Randall wrote:I do actually have Absolute Watchmen. I bought it when it first came out, after selling the Graphitti book for $150 on eBay (bought it years ago for $25!).
$25? How? I thought most of the Graphitti's were going for $40 even in the 1980's! I was lucky that the local comic shop in the town I grew up in SOLD me the Graphitti Dark Knight Returns LE for cover price! Lots of shops in 1986 were raffling the hardcover LE of it for $100 and more. It was just plain greed! Granted, there were only 4,000 copies of it printed, but still to mark it up before the book's even 5 minutes out of the box...!
(Still have that Graphitti Batman, btw. It's by far my favorite reprint of the whole Batman DKR lot. I have little use for the 10th DC DKR Anniversary slipcase which in my opinion was "meh" and I might put that one up for auction. I just like the cover and quality of that original limited 1986 release better...)
I think the Watchmen Graphitti LE was even more limited. I wasn't really into anything that adult back then and didn't read Watchmen until almost 20 years later. It definitely wasn't as big as Dark Knight back then.
As I understand it, Moore was so ticked off even then (DC ripped him off on licensing and basically has kept Watchmen in continuous print for over 20 years so that Moore will NEVER get the rights back to his most famous comic series) that not all the Graphitti Watchmen LE's, if any of them, were autographed like they were originally supposed to be.
I've seen them pop up once or twice online, but even $150 isn't the most I've seen them go for. Still, that's a good return on something you got relatively cheap!
Last I heard, Absolute Watchmen is in its SECOND print run.
Not that it's a big deal to me... I can deal with owning second, third, and fourth prints of
reprint volumes. People get too hung up on "pinstripes" and "gold-plating" in my opinion. Sometimes, the mistakes and things left out of original prints surface in the corrected print-runs. A bunch of people NOT familiar with the first prints of DKR aren't aware that Miller repeatedly called Lana Lang "Lois" in the first print of the original bookshelf's.
What I don't care, myself, is the
re-editing and rewording of stories to fit a new editorial agenda. DC infamously did that with Infinite Crisis (which I felt was a BAD story in many ways -- Final Crisis outdid it as being the laziest written and worst planned crossover series I've seen, period) in the collected versions. Really, really bad form. But then again, I haven't been impressed with any of their company-wide crossovers in years and still feel the best executed one was the original Crisis on Infinite Earths. Even that story shouldn't have probably been printed. It created much more of a mess than it solved!
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