Walking Dead: Here's Negan Preview
Image/Skybound, published date: April 2017.
As part of Image Comics celebration of their 25th Anniversary in 2017 they distributed 1992 "blind boxes" (1992 is the year they started), each containing 25 comics randomly selected from 17 new series comics each with six variants:
- 25th Anniversary Variant Cover (1925 copies approx. per series)
- Black and White 25th Anniversary Cover (500 copies approx. per series)
- Virgin 25th Anniversary Cover (300 copies approx. per series)
- Virgin Black and White 25th Anniversary Cover (100 copies approx. per series)
- Blank Wraparound Blank Sketch Cover (50 copies approx. per series)
- Sketched Cover (25 per series)
500 copies of Walking Dead: Here's Negan Preview were also randomly distributed within the boxes, with 25 of the 500 having sketch covers by Charlie Adlard, giving a grand total of 104 possible variants (49,800 comics in total).
The chance of getting a Walking Dead: Here's Negan Preview standard variant in a box was just under 24% and the chance of getting one of the 25 sketched covers was just over 1% (this assumes that all 500 copies were distributed within the 1,992 boxes that were publically available).
Note, as the boxes were supposedly randomly filled, it is possible to get duplicates and, from unboxing videos this certainly seems to be the case, also, anecdotally, one lucky purchaser reported getting two copies of Walking Dead: Here's Negan Preview from one box!
If the publically stated figure of 500 was the correct number placed in the blind boxes (475 standard and 25 with additional sketch covers), there were definitely more than 500 produced. Charlie Adlard is thought to have been given at least 12 comp (complimentary) copies and 11 of those were signed by Charlie in March 2017 on CGC Signature Series (one graded 9.6 and the rest 9.8) a full 4 months before the blind box release in July 2017.
Adlard's comp copies (at least one raw and a number of the CGC graded copies) have been sold through Charlie's local comic shop, Infinity And Beyond in the UK. One of the signed CGC graded 9.8 copies was sold by the shop on ebay for £600 ($805 approx. using the exchange rate at that time) at the end of September 2017.
The sketch covers of Walking Dead: Here's Negan Preview are rare & unique and were selling for around four to five times the price of the standard variant of the comic on websites such as ebay. Below are two more sketched examples with each sketch on an additional cardstock cover:
Note that Walking Dead: Here's Negan Preview is a preview i.e. an incomplete story and is not to be confused with the later hard copy edition (which has the title in red lettering and the Walking Dead in black lettering) that collects the full serialized story, originally published in the IMAGE+ magazine:
Above is the collected hard copy edition and below is the preview edition from the Image blind box:
By mid August 2017, CGC had recorded 12 gradings of Walking Dead: Here's Negan Preview with the 11 comp copies on Signature Series (ten at 9.8 and one at 9.6) plus a lone unsigned 9.9 (Mint Minus) copy at the top of the census. This had increased to 37 copies by the end of September 2017 plus 2 of the comics from the Blind Box with an additional sketch cover were also added as a separate variant (both had Qualified labels as neither had been sent in by the artist nor were they witnessed by CGC).
Right now on eBay