Update: We reached out to Loot Crate to confirm whether or not they were a Diamond certified retailer, and they declined to respond and simply guided us to Marvel for any inquiries involving the book.
Original Report: Nearly a week ago, a report came out that “Rocket Raccoon” #1 sold nearly 300k in pre-orders, without the help of incentives or variant boosts — something that we covered in a longform piece, fairly skeptically. While no specifics were given about the 300k in sales at the time, it did seem fairly strange, given the success of “Rocket”, a book starring a niche character, against other titles with more popular characters.
Well, now we know part of the reason “Rocket Raccoon” has done so well: because a third of its success came from a single source.
As reported on at Comic Book Resources, the online subscription service Loot Crate purchased at least 100,000 copies of the book for its subscribers. Loot Crate, for those unaware, is a subscription service in which you pay a flat fee for a monthly subscription and they send you a box of goodies — which now will include a copy of “Rocket Raccoon” #1.
“Rocket Raccoon” is still a success, there’s no doubt about it. But now it becomes a bit easier to see why it was a success, and that — unlike previously noted — it did involve what we can literally refer to with no ill intention as a “retailer scheme.” CBR reports that Loot Crate has a subscriber base of 110,023 people, so that’s certainly a fair amount of “Rocket” going out.
It should also be noted that this is a retailer done outside of the direct market of comics, which does somewhat inflate their sales numbers in this regard. They are sales; they just aren’t “ordinary sales,” or however you want to refer to our insular base as comics are taken more and more out of book stores and only available in actual comic shops. Marvel selling the book outside the direct market in such massive quantities is sure to be something that rubs others the wrong way, though I think time will tell as to whether or not Loot Crate-Gate becomes anything “controversial” (it’s worth noting that neither Marvel nor Loot Crate gave CBR a statement on this).
So that explains a lot. And, now, despite the “inside baseball” of these strange sales, it at least makes sense.
And congrats to Skottie Young for getting his art out to a wider audience, because that’s certainly a pretty great thing to happen.
