A Super Partnership?

At Your Local Walmart

Love it or hate it, you can’t deny the reach of Walmart. While I personally tend to do most of my retail shopping at Target or other stores, sometimes a trip to Walmart is unavoidable. Starting last year, DC Comics gave me one more reason to risk life and limb down the aisles of the Big Blue Box Store. DC began releasing exclusive 100 Page Giant comic issues featuring twelve pages of original content and reprints of recent stories from DC’s collection. Stories featuring Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, and other popular characters were released in a monthly format that allowed more casual readers a chance to not only read an original story, but catch up on fairly current stories as well. Most of the reprinted stories appear to be from the New 52 line or just a tad bit older. The books sold so well that DC expanded the line to include books for characters such as the Flash and Teen Titans and also released holiday-specific books as well. I own the Halloween Horror Giant that features Swamp Thing, Aquaman, Blue Devil, Scarecrow, Reaper, and Zatanna. It’s an excellent book.

Earlier this year, DC announced that they would be dropping Walmart’s exclusivity on this line and would begin selling the books at comic shops. They’ve also begun reprinting the original stories from these 100 Page Giants and releasing them as individual stories at comic retail shops. This is a great thing, as it has been somewhat difficult to find many of these books at Walmart. In many cases, I couldn’t find any books at all. At other times I was able to easily find multiple issues of books both new and old in the same area of certain Walmart locations. I also found plenty of damaged books as well.

The success of these books had opened the door for even more exclusive items at Walmart. The first exclusive is a wave of Batman: Black & White miniature statues based upon the DC Collectibles Black & White 7″ polyresin statue line. These statues, standing roughly 3.75″ tall, are plastic versions of their larger counterparts and feature a blank base. The 7″ statues feature a black and white Batman logo.

At the time of this post, three series have been released of these miniature statues. Each series features six statues based upon the work of artists such as Frank Quitely, Patrick Gleason, Amanda Conner, and Dick Sprang. They come in blind bags and cost about five bucks each. With such a small amount of figures to collect, though, getting duplicates is rather easy. In fact, I’ve purchased five blind bags far and already have a duplicate.

DC announced that these figures would be released as a set at comic shops and would include a seventh exclusive figure. If you’re a fan of Batman, I highly recommend nabbing some of these statues if you can find them.

Teaming up with Walmart has proven to be profitable for DC Comics. Yes, the giant retailer has shut down plenty of independent comic book shops over the years, but by exposing potential new readers to some great stories and cool exclusive items, this partnership might actually help local comic retailers. I especially like the fact that DC has started releasing reprints of the stories and full sets of the miniature statues with exclusive bonus statues at comic shops, as it gives folks that might have missed something a second chance at picking up what they want.

Have you read any of the Giants? Do you own any of the statues? Let me know in the comments and also tell me how you feel about DC Comics or any other comic company teaming up with big retailers such as Walmart. Thanks for reading. I’ll see you all again real soon.