In this week’s edition of Lying In The Gutters, Rich reports on Liefeld getting into hot water for selling Marvel and DC comics he worked on with his own covers wrapped around them.

On the boards, Liefeld and Jimmy have always referred to the items as free, giveaway, flats. And indeed, that’s what has been given away

Not a horrible thing to do for your fans at all, but definitely a little on the questionable side when it comes to legality. I may have no love for the things, but variant covers are a huge business for Marvel and DC, and as Rich says, they both have contracts with Dynamic Forces to provide them to the public. The real problem is that the Jimmy Jay Company is selling comics with these flats wrapped and bound to the actual books for $25 a pop! (Or they were - at this point JJ has either sold out or yanked the books from his online store.)


But Rob isn’t having any of it. He tells me, “The flat, unfolded, makeshift covers were printed to the tune of 250 copies given away free from me in August at Wizard World Chicago. The purpose was for promotion of ‘Onslaught Reborn.’ If fans and retailers choose to sell them after receiving them free, that is beyond my direct control. I can only give them away.

“I congratulate the JayCompany for being opportunistic and upon hearing of the prints, immediately capitalizing on them.

“This must be why they are so successful at retail.”

Successful at bleeding a dwindling segment of the collecting population to death, at least.

Here’s where this argument falls apart - Liefeld and Jimmy Jay have a decade-long relationship, stretching back to 1997 on Wizard’s AOL boards. At the time, JJ was one of Rob’s most vocal supporters, and for a while, nothing seemed all that odd about it…until JJ announced one day that he was selling some of Rob’s books with exclusive JJ variant covers.

When Awesome folded and Arcade Comics rose from it’s ashes like a zombified phoenix, Jimmy Jay was Rob’s co-founder. In truth, Rob and JJ have been practically joined at the hip when it comes to comic publishing for the better part of the last ten years. While it’s possible that Rob came up with and pushed the extra cover on his own, JJ has an inside track to buy them off of Rob - he’s not just some dude that sent a PayPal payment for 50 copies of autographed comics.

Look, Rob’s as close to a non-entity in the comic book field as he’s likely to get at this point. He’s not going to be more than a nuisance to any retailer’s bottom line. His days of hurting stores and businesses through his shifty business practices are over, but it still gets under my skin when I see him and his cohorts lie, cheat and steal like this. For God’s sake, Rob, play it above the board for once and just come clean.

Comics