DC to Offer Retailers Flash, Green Lantern Rings in Connection With Brightest Day
by Russell Burlingame
In what was probably motivated at least in part by Marvel's controversial Deadpool variant offer, DC Entetainment announced earlier this week on their blog The Source that a number of upcoming tie-ins to the Blackest Night follow-up story "Brightest Day" will ship with plastic Flash and Green Lantern rings for retailers ordering more than ten copies of April's The Flash #1 and Green Lantern #53.
Given the popularity of Geoff Johns and Green Lantern, and the fact that it's the first issue of a new series for The Flash and the first time Barry Allen has been featured as the title character in his own ongoing since the mid-1980s, it's likely that most comics retailers would be carrying more than ten of these books anyway, so almost all retailers should be eligible to participate in this promotion without increasing their orders (at least substantially). It was not immediately clear from the wording of DC's blog post how many rings a retailer could order for every ten comics ordered; the Blackest Night issues offered retailers the opportunity to order bags of fifty rings. The post said that more information would be made available to retailers soon.
"One of the many great Flash Facts about DC Comics is that they actually do support the retailers with promotions like this that not only make our whole business a bit more fun, but also bring the promotion to every single reader," said Geoff Johns, who writes both titles and owns an interest in Earth-2 Comics in Sherman Oaks, CA.
Complaints by some retailers that 25 or 50 copies of some of the books that had to be ordered to qualify for the Blackest Night ring offer probably spurred DC to lower that number to 10 for this promotion, even though sales on the previous ring issues spiked and retailers have been divided on whether or not they actually ended up left with additional stock at the end of the day. Rumblings in the industry are that at least some retailers are taking Marvel up on their fifty-to-one trade offer of unsold Blackest Night tie-ins for a copy of Siege #3 with a Deadpool variant cover, but a small retailer interviewed by Blog@Newsarama when the program was announced told us, "I probably don't have ten of those books; a lot of those books are complete sell-outs."
The Flash #1 will hit shelves on April 14, and Green Lantern #53 will follow on April 21. Each of the books will carry a banner on the cover that will indicate "Brightest Day" above the book's title. Brightest Day #0 will kick off that event on April 14.
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