That meant wealthier speculators buying cases of the stuff, hoping to sell it for ten times what they paid for it within a year. In some cases, they did! That's why there's so much of our output from that era on the market." "I literally had nothing to do with most of those projects," Layton revealed, "Deathmate was thrust upon us because (Steve) Massarsky and Jim Lee were best buddies at the time and had privately arranged the crossover." For retailers, Deathmate was harmful, due to the tying up of cash flow with books arriving late, especially given the $4.95 USD cover price (at the time, the average comic book cover price was less than half of that). Also due to waning fan interest, the re-orders were lower than initial orders. The Valiant Deathmate books (Prologue, Blue, and Yellow) had print runs of over 700,000 copies, but by the time Deathmate Red was released, it had a print run of 250,000, although retailers were nonetheless left with many unsold copies. At the time, comic book distributors would only allow unsold books to be returned if they were six months late. Retailers dealt constantly with late books from Image, which indirectly caused some comic book shops to close. Partially due to the lateness of Image publications, the window was eventually decreased to two months. Collected issues As of now the issues of the crossover have yet to be collected. This is likely due to the (often confusing) truth of the involved characters being owned, licensed, and printed by a large number of separate publishers. The respective owners and publishers consist of Gold Key Comics, Image Comics, Valiant Comics, Wildstorm Comics, DC Comics, Dynamite Comics, and Dark Horse Comics. References External links Marcotte, John (May 14, 2005). "The Comic-Book Apocalypse". Badmouth. 1993 comics debuts Comics by David Michelinie Comics by Jim Lee Comics by John Ostrander Image Comics limited series Intercompany crossovers Valiant Comics titles Top Cow titles WildStorm limited series