|  by Brian Hibbs
(#143 – April
2006 – “One Year (and a few weeks) Later ”)
This column is
a week late.
I started writing
a draft last week, coming off of visiting the Alternative Press
Expo, but 406 words into it and I just wasn’t feeling it any longer
(it started: “So, let’s say that you want to publish your own comics.
The first thing I’m going to say to you is: Don’t.”)
I was kind of
despairing at that point because I don’t normally miss deadlines,
and I was really stumped for something meaningful to write (hey,
you do 143 columns on comics retailing – and less than 5% of them
can be about how great you are! – and you can criticize then,
chuckles), but thankfully the email fairy intervened with two different
people in the space of two days asking for a follow up on the “How do you order
One Year Later (OYL)?” column. Add that to the one request in
the Newsarama talkback thread, and another one I got over on the
Comix Experience blog,
and I figured that gave me a quorum.
The ironic thing
is that I almost blew the deadline on the original OYL column due
to illness, and I’m sitting here typing this column in a vicodin-induced
haze because today I’ve got some sort of a virus that makes my throat
feel like I’ve been gargling with teeny tiny razor blades. So, if
there’s some sort of an egregious spelling error, or my logic goes
way way off the track at any point, or
I start talking about, dunno, email fairies,
that’s the reason why.
(or, at least, that’s my excuse)
So, if you go
and read the original,
pre-ordering OYL column, you’ll see that one of the central
problems of something like this is “how the hell do you order this
type of stunt?” I mean, assuming you don’t just have buckets of
money to throw in the direction of stunts?
Most retailers
don’t after all. Most retailers aren’t particularly well capitalized
enough to take large gambles every month. I could have gone
ahead and easily done +50% or more of a title’s base numbers for
OYL, or expressed all orders as a (high) percentage of Infinite
Crisis -- I have that kind of money on hand – but I’ve also
learned over the 17 years that I’ve been selling comics that the
instant I consider taking the brakes off the conservative-financially
train, the market as a whole will snap back and leave the market
drowning in books. I never got burned on the B&W bust, or the
collapse of Valiant’s heat (Turok
#1, anyone?) or Image’s market correction. I didn’t lose my shirt
on the Return of Superman (I know retailers who could, still to
this day, insulate their houses with leftover copies of Adventures
of Superman #500), and I see another glut, call it the “MegaSuperCrossoverGlut!”,
ready to burst at just about any moment.
 Now,
to be fair, there’s more than a few retailers who seem to be profiting
greatly from taking the big chances, although it strikes me that
most of them are chain stores who have a large enough organization
to absorb the blow of mistakes by spreading it over a wider area.
Either way, fiscal conservatism works for me, and, as near as I can tell it is how the
majority of the retailers in the market function as well.
What makes me
think this? Well, here’s the percentage gains
from the OYL titles as reported by ICv2:
Action: +8%
Aquaman: +105%
Batman: +5%
Birds of Prey:
+23%
Catwoman: +30%
Demon: +24%
Detective: +76%
(note, however, that Detective was PART ONE of the story line, and
came out 7,560 copies – or more than 10% -- lower than part
2 in Batman)
Firestorm: +19%
Green Arrow +21%
Green Lantern
-8% (yes: minus)
Hawkman/girl:
+39%
JSA: -4%
JSA Classified:
+6%
Legion: +50%
Manhunter: +24%
Nightwing: +20%
Outsiders: +9%
Robin: +14%
Superman: +3%
(We don’t have
comparisons for Titans or Supergirl, because they’re
both running late – critically late in the latter’s case)
The absolutely
critical thing to understand about these numbers is that these are
the final copies sold through Diamond, and that they include all
reorders shipped – given that the overwhelming majority of these
books had first-week sell-outs, those numbers reflect 100% of the
overprint that DC printed.
 Or,
to put it another way: as little faith as the DM retailers appear
to have shown in their orders, DC itself, in fact, has shown less.
To me, this is
an epic and catastrophic bungling of the sales potential of most
of these books, from the very top of the supply chain. Why?
Because this was the best single chance, this entire decade, to
get people to sample DC’s line, free and clear of continuity (or,
at least, where every reader was on exactly equal ground)
Remember: the
publisher (at least in the case of a Marvel or a DC) generally has
a lower Cost of Goods, and a high Gross
Profit Margin than a retail store. Especially
so than a single storefront retailer. It is far far
easier for them to take a risk on inventory position that it is
for any retailer.
Now here’s the
one thing I can’t really tell you: I suppose it’s functionally possible
(not likely, but possible), that retailers, as a whole, ordered
NO extra copies of any OYL title, and so those little percentage
growths in most books actually represent DC going “way out on a
limb” in overprinting. Again, I think the chances of that are nearly
nil, but let’s try and be somewhat “fair”
and acknowledge the possibility.
Because if that
isn’t what happened, then my take is that DC committed two of the
worst sins a publisher possibly can commit.
1) They changed
the rules in the middle of play. Without fucking
telling us.
It was one thing
when Marvel, under Jemas went “No Overprint” – they announced it
clearly and loudly months in advance. There was no secret change
right at the moment that the demand for their work has probably
reached its peak.
 More
than that: “no overprint” was applied at the same time as the FOC-ordering
system, so there was a clear, and fairly level, playing field in
which all retailers had equal access to a work – place an order
between FOC and ship date, and it would not fill until after
OSD claims (“Overages, Shortages, and Damages”) were all filled.
However, without
a FOC system in place, it is entirely possible for a small handful
of people to buy up all of the remaining overprint on a title, effectively
controlling the supply for the number of weeks it takes to go back
to press on a work. Pretty heinous stuff.
There is, and
has been a long-standing understanding that DC keeps an adequate
and healthy overprint on hand precisely to spur future growth. From
my vantage, this appears to have changed over the last few months
– but they never bothered to tell us.
2) This means
they’re pandering to completeists and
fanatics, rather than legitimately trying to grow the number of
people who are reading their books – which was, as I understood
it, the whole point of OYL.
I know this won’t
make Matt Brady too happy, but I’m of the firm opinion that the
number of people who visit sites like this or The Pulse
or Comic Book Resources (or whatever) on anything like a regular basis are
the tiniest tiniest minority of people
who purchase comics. I especially believe that the people who visit
(or post!) daily, are even a smaller fraction than that.
So, I strongly
believe that those “Four more titles go back to press!” “Seven more
go back to press!” headlines do something somewhere between jack
and shit to actually sell more DC comics to people who aren’t already
DC comics readers.
Further, the more
casual reader – the one who doesn’t come into the store each
and every Wednesday (and that’s by far the largest percentage
of my customers) want a book when they want it – they don’t want
to hear that it has sold-out nationally and will be 2-3 weeks for
the 2nd printing to work its way through the system.
They’re gone halfway through that sentence, and they just stopped
actively looking for that title.
DC has been managing
inventory pretty well for several decades now – they’ve got a long
historical record, and a fine track record of having just about
the “right” number of copies on hand to fill all of the demand.
They’ve long been the publisher with The Carrot-est
approach, which makes this sudden and dramatic switch the The
Stick utterly baffling – and, I believe, destructive for their own
market.
See, this is hard
for me to say, because I’ve always been a DC fan(boy),
but I think when it comes to a straight-up fight, with the same
rules, Marvel is always going to win, and win big. I don’t know
why this is, perhaps the characters are
more appealing or something. They’re certainly not to me, but it
has been my general observation over the decades that unless Marvel
catastrophically fucks something up (ie,
the period between, say, Heroes World to Joe Quesada), Marvel pretty
much always wins, and in a walk at that. DC has been able to counter
this over the years, to some degree, by either offering things that
Marvel won’t or can’t (DC direct, backlist, Vertigo, etc.), or by
offering superior service (sales reps, co-op advertising, better
discounts for many customers, etc.)
But the thing
is, DC can’t win by adopting abandoned Marvel policies, by trying
to hit us with a stick until we come around – it certainly didn’t
work for Marvel (there’s no doubt in my mind that Marvel’s sales
growth during Jemas was absolutely in spite of him, not because
of him) for that matter! I fundamentally believe that retailers
as a whole will continue to be fiscally conservative in their ordering,
and that artificially limiting supply in the hopes that “we’ll order
more next time” not only doesn’t work, but harms the publisher
trying to interject such a plan.
Or to put that
a slightly more specific and real world way: the difference between
the pre-OYL Robin #147 (32120 copies) and the OYL Robin
#148 (36717) copies is, wow, all of 4597 copies. Assuming 3500 comic
stores, that’s a whopping 1.3 copies per store. In six months, it’s
pretty likely even that marginal gain will have washed away. So
what’s the point? Why even do a stunt like
OYL then? If you don’t have the inventory on hand to support the
kind of structural changes your making, the kind of creative risk
that entails, then why even bother?
For myself, with
just a few exceptions (Demon, Firestorm, and, ah,
Manhunter it looks like – that is, the bottom tier books
in the stunt), we out performed the national market in our pre-OYL
and OYL sales percentage gains. And we still needed more on most
of the books (Except Firestorm, Hawkgirl and Outsiders)
by no later than week #2.
In some cases
that could have amounted to another 25% gain or so, though most
were in the 10% or less range.
But those copies
weren’t available when we needed them.
And I count that
as a failure, and as a loss of potential sales.
Should I take
the blame for not having enough of these books? Hard to argue, I
think, when I outperformed the national market trends. Further,
in what was the open question of the time of the last column’s writing,
our preorders for the majority of the titles didn’t increase by
even a single copy.
Still, the guessing
games don’t stop – we got to see how (or if) the audience embraces
the OYL concepts. Anecdotally, our first week sales on the “Second
month” of sales look to generally be right back where they were
before for several of the titles of the titles, but we do have some
solid “sticky” gainers – the main 2 Batman books, the main 2 Superman
books, Aquaman, at least. The next few weeks will play out
the rest of them.
And then, joy,
comes 52. The only benefit is that they’ve gone back to the
carrot (returns, and FOC) for the first 3 months. I’m placing the
first few issues at around 110% of Infinite Crisis because
of that – but the real questions are when is the drop off going
to happen (because it will) and just how severe will it be?
**************************
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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