ICv2

That's super awesome.

And, uh, Nerdette is, "Congrats on making it to the top sellers list in December on ICV2." That is a good sign because we really want, Kel, for you to be able to tell all nine issues.

Yeah.

We don't want just, you know, three issues, you know?

I still don't know if it's necessarily a good thing in the long term.

Well, somewhat related, ICV2 put out their numbers for September as well as the third quarter, and I don't have the actual numbers on this, but this is my opinion based on someone who does comic news every day.

I don't think DC Comics puts out as many variant covers as Marvel does, and yet they still are leading in the third quarter of the year for sales.

They're leading by quite a bit, too.

There is a feeling at this moment that we are in an amazing spot as a community, as an industry.

And so that's leading me to ask the question: Is the comic book industry thriving in 2026? We knew it was thriving in 2025, but how is it performing now? Well, ICv2 every single year at New York Comic Con has their white papers, where they present us with a bunch of, uh, graphs and facts and figures of the numbers behind our industry.

And I know that Marco and I eat that up every single year.

So we're gonna talk about what was said there, what was presented, and just how good the industry is doing or isn't.

Uh, y- it, it goes from I can manage one to three comics a week into I can manage up to eight to 10, uh, and so on and so forth for more and more things.

So that's another really good point.

Um, a lot of the, of what we were hearing at the convention, and especially for the ICv2 thing, was, you know, the, these are the, the, the Dog Man, the Captain Underpants, the generation that came up with these sorts of mediums being more prevalent, uh, in their youth, to they have the disposable income to enter the market now.

You're on mute, Tyler.

Yeah, indeed, indeed.

Uh, now we have, we continue with more Hasbro-related stuff, uh, and that comes, this comes both off of ICV2 and BoardGameWire, both covering D&D Magic Workers move to Unionize, citing crunch and job insecurity despite record wizard profits.

I'm taking this, uh, from, uh, Board Game Wire.

Dungeons & Dragons and Magic the Gathering workers are moving to unionize after alleging rising workloads, unpaid overtime, and job insecurity at Wizards of the Coast, despite the business having become the main profit engine for toy and game giant Hasbro.

So if your news that you're interested in is a new game announcement, These magazines are kind of in that realm because they're going to have reviews of games that you might not have heard of before.

For websites, you know, you hear us call out our favorite websites when we're talking about the news.

Board Game Wire, ICV2, and definitely Board Game Beat, which is Eric Martin's blog about board game announces, news, releases, etc.

Eric, of course, ran news for BGG for a very long time, and I consider one of the most knowledgeable news people in board games.

There's no...

Wait, wait, I, I, I, ICv2 is not-

That...

They're not, there's nothing like there used to be.

Issue 2 with four variant covers.

a little information from the top 50 comics of September, 2026, uh, according to ICV2, uh, based on units sold, uh, Legion volume nine, number one was the 12th bestselling book of the month.

Um, and this is without actual sales numbers given.

Um, so the way to look at this, there were, Five absolute issues.

And that's going to lead us into our first news article today.

This is coming from ICV2.

Wizards of the Coast's D&D team and Studio X announce intent to form union with the Communication Workers of America.

Wizards of the Coast Dungeons and Dragons team.

Yeah.

The public metrics we have now, like ICv2's monthly top 50 and top 200, and this Bleeding Cool year to date list we're examining today, they draw on systems like ComicHub.

Okay.

So ComicHub.

And a little bit of Marvel new- more Marvel news.

ICv2 revealed that Amazing Spider-Man #1000 variants, uh, were held back, uh, that didn't get released, uh, on time, and they will be delivered on November 4th.

But they're giving comic shops the opportunity to say, "No, thanks.

I don't want those now." Which I wonder will hurt the bottom line of the 1,000 sales or not.

Not much else to say on this one.

This comes off of ICV2, so we're going to continue giving you snippets of what's going on with that until it all stops.

It's all people fighting about what can you do with the seized consignment inventory.

During the bankruptcy, this inventory that was sitting in the warehouse was just claimed by the bankruptcy.

people you know very well.

Absolutely.

So this is off of ICV2 as well.

And this is Maestro Media, who's a board game publisher, has partnered with a new company founded by Nathan and Jordan Weissman called Grimoire Garage.