by Brian Hibbs

Every once in a while, procrastination works in my favor. My deadline was hours away, and I hadn’t yet written a word, and I really wasn’t sure what to write about this month. Then fate threw me a lucky curve, and DC announced it was not continuing its co-publishing deal with 2000 AD and Humanoids.

To a certain degree, the relative failure of these lines really underscore a lot of the problems of the current marketplace, and point towards the challenges of the future.

As I discussed last month, there are simply too many books being produced, and nowhere near enough venues to sell them in. How much clearer can this be than in the 2000 AD and Humanoids situations? In fact, both lines had very aggressive publishing plans – each putting out 2-4 books, each and every month for the last year. I’ve added nearly 40 books to my permanent-stocking list, since the imprints started, and there are a few titles I’ve opted not to restock.

Forty new TPs. Each with an average price of, let’s say, $15 (though, mathematically, it’s almost certainly much higher than that) – that’s nearly $600 in retail in just the last year. Where are the customers for that much material?!?

I was just at APE last weekend, and I spoke to several aspiring cartoonists about how to approach the market. The Direct Market is wonderful, I opined, because, if you’re talented and driven, it’s pretty insanely easy to get nationwide retail distribution for far far less money and effort than you would expend in any other creative field. But while the “driven” part is incredibly important for success, the “talented” portion is far more the key – because in a modern, quality comic book store, you’re competing for shelf space and order dollars against, basically, the very best comics have to offer. As a book-format comic, you’re clawing for inches of display space against Watchmen, and Maus, and Blankets and Persepolis, and Sin City and Sandman and Hellboy and Love and Rockets and and and and…

Doing a graphic novel or a TP isn’t like it was even 3-4 years ago. In a marketplace where “everything” is in print “all of the time”, the bar is raised significantly for penetrating the marketplace. You no longer have any significant display space after your first few weeks on sale, being reduced to a purely spine-out display. Now you mark your visibility and salability by eighths of inches.

Understand that physical retail space is your largest barrier to actual display. My good friends at Comic Relief in Berkeley recently upgraded to a space that’s something like four times the size of their old one. It is an impressive, impressive space. And Rory filled it all up within 30 seconds of opening. Yes, there is much more room to browse, and full-facing has likely increased ten-fold, but even in this massive showroom of a store, at least three-quarters of what they stock is spine out.

No, not every store is as insane as Rory’s (“insane” in a good way! Seriously, the place is Mecca!) – I know I sure am not; I doubt I’m carrying 2/3rds the number of items that Rory does – but the clear on-the-sales floor reality is that it really isn’t possible any longer to give all books the display they deserve.

Even when the work is clearly superlative work. Some of what Humanoids publishes is easily among the best of comics art. But there’s just not the display room available to fully showcase all books. It just can’t be done.

What happens as inventory swells is that, yes, you’re selling more books overall, but the “turn rate” – or, how often you sell an individual copy of a book, usually measured as n per year – begins to dramatically slow. I’m carrying a whole lot of inventory that turns at 1x a year or worse now. Too much inventory like that and stores go out of business.

Ordering backlist really needs to be thought of as a “just in time” process. That is to say, in a perfect world, you receive your next shipment of a title the same day as you sell out the last copy of your previous order. For example, I can want 5 copies of Sandman v2: A Doll’s House on hand because that’s more or less copies what we sell in the time it takes to get more copies from Diamond. When I do inventory each week, and I see it has 3 copies left on the rack, I’ll reorder 2 more to take it back up to 5. Some weeks we only sell one or two, other times we’re out of stock for a couple of days, but this is just part of the process – I doubt it is more than 2 weeks total out of 52 of the year. But you don’t want to have more inventory than you can sell off within a reasonable time frame.

So the Humanoids and the 2000 ADs get shelved with just their spine showing, and while they sell as well, and sometimes better than they have in any of their multiple previous incarnations (This is, what? At least the 4^th or 5^th version of Alan Moore’s Skizz?), it’s certainly not enough sales velocity to sustain publishing nearly a book a week between the two imprints.

If I’m counting right, just Marvel and DC alone are offering forty new TPs, GNs, or collections to the market in the month of June alone. Holy cow, that’s ten a week! At that rate of production, that’s another 480 SKUs a year! And, y’know, there are hundreds of other publishers involved in the Direct Market too.

Even Marvel and DC seem to be feeling the pinch of trying to manage such voluminous backlists in a world of ever-expanding production – a significant proportion of both publisher’s backlist lines are out-of-print at any given time. Things that shouldn’t be OoP, like volumes of Preacher or X-Men. The wider your backlist, the harder it is to manage and budget it.

This, also, I think, puts lie to the notion that the bookstores are a great salvation for Western comics – if anything, I think rack space for Western comics is shrinking in book stores – while certainly there are other issues involved, like marketing (the line had about…oh…none!), the muscle of Warner distribution should have gotten good penetration for this work in the bookstores, yet sales seem to have been minimal.

The problem of rack space is a major concern, because it simply can’t grow as fast as material is being produced. More than that, budgets can’t grow as fast. A $15 book represents at least an investment of $7.50 to a store, and often quite more (a publisher offered at 40% means that’s a $9 investment to the store), and there are, literally, thousands upon thousands of perennial items available to stores. Diamond’s “STAR” list (the material that they’re committed to stock) has, as of 4/14/05, some 9100 items in stock and available. And Diamond carries, perhaps, a third of the material that are actively available from manufacturers. Even deducting games and trading cards, and other things that aren’t comics, there are almost certainly 15+ thousand different items that a comic shop could stock, with hundreds more added every month.

How can material stand out in that pack?

The short answer is that it can’t, and that distribution issues are quickly coming to a head to hold material back from filling its highest potential. There’s barely a week that goes by that I don’t have a conversation with some publisher or another where they insist their material is available and in stock in the system, and I show them that, in fact, it isn’t. This is because, functionally, distribution also doesn’t have the dollars and the rack space to have everything in stock at all times, even if it had the inclination to. In this, they are not unlike the retailer, except that disruptions and eddies in their “just in time” systems impact scores of stores, and, further, tend to have longer stock-outage problems.

This is because, quite often, it takes weeks for retailers to recognize that distribution is out of an item, and to take the steps needed to get copies back into the system. As an example, I’ve been trying to order Tank Girl for nigh on a year now, and each week it came back as “not backordered”. As retailers interpret this code, it means that Diamond doesn’t have stock of something, yet that they intend to at some point; otherwise it turns up as “unavailable”. Well, it turned out that, despite backorders running higher than copies being brought in, Diamond had actually moved the book to something they weren’t actively stocking, but would order once enough backorders had accumulated.

I can’t fault Diamond for this, necessarily – they’re a business, and if they don’t think something is turning fast enough, then they are well within their purview to discontinue it. However, the problem arises when these decisions are transparent to the other participants.

Half a second digression here to set this up right: I very rarely place backorders on material. One of the reasons for this is that I maintain a 8,000+ item inventory, and backorders quickly mount in such a wide inventory – when I used to allow them, my backorder files would quickly soar to a hundred items or more, too many to rapidly go through when placing weekly orders. I also tended to accidentally place multiple order for a book (for example, when a title gets relisted as a “frontlist” item through Previews, yet you already have a BO in place), where I’d end up with 3 or 4 “orders” placing at once, and getting a year+ supply of a book.

So, I’m not placing backorders on Tank Girl through this whole year. Some retailers do, however, and they eventually get their copies.

Now, Titan isn’t aware that Diamond isn’t actively stocking the book; in fact it seems that they think Diamond is – after all, they are filling some small orders on a regular basis. They have no way to know that these are exclusively backorders. On the other side of the coin, retailers like me who tend not to BO a book (and I believe that’s most of us), are just left scratching our heads and left wondering why orders aren’t filling. If we know that it was a BO-only book we might do so, but we don’t, so there’s unfilled demand not being met. If the publisher knew that was the status of the book, they’d take whatever steps they needed to take to get more copies out there because they have unsold supply sitting there. The distributor, who is meant to be matching that supply and that demand together, is falling down on the job.

Again, I’m very sympathetic to Diamond’s stocking requirements, but it does lead to strange scenarios like having the single largest North American distributor of comics not doing a particularly good job in carrying things like, say, Tintin or Asterix. Y’know? Those renowned international hits?

As the volume and quantity of TPs continues to expand, these kinds of stocking issues are going to do nothing but grow. A significant amount of material is going to slip through the cracks unless better long-range planning for the positioning and marketing of material is taken.

There’s one more aspect of an expanding TP presence that has to be noted: as consumers come to grips with the fact that virtually all significant material (and a lot of insignificant material, too!) is being put into TP form, quite often within weeks of its serialized end, this can have a depressive effect on the sales of the initial serialization.

The “book glut” is clearly upon us, can we adjust to the challenges that brings?

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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.