What your comic's
barcode is telling you.

I buy collections most weeks, and one of the most common conversations I have goes like this. Somebody has a comic they believe is a first printing. It might be. It might also be a second or third printing that looks almost identical, and is worth a fraction. Working out which is not a matter of opinion, and most of the time the answer is printed on the front cover in plain sight.

This is the bit of comic collecting knowledge with the widest gap between how useful it is and how many people know it.

The anatomy of a comic barcode

A modern comic carries two barcodes side by side, though most people read them as one. There is a twelve digit block, and a smaller five digit block to its right.

The twelve digit block is less useful than you would think. Reading left to right:

• The first digit is a product type marker, nothing to do with comics specifically.
• The next five digits identify the publisher. Marvel's is 59606, for instance, and it is the same on everything they print.
• The next five digits identify the title, not the issue. This is the important misunderstanding: that code stays identical across an entire series run, so every issue of a series shares it. Publishers pay for these codes, which is why they do not buy a fresh one per issue.
• The final digit is a check digit, a piece of arithmetic derived from the previous eleven. A scanner recalculates it to confirm it read the code correctly.

So the big barcode tells you the publisher and the series, and nothing about the specific comic in your hand. Everything you actually want is in the small block.

The five digits that matter

The five digit supplement reads as three parts:

• Digits one to three: the issue number. 001 is issue one. 450 is issue 450.
• Digit four: the cover. A 1 is the standard cover. A 2 or higher means you have a variant.
• Digit five: the printing. A 1 is a first printing. A 2 is a second printing, and so on.

That means 00111 is issue one, standard cover, first printing. And 00112 is the same comic, the same cover, but a second printing.

That single digit is the whole point. Publishers do not always announce a later printing anywhere obvious. Since roughly the mid 2000s the convention has been to alter the cover on a second printing, often just changing or removing a colour, but that is a convention rather than a rule and it is easy to miss if you have never seen the first printing to compare against.

Diamond formalised this issue, cover and printing structure across the industry in 2009, though most publishers had been broadly following it since the nineties.

Why old comics only have two digits

Pick up something from 1985 and you will often find only two digits after the main barcode. That is a different system entirely, and it will not tell you the printing.

Those two digits encode the cover month. 05 is May, 12 is December. Marvel moved to the seventeen digit format around July 1993, and the industry broadly followed.

There is a genuine trap in the old system. Those month codes were reused every twelve months without the main barcode changing, which means two comics published a year apart can carry completely identical barcodes. If you are cataloguing an eighties run by barcode, you will eventually get a collision. For anything from that era, the indicia is your primary source and the barcode is not much help.

The other barcode story: newsstand and direct

There is a second thing the barcode tells you, and it is not in the numbers at all. It is whether there is a barcode there in the first place.

From the mid seventies onwards, comics were sold through two channels. Newsstands, supermarkets and corner shops took them on a returnable basis. Specialist comic shops bought them on a non-returnable basis at a deeper discount, through what became known as the direct market.

Publishers needed to tell the two apart on sight, so they marked them differently:

• Newsstand copies carry a real UPC barcode in the box on the front cover.
• Direct edition copies carry a publisher marker instead. Marvel used a Spider-Man head silhouette from 1977 onwards, DC used a diamond, and both cycled through other markers over the years. Some early direct editions simply had a line struck through the barcode.

The interiors are identical. Same printing, same paper, same everything. It is purely a distribution marker.

So why does it matter? Because of what happened to the unsold ones. A newsstand copy that did not sell had its cover torn off and was pulped, with the cover returned for credit. The survivors were handled by non-collectors, read, folded, left in the rain and thrown out. Direct edition copies went to comic shops and were bought by people who bagged and boarded them.

Then the proportions shifted. By the late eighties over 80% of comics sold through the direct market. Marvel's newsstand share fell to roughly 14% by 1999 and around 4% by 2003, and some late newsstand runs shipped at ratios as low as one copy for every hundred direct editions.

Put those together and you get a genuine scarcity, and it is priced accordingly. For a key issue from roughly 1988 to 1997 in high grade, a newsstand copy can be worth several times the direct edition of the exact same comic. CGC now notes Newsstand Edition on the label, which has pushed the distinction firmly into the mainstream.

The premium window runs from about 1979, when the direct market got going, to about 2013, when most publishers abandoned newsstand distribution entirely. Before 1977 every comic is a newsstand copy, so there is no distinction to make and no premium to chase. There is more on this in newsstand versus direct edition.

Why first printings matter at all

It is worth being precise about this, because the usual explanation is that later printings are just people jumping on the bandwagon. That is the right instinct with the wrong mechanism.

The real reason is about when the quantity was decided.

A first printing's print run was fixed before anybody knew the comic mattered. Shops ordered it blind, based on a guess about an unproven book by creators who may have been unknown at the time. Whatever number they landed on is locked in forever. Nobody can go back and print more first printings.

A second printing exists for the opposite reason. It is ordered because demand exploded. The publisher goes back to press in response to information, and supply expands to meet the demand that has already revealed itself. That is why scarcity is permanently baked into a first printing and structurally impossible for everything after it.

The market convention then reinforces it. Price guides, collectors and the grading companies all treat the first printing as the book, which keeps the gap wide.

One honest caveat, because this gets oversold. Being a first printing is not sufficient on its own. A first printing of a heavily promoted modern comic that sold a million copies is worth very little, because a million of anything is not scarce. What creates value is a first printing and genuine scarcity and ongoing demand. Miss any of the three and you have a nice comic rather than a valuable one.

Equally, some second printings do carry real money, usually when the second run was small or carried a distinctive cover of its own. The rule of thumb is sound. It is not a law.

The four checks, in order

If you want to establish what you are holding, do these in this order.

1. The barcode supplement. Fifth digit. Fastest check there is, and it works on most comics from the mid nineties onwards. The checker will do it for you and will also flag if you have misread a digit.
2. The indicia. The block of small print, at the bottom of the first page on older comics, or on the last page since around 2006. Later printings normally state it plainly. First printings usually say nothing at all, so silence is the signal.
3. The copyright date. Compare it against the year the issue originally came out. A later year means a reprint or a facsimile edition, which look very similar to an untrained eye and are worth a small fraction.
4. The cover. Second printings from the mid 2000s onwards usually carry an altered cover, often just a colour change. Second printings of gimmick cover issues, foils and the like, normally shipped without the gimmick.

Where the barcode stops helping

Three limits worth knowing, because a tool that oversells itself is worse than no tool.

It cannot tell you the title. The five digit title code is assigned by the publisher and there is no public register mapping codes to series. A barcode alone cannot confirm you are holding Amazing Spider-Man rather than anything else with a similar code.

Plenty of variants have no barcode at all. Retailer incentive variants frequently ship without one. Amazing Spider-Man #666 had around 145 variants and most carry no barcode whatsoever.

Publishers have not always followed the convention. It is very strong evidence, not proof. If real money hangs on the answer, check the indicia as well, and if it is a genuinely major book, consider having it certified so the argument goes away entirely. Whether grading is worth it depends on the value, and the maths is in that guide.

The practical upshot

Next time you are going through a box, look at the fifth digit. It takes a second, it works on most comics from the last thirty years, and it separates the copy that matters from the one that looks identical and is not.

And if you are selling, know which you have before you list. There is nothing worse than pricing a second printing as a first and having a buyer point it out, or the far more common and more expensive mistake of selling a first printing for second printing money because nobody checked.