s been four weeks since the start of the post-D’orc era, and two weeks since the rush of ComicsPro. I still haven’t found my bearings, but I can tell you that a pattern is emerging in the comic book after market. A certain selection of comic books is flying off the shelves; we have seen weeks of indie titles sell out. It may be that 2026 is the year of the comic book speculator, but what could be fueling these sales?

 

The start of February saw D’orc #1 by Brett Bean take the speculator and reseller comic market by storm. Cover A copies were selling for $40 on the aftermarket the day of release. Prices continued to rise a week later, with some copies priced at $120. People noticed that the book stayed on the Covrprice Weekly Top 10 list, and a sort of panic took over the market. Every FOC group and influencer took notice and drove the demand for the book higher and higher.

 

This was the start of the aftermarket avalanche, and every week, a book would be focused on by speculators not wanting to miss the next D’orc.

 

The following week, we saw the same enthusiasm for White Sky #1 by William Harms, Jean-Paul Mavinga, and Lee Loughridge, another Image title that quickly sold out and sold for high prices online. When Image announced a second printing of White Sky #1 Mavinga said: “My thanks to all the fans who have already shown this project so much support, thank you to the retailers and distribution partners. Thanks, Eric and the team at Image. Thanks Bill for making this happen and a special thanks to my family for tolerating my ridiculously long hours, especially a tiny little youngster that makes her own rather amazing books. Thank you.”

The third week saw the pattern continue with Mad Cave’s The Florida Hippopotamus Cocaine Massacre by Fred Kennedy and James Edward Clark becoming a $50 book, with some sets sold for $100 on eBay. And just last week saw sales at $25 for Vault’s Nectar #1 by bestselling author Jeremy Robinson, even though it hasn’t been released yet.

Speculators are taking over the market selling these books online. We’ll find out whether it’s for better or worse in the future, but what can we learn about the factors driving this buying frenzy? What creates the perfect storm that propels these books’ sales on a vertical trajectory? I say ‘perfect storm’ because multiple factors are at play. D’Orc was a special case with low orders from comic shops, driving aftermarket value, which was amplified by the modern comic book social media landscape.

 

It’s unclear when this gold rush started, but I think Bean’s previous work helped push the hype for D’orc. Bean is a veteran in the industry; people know him from his work on I Hate Fairyland, but more importantly for our purposes of explaining the D’orc phenomenon is his involvement with the Dungeon Crawler Carl graphic novel.

 

Dungeon Crawler Carl is a huge property with an already built-in fanbase, and the Kickstarter for the graphic novel has cleared $2,625,208. I think that helped push demand for D’orc; people were already looking for Bean content. I like to think FOC groups and speculators saw these orders and jumped in on a book that had high initial numbers. Once people hear about the book on social media and can’t find a copy at their local shop, they go online to buy it.

Last week we might have seen another example of it with Oni Press’ Murder Drones by Wyatt Kennedy and Jo Mi-Gyeong, which had a campaign that pledged $1,804,166 and saw issue #1 sell for $20 on eBay.  

 

That covers the demand, but what about the supply? Did the retailers know? Now, there is no real way to know just how grassroots and natural the sale of D’orc was without the data showing how many stores bought D’orc #1 or how big the run was. We can assume that the low number of orders from stores could be feeding the increase in prices. This is the really interesting part of this phenomenon: if comic shops had ordered two or three more copies…would the rise in aftermarket prices have been the same?

 

It’s great that people are buying comic books, but the publicity could sour quickly. Artist, J. Gonzo had to warn fans not to buy a metal cover because he had no involvement.

D’orc, White Sky, Nectar…Murder Drones….what’s next? And when will the bubble burst?