The whole "blind bag" craze could backfire

A writer at Popverse says Todd McFarlane's warned that the current insanity of "blind bag" variants which Image seems particularly interested in employing as a "cash grab" tactic could backfire:

The blind bag craze has been a huge win for retailers, publishers, and readers, but one comic legend is warning everyone that things could backfire. If you aren’t familiar, a blind bag is when a publisher sells a comic in a opaque polybag and the customer doesn’t know which variant cover they’re getting. In some cases, customers might get a rare cover. Some comic shops have taken things a step further, creating blind bags where the customer doesn’t even know what series they’re purchasing, encouraging readers to try something new.

Seriously, is that fair and respectable to the customer, to keep it all secret? No, it's not. And what if the blind bags the store creates - concealing something entirely without a title - leads to the customer being ripped off with something awfully woke? In this day and age, it's particularly contemptible of the customers to pull blatant stunts like that if they don't know at all what's inside a bag 100 percent shrouded in darkness the buyer can't see through.

The craze has been a success, with Image Comics & Skybound Entertainment's Invincible Universe: Battle Beast #1 selling nearly 400,000 copies, with the numbers credited to the blind bag initiative. Things have been going well, but Image Comics' president (and Spawn creator) Todd McFarlane warns everyone that the bubble could burst

“If you have something that works that’s valuable, then you can use it for value,” Todd McFarlane says during an interview with ComicPop Returns. “What we historically find out in business, not just comic books, in business, is once something works good, there’s a tendency to milk the cow dry. And everybody just goes, ‘Oh, there’s money to be had. Let’s go.’ And then all of a sudden, you turn the consumer off, and once the consumer leaves, I would argue that’s the hardest thing to ever recover is getting the consumer back. Especially if they feel like they’ve been betrayed somewhat.”

McFarlane himself has taken part in the blind bag trend, as both Image Comics president and creator, with an Image Comics Holiday Blind Bag in 2025. Will blind bags go the way of holographic covers, or are they an important part of the industry’s future?

They should stop in use simply because it's just another gimmick to compensate for dismal sales of pamphlets, when here, paperbacks/hardcovers can offer an alternative with more potential profitability, and easier to sell in ordinary bookstores. And if pamphlets are proving more expensive today to print up, surely that's another reason why it'd be better to make the shift? And 400,000 pamphlet copies, once again, is a huge joke. I'm sure they realize it.

To encourage people to potentially waste tons of dollars over something that may be worth neither monetary nor entertainment value is insulting to the intellect, and I can't see why we even have to encourage people to stick with the pamphlet concept when paperbacks and hardcovers have long become a common concept. I would think even Image, with all their creator-owned products, might've understood that years ago, but as this proves, nope, they never did.