Eric July’s Alphacore #1 Marks The Rippaverse’s Third Million-Dollar Comic
Eric July’s Alphacore #1 blasted through $1 million in sales over the weekend, marking the third comic the creator’s released in his Rippaverse to break seven figures. The creative team of Chuck Dixon and Joe Bennett has generated waves of excitement across the comics world, as July’s hired the cream of the crop talent available from Marvel and DC and shown his company to be a formidable competitor to mainstream comics.
The campaign launched in early November with a retooled website for the Rippaverse, complete with an online waiting room, so it didn’t overload the site with traffic as the Isom campaigns did. This created a smoother experience and kept the website up during critical opening hours for backers to come in and complete their purchases.
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The book hit one million in sales after nearly ten thousand individual backers pre-ordered their copies of the superhero police procedural. July offered four different covers on this campaign, with a premium cover at half the price of the Shane Davis graded variant offered for Isom #2.
This in conjunction with lowering the cost of the regular books by $9 per unit, it took a little more time to reach that million-dollar mark. Based on the number of units sold, we estimate that lowering the consumer price has shaved $150,000 or more off what July would have brought in at the original Isom prices for his books.
This should make comic readers happy during rampant inflation and economic uncertainty. As bank accounts get squeezed by the policies of the Biden Administration — with a sizeable number of Americans agreeing that the economy is worse compared to 5 years ago — readers have to get pickier about what they back in their online purchases of premium products like July offers. Still, he’s retained many customers through the campaign, which will remain open until January 20, 2024.
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Fulfillment of the books begins on December 4th, according to the website, which will get many original backers their products in time for the Christmas holiday. This should create another wave of enthusiasm as reviews come in for the Alphacore book.
Eric July also added an impromptu t-shirt to the campaign featuring Isom and the Alphacore lead character, with a caption that reads, “What’s your favorite part?” The shirt is a tongue-in-cheek mockery of some of July’s detractors who were falsely trying to portray that no one had a favorite part of July’s prior comics — consistently usurping threads and chats on other topics to try to derail those topics with the question.
Regardless, Eric July and his team pressed forward, and in making a funny joke out of the critics, they managed to defuse any tension.
Alphacore is said to be a police procedural for superhero problems, and the first issue’s synopsis prefaces, “Though an affluent city, Florespark is not without problems. The Florespark Police are very capable of handling formidable threats. But Excepts still exist, and some of them have the worst of intentions. And that’s why they need Alphacore!”
“The Except team, known as Alphacore, is called in to take care of Except-related problems that the Florespark Police are too outgunned to handle,” it continues, adding, “But not everyone is a fan of their superpowered heroics, and not all of them are on the opposite side of the law.”
The synopsis goes on, “So when a thwarted bank bombing launches an investigation that spins into a string of murders-by-Except, Bryan Solari, Braxwell, and Ingrid Valdez must work alongside fans and non-fans alike to uncover the mystery of who has been the puppetmaster pulling the strings behind these crimes.”
“How does Alphacore operate? Who is on the team beyond our three main heroes? And who will they discover is behind this recent string of felonies?” the synopsis concludes, but not before encouraging readers to “Find out in the pages of Alphacore #1!”
The book has done well enough so far that Eric July’s announced there will be further projects involving Dixon and Bennett within the Rippaverse.
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