Never Safe For Work
My buddy (and frequent advertiser!) Jeff Lemire, author of TALES FROM ESSEX COUNTY (as published by Top Shelf) has a new website up at http://jefflemire.com/. You should check it out. But if the advertisement to your right is for his books? You should click that instead. 🙂
– Chris
So, I really like Cold Cut. In my duties as The Manager of The Beguiling, I put together between 6 and 8 orders with Cold Cut a year, and they’re very competitive on discount and stock availability for a number of publishers. When it comes time to do line-wide restocks of Slave Labor Graphics, or grab some out-of-print Tokyopop or Viz trades, or even our massive back-orders of smut from Eros and AG, Cold Cut are good folks to deal with who get us our product in a timely and well-preserved fashion.
You can imagine that I’m a little heartbroken seeing them trying to get out of the comics distribution business. One shouldn’t get emotionally attached to business entities; you’re all in this to make money and that’s as long as your goals are the same, friendship doesn’t hurt. But I can’t help it, as a retailer I really LIKE options when it comes to distributors. I like knowing that Cold Cut is there, and I’m sure that publishers like knowing that there’s another group of people out there working to get their books seen. Hell, my customers might not know how much they love Cold Cut, but they certainly love the considerably-lower prices on things like FILLERBUNNY toys and SPOOKY squeakers that are Cold Cut purchases from us. So, yeah, I’m bummed out (and they don’t even owe me any money!) about this, and I hope things come together for the best. I’m not holding my breath though.
Y’see… The writing’s been on the wall regarding…something…happening for a little while now. About a month ago, I stopped receiving Cold Cut’s weekly update of new product. I just figured my e-mail was bouncing or something, but… nope. No new product coming in. I also noticed that earlier this year (maybe?) the company was down to one (excellent) employee named Matt. I sincerely hope that whatever happens, Matt ends up okay because his customer service is top-notch, and he worked really hard for our business. And I’ve been wondering for a little while now how the new shipping charges in the U.S. (basically: everything through the U.S. Postal Service just got a whole lot more expensive) were going to affect anyone doing mail-order/distribution… I wonder if that contributed anything? I have a feeling we’ll never know.
But you wanna know what the straw that broke the camel’s back was?
Dan Vado e-mailed me.
Well, he didn’t e-mail JUST me, he e-mailed a lot of folks, retailers like me. Dan Vado is the GodKing of Slave Labor Graphics, long reputed to be Cold Cut’s top distribution client. In an e-mail on June 6th 2007 with the subject SLG Publishing wants to GIVE YOU A T-SHIRT, Dan Vado put out a call to retailers to… essentially see if they were paying attention to SLG’s promotions by offering them a free shirt. But he also encouraged retailers to place direct reorders with SLG by offering good terms and free shipping–something most retailers can’t resist. I thought this was odd… The Beguiling are loyal customers of Cold Cut’s and I’d always thought of the two organisations, CC and SLG, as being pretty tight. For SLG to be stepping up their direct-to-retailer sales like this, particularly because it’s been The Beguiling’s experience in the past that they’ve been reticent to do so (at least for us), I figured something was gonna go down.
And now it has!
I guess the big question everyone is asking right now is “What happens if it Cold Cut gets bought?” I think the more important question is, what if it doesn’t? Folks who are happy and want to keep running businesses? They don’t GENERALLY put those businesses up for sale. Am I a dick for trying to decide whether to place an order now, or wait and see if they have a huge closing sale down the road? Or am I a dick for other reasons?
Anyway, the whole situation is just sucky and stupid and annoying. Tom asked: “What is it about the shape of that comics market where a boom period is felt more through articles claiming “This is a boom period!” than it is in the wallets of creators and retailers?” and I’d really like to know for myself. Are these sorts of things growing pains? Is Cold Cut just a hold out from the dawn of the DM to be replaced by technologically-advanced bookstore distributors like Ingram and Baker & Taylor? Or is there something much more substantial wrong with the industry right now where we’re selling more comics than we have in a long time, and some organisations seemingly can’t (or don’t want to) make a go of it? I wish I knew.
– Christopher
From Tom Spurgeon at The Engine, on the subject of DC’s new online initiative, quoted in its entirety:
“I’m sorry, but while I agree that everyone should rigorously examine their contracts, and that this takes care of a lot of problems, the notion being floated here that no one can possibly get screwed over if contracts are examined falls somewhere on the spectrum between childish and ignorant.
“It’s childish because when you stridently defend something or someone based primarily on your own personal experience with them, you’re re-casting a company’s wider conduct into your own world writ large. In actuality, the existence of ethical conduct in one area or in one relationship often has nothing to do with the ethical misconduct elsewhere. That’s why such arguments used as a defense depend on recasting the original criticism as a 100 percent attack that it probably wasn’t, or drift towards the most strident examples of rhetoric rather than the bulk or substance of what’s being said. “You say that company is always evil, but I had a good experience with them, so you’re clearly wrong.” That’s also why there’s always a huge element of 13-year-old defensiveness in all of these arguments — “How dare you suggest I’m a victim because this other guy might be. I know what I’m doing.”
“It’s ignorant because the construction of such arguments restrict ethical conduct to a wretched, deplorable minimum: following through on whatever contract they can get someone to sign that’s applicable to right now. When you restrict the argument that way, it knocks 98 percent of all potential hideous business conduct from the beginning of time right off the table. Apply that low of a standard to you and me, and most of us are Christs.
“That someone is satisfied by a contract in no way gives moral impetus to exploitation or profiting at the expense of creators’ work. Siegel and Shuster were reportedly delighted with their pensions, and everyone was happy they got them, and their situation was a lot more complicated than selling Superman for $200 or whatever the Urban Myth says, but there should be no doubt that they did not benefit from their creation as much as they should have.
“Similarly, Jack Kirby made a comfortable living, and had certain expectations about the way the business worked, and was generally fine with it, at least enough to continue working, but that doesn’t make it just or fair when Marvel executives get creators royalties for the creation of toys based on Jack Kirby designs and Kirby’s family gets nothing for actually creating those characters. Let alone that this is cool if the current writer of Devil Dinosaur thinks his contract rocks. Give me a break.
“If you don’t think elements of this stuff exist today, and if you don’t think that companies screw people as opposed to contracts screwing people, and that landscapes shift, and that screwing involves applying elements of a contract (sometimes in ways they were never intended) and pressing advantages rather than contracts existing as words on stone tablets with easy to discern rights and wrongs, I don’t know what to say to you except to assure you this stuff is out there.
“The notion that specific conclusions shouldn’t be drawn before we know something for sure is a sound one. I agree. The idea that DC should be given a grace period to publicize their latest publishing venture without people rightly targeting the ownership and money situations as keys? Fuck that. They’ve done nothing to earn a free trip around the campfire giving high-fives. Besides: they know what they’re doing; if they didn’t want a grace period driven by empty-headed blowjob articles and general boosterism, they would have made all the information they’re promising public from the start.
“I don’t believe there’s been a rush to judgment here; I believe there’s the usual Internet reaction and then the usual, depressing assertion of a rush to judgment in order to further a mindset designed to limit longterm creator reward to what the institutions are willing to give them.” – Tom Spurgeon
—
Thanks Tom, you know exactly what to say sometimes.
– Chris
Here’s some things!
ITEM! So this Zuda thing, it’s just another way for a multinational corporation to separate you from your Intellectual Property without them paying you what that’s worth. Right? I mean, I’m not missing something? Other than the always-entertaining arguments that a) I can do whatever I want and you don’t know better than me, grandpa! or b) I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING AND I CAN ALWAYS COME UP WITH NEW IDEAS EVEN AFTER I GIVE THESE ONES AWAY. and my favourite c) You’re A Douche. I mean, sure, submit to the will of AOL/Time-Warner if you want to, I guess, but it’s not like the road to webcomics stardom is particularly hidden, or difficult to travel, or without lots of clear guideposts along the way.
ITEM! Speaking of the road to webcomics stardom, a bunch of my friends and associates here in Toronto launched their own webcomics community a few weeks ago. One of their members, Cameron Stewart, finally got around to asking why I hadn’t mentioned that yet on the blog, which is fair, because I really should have as soon as they launched. Honestly, it’s because when I got the “WE’VE LAUNCHED” e-mail the site wasn’t ready yet… Nothing updated, some broken code, all that stuff. I figured I’d wait until they told me to talk about it. I’m every PR-man-or-woman’s dream! So let me introduce TRANSMISSION-X.
“Enjoy new comics every week with Ragni on Mondays and Karl Kerschl’s The Abominable Charles Christopher on Wednesdays, followed by Andy B’s Raising Hell on Fridays, along with Scott Hepburn’s The Port and Cameron Stewart’s Sin Titulo Rounding out the weekend on Saturdays and Sundays respectively.”
I can see why Cameron poked me today, the site’s looking great and all of the currently-updating features have at least a couple of pages ready to read, if not significantly more. Everything there is looking sharp, and, dare I say it? Commercial. I know that commerciality is the enemy of art and all that, but there’s no feeling reading the site that any of these guys–or these comics–aren’t ready for prime time. Let that be today’s lesson: Professional quality comics on the web don’t need to involve AOL/Time-Warner.
Oh, and as I’ve already mentioned a couple of ways in which I’m biased regarding this issue, I’ll add one more to the pile: The next two comics in the TRANSMISSION-X stable are going to launch at The Toronto Comic Arts Festival, August 18th and 19th. Get ready for Arthur Dela Cruz’s KISSING CHAOS and Ramon Perez’ KUKUBURI too. Yay TCAF! Yay Toronto cartoonists!
ITEM! Uh, speaking of The Toronto Comic Arts Festival, heh, uh, I’ve been doing a lot of work on that. It’s getting to be the exciting time, and we’ve been adding guests to the show left-right-and-centre. A great mix of locals and international guests, guys and gals, print comics, web-comix, and self-published work. Since the last time I mentioned it, check out some of the folks we’ve added:
From The Internet: Danielle “Girls With Slingshots” Corsetto, Chris “Dr. McNinja” Hastings, Jason “BlogTO” Kieffer, and Roxanne “Torontoist.com” Bielskis.
From Toronto: Clayton Hamner, Dave Lapp, Peter Thompson, Steve Wilson, and Tara Tallan.
From Art-Comix: Kevin Huizenga, Brian Chippendale, Frank Santoro, James Sturm, and Matthew Thurber.
From “The Mainstream”: Mike Huddleston and Adrian Alphona.
Publishers and Speakers too!: Peter (Little Nemo: So Many Splendid Sundays) Maresca, Dan (PictureBox) Nadel, and Jason (Shonen Jump, MANGA: THE COMPLETE GUIDE) Thompson.
I’m pretty excited about all of this, I think it’s gonna be a great show (but then you’ve heard me mention that already), and there are more… many more… plans on the way. You should book some plane tickets.
– Chris
The big discussion right now is about manga for grown-ups. It’s ostensibly about “Men’s Manga”, but luckily Simon Jones put that bullshit to rest right-quickly by pointing out that Josei (“Women’s”)Â manga has been an unfortunate failure in North America as well. About the only ‘mature’ manga doing very well right now is smut, for women (Yaoi/BL/changepurse/etc.), with even hardcore hetero mangaporn having a tougher go of it than it used to.
Johanna can’t help smirking because as a woman who’s been elbowing her way into the boys club for years, she gets to play the ‘turnabout is fair play!’ card, and I can’t say as I blame her. At her Livejournal, the thoroughly unpleasant “Kethylia” makes the same point, but tacks on the added rallying cry of “This Is Just The Way Things Are, And Everyone Oughtta Just Shut Up And Accept It!” which is about the stupidest thing I’ve read on the internet today. To be fair though, I’ve only been on the internet for like an hour.
Way down at the bottom of Johanna’s post, the former editor in chief of Viz Magazine, and guest at The Toronto Comic Arts Festival Jason Thompson drops in to make some incredibly salient points:
Here’s a thing: We sell more “men’s” manga in the store than most “kids” manga… In fact, if you look at the Direct Market sales charts, manga from Dark Horse and for a predomenantly older, male audience does a heck of a lot better in most comic book specialty shops than even the big-hot-bookstore stuff. It’s not that men’s manga is unprofitable as a genre, it’s that individual titles don’t catch on (and that’s always been the case, DRAKKUN anybody?) even if they seem like sure-fire bets. Many of my favourite manga have been cancelled, or gone out of print, or had their copyright lapse, or had their publisher go under–it’s not that big a deal. Many of my favourite non-manga comics have faced a similarly tough road. But in an industry where that new GHOST IN THE SHELL 1.5 TP is going to be the top-selling manga of the month through Diamond, and in the top 5 for graphic novels of the month (I think that means at least 10k copies are shipping, if not more…) there’s definitely an audience for that material. As Jason mentioned, it’s a different size of audience, but it’s not, you know, non-existent.
If you scroll back through the archives a few days, you’ll see the announcement for TEKKON KINKREET, a new edition of my beloved Black & White by extremely-famous Japanese Mangaka Taiyo Matsumoto–a book that went out of print YEARS AGO here, with another book by the creator halted mid-serialisation. It’s being re-released, EXTREMELY COINCIDENTALLY at the same time as a film version of the manga is making its way to cinema screens everywhere. Manga publishers want to put out good work that will sell well, (or at least work that will sell well), and they want to give every book a fighting chance. Dark Horse developing a line of men’s manga makes perfect sense–Blade of the Immortal readers will check out Satsuma Gishiden, all those 80’s B&W boom-market fans of Lone Wolf & Cub will pick those up, and then get the prequel series, and all of the other work by the creator. Got a huge, hot property like MPD Psycho? Why not test the waters with a few other series by the same creator, build interest in it before it’s released? Building lines of products makes perfect sense, because at the end of the day we don’t live in a meritocracy and the books don’t rise and fall on their strengths or weaknesses, but instead the marketting that’s invested into them. Wheat from the chaffe, some shake-ups along the way, but there are more than 40 volumes of work by Koike and Gojima in print in English right now–someone in the 80s would have a heart-attack just hearing that news.
The worst thing about that stupid admonishment, the “Shut-up and accept how things are now!,” is that it’s a complacent, ignorant assessement of the market. If people actually thought like that, or rather, if people actually took that stupid advice, they would have talked Stu Levy out of the Tokyopop Revolution, or shouted down the legions of fangirl-Fujoshi who thought that just MAYBE if they put out some boys-humping-boys manga that SOMEONE might buy it, or that a monthly magazine called SHONEN JUMP might actually work in North America, despite its predicted death. It’s the wishers and hopers and dreamers that come up with all of these harebrained schemes and put them into action. It’s those MBAs that sit back and think: “Hey, Naruto’s been out for 5 years now, those kids might actually grow up and not turn into emotionally arrested adolescents still pining over the same stuff they were reading when they were 12. Why don’t we put out some books for teenagers and call it SHONEN JUMP ADVANCED? Why don’t we put out some books for those same kids another few years later, like UZUMAKI and GYO and PORTUS and brand them as HORROR books?” Don’t accept the status quo, don’t rest on your laurels, don’t get comfortable. Innovate, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
So, yeah, things are not as easy for manga for grown-ups as for the teen-oriented manga, but who gives a shit? COMICS FOR ADULTS HAVEN’T TRADITIONALLY HAD A GOOD TIME OF IT EITHER. Why don’t you talk to Eric Reynolds about Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service not doing as well as we’d all have hoped when that poor dude is trying to put together an anthology of work by people who can’t afford to do comics, because the sales aren’t there, and they make more money doing spot illos for various magazines. I’m sure he has an appropriately tiny fiddle he can play for you.
Support the stuff you like with your $$$, with appropriately frequent and graphics-intensive blog posts, and at the stores that are willing to stock those books for you (hint: online pre-order discounters and scanlation sites? Not helping your cause any… it’s not like they’re ordering copies ‘for the shelf’).
And never stop dreaming!
– Christopher
http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=07052007
I don’t know who I was ‘discussing’ this with the other day, but thank you Achewood for clarifying the argument so thoroughly.
– Chris
(Warning: Rambly)
An Appreciation of Questionable Content
Do you know what I did Saturday? If you do, that’s actually a little creepy. But I’ll tell you anyway: I read all 900+ pages of the webcomic Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques, freely available online at http://questionablecontent.net/. It’s a four-panel “gag” comic with a heavy daily continuity, making the each strip essential for hardcore fans, but making the comic as a whole fairly accessible for folks just jumping in, espescially if they ‘get’ that days’ joke.
I’m bad at webcomics, only reading (with a few small exceptions) the strips that my friends do. Luckily, I’m friends with R. Stevens of Diesel Sweeties, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics, and Ramon and Rob over at Butternut Squash, so I’ve got most of the best and most popular webcomics covered. But every once in a while, I’ll be introduced to like, Jeffrey Rowland (of WIGU and OVERCOMPENSATING), or Jonathan Rosenberg (of GOATS) or my dear sweet Dr. McNinja Chris hastings, and I’ll be all “Oh, you do a webcomic? Really? I’ve never heard of it…” and make a total asshole of myself.
So at the Paradise show a few weekends back when I picked up a bunch of the shirts from QC, I figured that maybe I could avoid making an ass of myself IN FUTURE by… you know… reading the comics. Plus I think Mal told me that I should at one point. Anyway, it’s all a very good idea, and a time-consuming one, but what better use for 7 hours could I possibly have had?
Right off the bat: If I didn’t have a vested interest in finishing this series, I would have given up in both anger and frustration about half way through. The sexual politics of the first few hundred strips are, to put it bluntly, completely fucked up, and so aggressively wrong-headed that I actually considered stopping at strip 400 to write this post with a WHAT DO PEOPLE SEE IN THIS? HOW IS EVERYONE NOT KILLING THEMSELVES? sort of a vibe going on, which probably wouldn’t have been the best or most productive review. Thankfully at strip 500 the author decides that enough is enough and that a beloved lead character really oughtta stop emotionally and physically abusing the rest of the cast, and does, and that character has been working to redeem themselves ever since. Since this thread of emotional and physical abuse is kind-of the emotional core of the entire comic and the springboard for much of the plot, that it is so completely fucked up will likely turn off… many? Most? of the people I would normally send over to read it, if I didn’t specifically qualify the early strips with: Don’t worry, it’ll turn out okay in the end. The horrible attitudes towards sex and intimacy disappear about half way through, and from then on the strip really blossoms into something excellent. So, yeah. Either start at strip #500, or just grit your teeth like I did.
The strip is excellent though. Even through the occasionally torturous first half, there’s a humour, levity, and real heart to the series. Questionable Content is about a group of young adults in their early-to-mid 20s, working crappy jobs and hanging out and commenting on popular culture. Relationship-oriented drama and humour, through a Pitchfork Media sort of lense (but ironically). It’s a sitcomic…Â kind of like a gritty, lo-fi Friends with concessions to genuine whimsy and innovation vis-a-vis the occasional talking robot, magical creature, and wrong-headed superhero. Man, if ragging on the sexual politics didn’t piss people off, comparing this to Friends probably will… But seriously, millions of people watched Friends, what’s the big deal? It was a popular show that made you laugh once! Admit it!
(Look! They’ve even got a couch!)
Anyway… As I was mentioning I did really enjoy my experience, and have made visiting the site to see the newest strips part of my daily routine as of Monday morning. I guess what I really liked about it, especially reading it all at once, is seeing where the author’s eye tends to land, and seeing how the strip is shaped because of it. The afformentioned popular culture references usually take the form of band and music genre references, and it’s interesting to me because from 2003-2007, the time that the strip has been running, the authors musical interests have taken a similar path to my own musical interests and experiences. Music has a huge role in the strip, with characters being defined by the music they listen to, their romantic compatibility presaged by their musical compatibility. Sayeth the character Marten in regards to a potential relationship: “Man I hope that doesn’t become an issue with Dora. What if she can’t stand my musical taste? I mean, I know she likes the Flaming Lips, but we don’t really have a lot in common musically.” It’s just one of the many moments where music defines the various characters and situations, and it really works to give the strip a cohesion that a lot of comics lack.
But the real payoff is in seeing the characters that are introduced and ‘don’t make it’. What if everyone decided that they didn’t like Joey after the first season, and they made Mark and Carol permanent cast members instead? Wouldn’t that be weird? Heh. I love seeing the author’s process and development on the page (and just an aside here: the art undergoes a fairly substantial upgrade from start-to-finish as well, with the most recent strips looking fairly slick and cartoony, and the early strips… Well, there’s a charm to them for sure, but…) and seeing the realisation that the uptight coffee barista wasn’t going to work out, or that the first iteration of a character was a bit… shallow… and needed to be overhauled. It’s great. Author Jeph Jaques even manages to do that rare thing in almost any kind of long-form serialised comics: have the characters grow and change, and have it feel natural. The plot develops out of the characters’ attitudes and behaviour, it’s what good storytelling in this genre of comics is all about.
Actually, one of the things I was going back and forth on with this series was the constant external thought process of all the characters. I can’t tell if I find it refreshing or annoying. No one seems to have an inner monologue, or a thought that doesn’t go unspoken. It might be why I found the early going so difficult as well, because the behaviour of some of the characters was really aggrivating, but hearing their constant justifications for that behaviour was just waaaay too much. It does work really well for the humour though, and even seeing characters fumble through social interaction and dating is fun when they can’t stop babbling to themselves. But if one more character utters “I have issues!” unselfconciously… I dunno. It will probably spark The Rapture or something. Not the band The Rapture either, but the Jimmy Swaggart Rapture. The Charleton Heston Rapture. (Both of those would be good band names).
Anyhow, if you’re looking for another enjoyable, subtantial comic strip to add to your webcomics browsing, I can definitely recommend Questionable Content. Even their shirts are very good. I mean, She Blinded Me With Library Science? That’s gold, Jerry, gold! Wait, that’s a Seinfeld reference, not a Friends reference. So much for my strong closing remark. Ah well.
Sorry.
– Christopher
From Spurgeon:
* Marvel Editor Tom Brevoort’s use of old sales figures at his blog has proved intriguing for a lot of folks, particularly when it comes to making comparisons to the market back then, at the height of a flush period that included a lot of back-issue collectibles speculation, and now, when things are better than they were five years earlier but are nowhere near the raw figures of 15-17 years ago. In other words, “Why can’t we sell 8,000,000 copies of Spider-Man anymore?”
One thing I think worth noting is that while speculation was a huge force at the time Brevoort’s charts represent, particularly for boosting the three or four titles at the absolute top of such lists, it should be noted that the overall delivery system allowed for that much product to be moved. It also sustained way more titles over 100,000 copies. In other words, the notion of blockbuster comics as it existed in the early ’90s exploited a system that was obviously better suited to delivering a higher number of superhero comics overall. One of the things I try to track about today’s comics is the effects when the same sort of top-title mentality is unleashed on an underlying market that isn’t as healthy top to bottom.
Emphasis mine.
Here’s the thing, the current, physical delivery system we have? It couldn’t even allow for CIVIL WAR type numbers at 200-300k. Civil War #6 didn’t make it to the Los Angeles Diamond warehouse in time for distribution to west coast accounts, meaning a quarter of the country was without copies. Why can’t we sell eight-million Spider-Men? Our sole distributor wouldn’t have anywhere to put them, for starters… When I obliquely say things like ‘comics distribution is BROKEN’ this is the type of thing I’m getting at.
– Christopher
P.S.: This is an easily illustrated example, but 4 out of 4-5 weeks a month, there is ‘split shipping’ between warehouses on at least one comic/book that we order more than 10 copies of, to say nothing of allocations and just-plain-lost orders. Diamond does a good job for being the only outlet for a lot of this stuff available, but… 4 out of 4-5 weeks a month, it wouldn’t hurt to have a few failsafes.
P.P.S: And our stupid comics are being delayed a day again this week for no reason. 😛
Over at his blog, Alan David Doane picked up on the fact that The Beguiling doesn’t participate in the “First Look” program for Marvel or DC, where for a fixed cost you receive preview-copies of their books a week in advance. Tom Spurgeon notices Alan noticing, and then Alan responds. So, uh, here’s what’s really going down:
For a time, we fine folks at The Beguiling were subscribed to both Marvel and DC’s “First Look” program, where for roughly $6 (or $6 plus shipping, where Marvel was involved) we’d get a selection of next-weeks books a week early, to peruse and theoretically to inform us and/or get us excited about the books. We dropped out of the Marvel program early, because it was costing us a little more than $15 a week for the books, which had to be UPS’d to us with a separate shipping charge. $15+ a week for like $12 retail worth of comics? I don’t know about you, but the ‘usefulness’ of the information contained therin just wasn’t justified by the cost. I’ve got no problem spending $60 a month to significantly increase our sales (spend money to make money, etc.), but the cost/benefit ratio never worked out for us.
DC Comics, on the other hand, completely discontinued theirs a few months back, when they moved to the FOC (or adjust your orders 3 weeks before the books come out) system. Apparently, they didn’t think they could do both… Marvel can, it just costs us $15 in UPS fees. In all honesty we liked the DC First Looks well-enough, although any book that might have enough ‘hot’ stuff in it as to actually adjust our orders was often left out of the package for fear of spoilers. If you start to think about this very hard at all, you’ll realise this makes the whole endeavour more-or-less pointless, and perhaps that led to DC discontinuing it. DC have always been powerfully, powerfully anal about their ‘secrets’ being ‘spoiled’ even one iota of time before they were ready for them to be out there, and so if they weren’t prepared to release important information, then they were defacto releasing unimportant information, charging us $6 for the priviledge, and probably losing money on it…
I think the key assertion with Alan’s piece, that we didn’t participate in The First looks because we were concerned with other publishers, it has the ring of truth but it doesn’t hold up. Frankly, we are more concerned with other publishers than with DC or espescially Marvel. Those books sell themselves very well to the dedicated hardcore, and despite some tweaking here or there we stock the books, maintain our selection, and make intelligent recommendations based on existing purchases–it’s easy. Something like the truly-excellent Rutu Modan’s EXIT WOUNDS does require more attention from us, because, despite it being better than anything in the Marvel or DC universes that graced our shelves last week, it’s by an unknown author, it’s her first graphic novel, on a ‘difficult’ subject, and it’s art style and storytelling ‘give good hand’, meaning that the book can be easily recommended once a customer is looking at it. We gotta put more work in on that one, but it’s totally rewarded and makes our days happy and wonderful when we sell lots of them.
But, that doesn’t mean we won’t take every advantage that’s offered to us, from every publisher. The DC First looks worked for us because for $6 a week, we averaged $12-$15 worth of books, meaning that even if not one iota of useful information was gleaned from the books, we got saleable product out of the deal at a good discount, so it’s at best a wash. If Marvel could manage to get their first-look costs down, and could manage to get us the books in salable condition (seriously, those UPS envelopes looked like they’d been stuck in the spokes of someone’s bike wheels to make that “thwap-thwap-thwap” noise), we’d probably sign back up for the program. And I’d know what the big spooky deal is about this week’s EVERYONE IS SAD ABOUT CAPTAIN AMERICA: IRON MAN WEEPS FOR 22 PAGES. My guess is Skrulls, but enh? If we sell out, there’ll be a second printing. If we don’t, then it won’t have mattered what the big deal is. Win-win!
…I should also note that recently Image Comics has started offering a First Look program–For Free!–that makes the most sense out of anyone’s. Chances are that the majority of comic stores are at least ordering one copy of everything DC and Marvel publish, but the same can’t be said of the books published by the fine folks at Image Comics. So Image sends one of more-or-less everything out, for free, to every Diamond account, on the off chance someone who isn’t ordering CASANOVA or FELL or GIRLS or whatever will take a look at an issue and like it enough to try ordering it… or throw it on the rack and sell it, and maybe make a few bucks and increase their opinion of Image a little. It’s a great idea, kudos to whoever come up with it. (Of course, we’re ordering at least one copy of every Image book, but I do appreciate the opportunity to read THE WALKING DEAD a week early when I can).
Anyway, in my ever-humble opinion, smart retailers take every advantage, and determine whether every offer is advantageous or not to their own establishment. So, in that way Alan was definitely correct, we’ll source every book we carry from two or three different distributors and see who offers up the best deal, the best shipping, the timeliest turnaround. We wanna get the books in first and carry them the longest, and get you the best price on them. Putting all of our eggs into the Diamond basket, certainly not the way to do that right now. But if Diamond does step up (and they do, every once in a while) then we’re happy to work with them.
That’s today’s boring retail theory. Sorry.
– Christopher
Headed to the Toronto Comic Arts Festival in scenic Toronto Canada this August 18-19? Why not stop by our Facebook Event Page and confirm your attendence?
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=2423397996
TCAF: It’s gonna be pretty cool.
– Chris