by Brian Hibbs
There are a lot
of cycles in comics – things that ebb and flow and come back around
again – and this year we’re in one of those weird cycles of there’s
just nothing for the Holidays.
Some years you’ll
get nice big piles of “gifty” kinds of
books: books with “buzz”, books with verve, books that are “must
haves” for the season.
And some years,
like 2006 apparently, you get very little.
The last few weeks
haven’t delivered much in the way of excitement. Heck, this week’s
invoice, for what will end up being the last ten shopping days before
Christmas, was my smallest invoice in the last month.
What few high
profile fourth quarter books we’ve had – say something like Fables:
1001 Nights of Snowfall or Absolute Sandman – shipped
in October, largely not being “new” enough to be a major Christmas
purchase late in the season.
I’m not entirely
sure how common this is for other comics retailers, but, speaking
for myself, we’re not in a “prime” shopping location – we’re not
right next to major department stores or big box-type retailers
– so we’re never really had much in the way of a big “Black Friday”
bounce. Historically, we’ve always seen our greatest gains in sales
in the last week-to-ten-days before Christmas.
But that’s, of
course, dependent on having the “gifty”
comics to sell.
A friend of mine
at a comics publisher described their job
as “playing whack-a-mole” – you fix a set of problems on one side
of the board, and another set jumps up on the other side. You fix
those, and you have to jump to the middle. Fix those, and the first
set of problems crop up again (because resources are being put to
fixing the newest issues)
I really like
that analogy, because it rings very true to me. I don’t think there’s
any publisher out there that actually has enough staff to all
of the jobs they’re meant to do.
That’s one of
the reasons we get so much “Feast or Famine” in shipping schedules
– weeks where every big book ships, followed by weeks where there’s
barely any reason for even the most hard-core fan to come by the
comic shop. Uneven shipping like that plays merry havoc with sales.
“Weak” books become weaker because the dollars just aren’t there
because they’ve all been soaked up by the biggest books.
When you have
weeks where five of the Top Ten comics for the month ship, of course
everything else is going to suffer because of it.
The tricky thing
about comics, is that the periodical is
a habitual delivery system. And when you break that habit, you begin
to lose the customer. Not just for any specific project, but cascading
along all of the other titles that a customer is potentially interested
in.
If a customer
drops off of [Mid-List Title] #11 because too many other
a-list books came out that week, they’re almost certainly not going
to be back for [Mid-List Title] #12. Or
#13. Or #25. Which
makes it even harder for [Mid-List Title] to make
it to #25 in the first place.
It wasn’t really
all that long ago that comics shipped pretty much like clockwork
– you knew that Batman shipped the 2nd week of
the month (that’s from memory, not fact, don’t be snarky!),
because it did every month. And there’s value in that.
I mean, when customers
come in these days and ask me when [Something] is shipping,
most of the time all I can really say is “Uh, dunno”.
Anything major is nearly guaranteed to be late at some point, or
so it feels. And the highest-profile late books, like DC’s All-Star
line or Marvel’s Civil War, take away so very much of the good will
that something like 52 might engender.
It isn’t just
that schedules skip all over the place, but the publishers themselves
don’t seem to be able to communicate the changes themselves.
I believe we’ve
had exactly one week this year where all three of the titles listed
as “The HOT LIST this week” on the weekly “DC Nation” page actually
shipped. And I swear to God that at least thrice a month I have
to explain to someone that the schedules listed on publisher’s websites
aren’t reflective of what actually arrives when.
I mean, if you
can’t get it together in your house ads or websites, it is nothing
but frustration for the retailer and consumer.
Heh, I’ll
go you one better – even the FOC (“Final Order Cut-off”, note that
first word) isn’t really reliable. I’m pretty sure I ordered an
issue of Powers on FOC at least 12 weeks of 2006. This
despite the fact that Powers only released 6 issues in 2006.
If the schedule isn’t actually firm at the “final” cut-off, then
where are we?
And, honestly
folks, this unreliability is driving more and more readers to drop
periodical releases. I’m sure we’ll still sell a bunch of copies
whenever they get around to releasing the next All-Star Batman
& Robin, but it’s going to be a lot less than it
would have been, had the book shipped on anything resembling a normal
schedule. On Civil War, we took a 19.86% drop on sales from
#4 to #5 – completely uncommon for a title at that point of its
sales history – much of which I attribute to lateness.
Why? Because it kills momentum, and it reduces enthusiasm. I’ve
been similarly stung by a lot of the most recent Civil War
crossover books – I’ve still got over half of my order of Iron
Man #13 left, owch.
One other thing
about Civil War – I notice in Marvel’s March solicitations
they’re already soliciting the Civil War trade paperback.
At this point, neither #6 nor #7 have seen print. Further, the FOC
for the TP is listed as 2/15. Given that Civil War #7 is
still currently scheduled to arrive on 1/31 that only gives me 2
weeks of sales to judge velocity, and a bare six weeks to sell my
inventory before it becomes moot with the “better package” of a
TP.
Every publisher
is putting out TP material too close to the release of the periodical.
This is a particularly egregious example, yes, but every major publisher
is doing it, and the net effect (when coupled to the inconsistency
of release, as above) is the publishers themselves are encouraging
customers to “wait for the trade”.
I find this to
be incomprehensible myself. The staggering success (and, yes, Civil
War has been, up to now, a huge success) of this kind of event
comic is because it is a comic. Because it gets you excited
about coming in to the comic book shop every week to see how the
universe is impacted, how things unfurl. That doesn’t work
unless it is a periodical release. So to undermine, no matter how
unconsciously, the periodical format is ineffably foolish.
2006 was a year
where schedules were FUBAR. And I think it really culminated in
this non-Christmas Christmas we’re having. Don’t get me wrong, sales
are up, my store is healthy, but I think this was a year of missed
possibilities, of lost potential sales. Because sales would have
been up more had Civil War shipped on time, and hadn’t
knocked the rest of Marvel’s schedule around (only 9 issues of Amazing
Spider-Man and Fantastic Four this year, instead of 12,
that kind of thing); or if either of the All-Star titles had come
out on anything resembling a bi-monthly schedule; or if the Wildstorm
relaunch hadn’t been floored by not having Wildcats launch
the line. Or come out after #1.
Or, or, or.
It also doesn’t
look like the industry is entering first quarter of ’07 all that
strong – my initial orders for January books were the lowest in
2 years because there’s just not much coming out, and my looks at
the February and March catalogs don’t seem that much more encouraging.
We need strong new projects and initiatives in the first quarter
to have strong sales.
Hm, I haven’t
said anything about ComicsPRO, lately, have I? Let’s rectify that!
ComicsPRO
is just over a year old now, and things are looking good – with
over 80 paid members, ComicsPRO now has
more members than any previous attempt to organize Direct
Market retailers. My back-of-the-envelope calculations make me think
we’ve got something like 5% of the total gross sales of the Direct
Market in the organization.
More importantly,
membership has nearly reached the critical mass needed to get over
the first organizational hump – ComicsPRO,
so far, has been a purely volunteered-staffed organization. There’s
a lot that volunteers can do, but the cold reality is that
every member of ComicsPRO has a number
of other responsibilities – our families, our own businesses,
pretending that we have real lives, and so on.
So, I’m looking
forward to the point where we have enough members that we can begin
to consider hiring an administrator, and shifting the operational
requirements to an employee. I strongly believe that a Board of
Directors is better suited to leading, rather than day-to-day doing,
and, that if we can make that transition, we’ll be 100% more effective
as an organization.
We’re also undertaking
our first expansion to the Board, where we’ll be asking the membership
to elect three new Board of Directors members – an increase of 50%
to the Board. That should also make a large difference in what we’re
able to achieve.
ComicsPRO
has two big events coming up that I believe will help us achieve
our goals sooner rather than later.
First up, we’re
going to have a Northern California recruitment meeting on Thursday
February 8th, from 7-9 PM, at the Cartoon
Art Museum in San Francisco. The goal of this meeting is
to (obviously) recruit more members (hopefully getting us to over
100 members before April… see below), and to begin setting an agenda
for our next year. I know the things that I think ComicsPRO
can and should achieve in 2007, but I’m also old (if not wise…)
enough to know that without widespread consensus, nothing much will
happen.
By meeting face-to-face,
I think we’ll be able to get a lot of stuff done that is much harder
to accomplish via email and the like.
This February
meeting is open to all Direct Market participants, ComicsPRO
member or not. I know that there are a lot of people “on the fence”
about the value of the organization, so my hope is that by letting
everyone come forward to discuss their agendas, we can show how
valuable membership will ultimately be.
Look, the fact
is that the largest players in the DM play retailers against one
another (c.f.: the “Retailers demanded it!” card played during the
second delay on Civil War #6), so there’s a frickin’ ginormous value in finding
common ground and banding together to face off on issues like late
comics, shipping schedules, solicitation policies, and so on and
so forth.
The February 8th
meeting at the Cartoon Art Museum is free and is open to
anyone working in the Direct Market – all I ask is that you RSVP
to my email address down at the bottom of the page so I know how
much food and beer to get.
Yup, free beer,
hooray!
Please join myself
and ComicsPRO President Joe Field at this
meeting. Publishers and distributors are also more than welcome
to attend.
This will lead
into the more important event: a meeting of the ComicsPRO
membership in Las Vegas from April 11-13, at The Orleans hotel.
At this meeting,
we’ll elect the new slate of Board of Director members, and solidify
the working agenda for ComicsPRO through
2007. I expect that several “Position Papers” will be proposed as
well, starting a regular process of expressing retailer’s POVs
to our industry partners.
The tentative
schedule at this point is that April 11th will be an
evening get together, with early registration. April 12th
will be open to retailers only, and devoted to building the organization
itself, presenting position papers, that kind of thing. April 13th
will have us let in publishers and distributors as well, to begin
to address the Burning Issues of the Day.
Attendance to
the Vegas meeting isn’t free, but it is close to it – for ComicsPRO members, it’s a big $50 to attend. For retailers
who aren’t currently members, it’s $450, but $300 of that is applicable
to ComicsPRO membership (see how clever we are?). For non-retailer
attendees, the cost will be $450, straight up.
(We’re also working
on offering some partnership deals – sponsoring meals and the like;
if you’re interested in something like that, please email info@comicspo.org. We are not looking
for the typical “dog and pony show” one-directional presentations
that typically mark trade show, however.)
If you’re interested
in attending this Vegas meeting, in any capacity, please email the
aforementioned info@comicspro.org
for more details.
2007 is the year
ComicsPRO should go from potential to
practice, and I think it is important that every Direct Market participant
make plans to attend, and help ComicsPRO
step up to the next level.
I hope to see
you at one (or both) events! It’s only our future on the line, folks.
**************************
Brian Hibbs has owned and operated Comix Experience
in San Francisco since
1989. Feel free to e-mail
him with any comments. You can purchase a collection of the
first one hundred Tilting at Windmills (originally
serialized in Comics Retailer magazine) from IDW
Publishing. An index of Tilting at Windmills on Newsarama
can be found right here.
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