(#145 – June 2006 – “Fifty Two Pickup”)

by Brian Hibbs

Ah, the day of fun is almost here.

You should be reading this on Friday, June 16^th, which means that I have eleven more days to figure out just how the heck to order the non-returnable issues of 52.

You, a regular reader of comic news, should be well aware that 52 is DC’s weekly “one year in the life of the DC Universe” maxi-series (doesn’t get more maxi than 52 issues, really). What’s probably less apparent to you is just how much of a challenge something like this is to order.

Traditionally, the Direct Market method of ordering comics works fairly well because our orders aren’t too far in advance from product arrival. Here at the end of June, I’m ordering comics that are meant to be shipping in August (for the most part), so we’re anywhere from 6 to 10 weeks ahead. This usually translates into two issues. I have Hawkgirl #53 on my racks for at least a week or two, I’m ordering #55.

(Which is one of the many reasons that retailers hate hate hate late books – as a book drifts off schedule, it increases the number of titles we’re “on the hook for” using old data.)

But for a weekly series, this largely gets thrown out the window – while the time frame is the same, the number of releases (and hence the risk) scales dramatically up. Just before I have to order the August books, I will have first week sales on 52 #6, and then I have to order issues #13-17. That’s eleven issues behind on the high end.

DC is in the process of moving to a “Final Order Cutoff” system like Marvel’s, where we can adjust the orders up or down right up to the moment where they have to set the print run, and the sole book they are offering it for right now is 52. While this means that my orders for 52 #13 aren’t “finally” due until Wednesday 7/5 (where I’ll have the first week sales of 52 #9 on hand)

While that makes this easier to a certain degree, I still have to write a number down on my June Previews order form to initially set my orders for #13-17 (five issues, for it is a 5 week month in August), at least to cover me from Something Happening and me missing the FOC cutoff date (As I do about twice a year for the Marvels, so far)

There’s another problem, of course, which is that while first week sales usually are the majority of what you’ll sell on many books, that tendency deforms to a greater or lesser extent on “event” books, or “hot” books, or, as Joe Field would put it, “cool” books.

How to explain this for you to easily grasp?

Let’s try this: any given store’s customer base is going to actually consist of several “pools” of different customer behaviors. There’s a group of people, for example, who are hard-core and dedicated and buy new comics every week without fail. These tend to be the heaviest “users”, the “zombies”, and they tend to disproportionately support the B- and C-list superhero titles.

There’s a group who equally love the super books, but don’t necessarily come in weekly or anything like it. They tend to stick closer to the “icons” of the lines, but they’ll branch out when there is an event, or just good buzz. Some of these people “float” from shop to shop based upon where they happen to be when they want to buy comics, some just have busy real lives and can’t make it in all of the time, others have the habit, but not so much so that they don’t sometimes miss whole months worth of releases. It’s usually hard to predict what this group might buy, largely because of their inconsistent buying occurrences.

Then there are people who like comics as a form, who buy the “art comics” and the literary work, but who will absolutely positively buy a superhero book too, if it’s good. These people tend not to buy more than the smallest handful of regular ongoing series, but will jump in and out of storylines on a whim.

And there’s Art Snobs, and Newbies, and Tourists, and Civilians, and a dozen more groups as well. And they’re not static, and they overlap and ebb and flow. The guts of “how do you order comics?” is in predicting which groups will react in which way. With monthly books, it is “easy” – you have enough weeks of data to see where your long-range sales are going to be. You can see within a few issues which books are Week One Wonders and which have Legs.

On a weekly book, that’s a lot trickier to see, because it takes so much longer to find your “mature sales” spot – right now, I only have 5 weeks of data on one issue of 52, and I need to order the next five issues. I can’t really tell yet what the long-term prognosis for the book is going to be because, naturally, the first group of issues is going to have the most people sampling.

I don’t think I’ll actually be comfortable ordering 52 until I have sales data for week six on issue #8 – which means the week that #14 comes out, and the week I have the FOC for issue #18. Best case here: there are about 5 issues (#13-18) I’m ordering with only the vaguest idea if I’m “right” or not.

Let me try to give you an example of drop-offs on a title so you can see how tricky this can get. Look at All Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder. This is an extreme example, because the title has not only been plagued by extraordinary lateness, but it has also been a critical failure. We sold 160 copies of issue #1. 127 of #2. 104 of #3. and with #4 we were down to only 84 copies sold – just a smidge over half of the sales of issue #1. Of course, I ordered #4 based upon my last piece of data when I ordered it – sales of #2. Which means I have a lot of copies left over.  Now picture what excess inventory could look like in a weekly series.

With a normal monthly title, most of the audience decides somewhere around issue 4 or 6 whether they’re going to stick with a book. Is this also true with a weekly title? Or will the “audition” last for 2-3 months, meaning 8-12 issues?

52 launched at Comix Experience very, very well. In fact, our first-four-weeks sales for #1 are exactly equal to the same period on Infinite Crisis #1, which is much better than I expected. First week sales on 52 #2 are within 5% of #1, which is a historically low drop. #3 took about a 10% drop, but #4 went up 5%. Wheee!

Our second-week-and-later sales on #2-4 are lower than on #1 -- #2 is about 60% of #1 – which might suggest that there’s not a lot of “legs” after the first week of release, but it’s really too early to tell with any kind of definitive answer. We’ve definitely been selling full sets (to date) of 52 every week to people still jumping in at the start, but how long will that sustain itself?

There’s also the problem of “trend deforming” issues during the fifty-two week run. For example, we know that #11 is the first costumed appearance of the new Batwoman. Will people who haven’t been buying, or who started then dropped off, come on board for that issue? Will they want the first ten, or will they just go along from there, or just buy the single “hot” issue?  Interviews and such with the people involved with 52 suggest there may be 3-4 of these “deforming points” through the series. Until we get there, there’s really no telling what the impact of these events will be upon sales, or what the right way to order the book from and around those points might be.

The one advantage that we gained was that DC opted to make the first twelve issues at least possibly returnable. If you placed orders that matched or beat some Infinite Crisis tie-ins (OMAC Project Infinite Crisis Special, Villains United Infinite Crisis Special), you’ll be able to return copies at some point in the future (still unannounced, at this writing).

Now, DC intends to assess a 10% restocking fee (or 25 cents) for every copy you return, so this isn’t all bread and roses. Going nuts on ordering #1-12 could end up costing you some serious coin. But what it did allow us was a tool to determine what the absolute ceiling for 52 might be, while shifting the risk a smidge away from us.

In the first four weeks, we never sold less than 125 copies of the seven issues of Infinite Crisis. However, the OMAC Project mini-series (the best selling of the four “lead-in” books) never got above 90 copies for us, and we barely sold 50 copies of the OMAC Project Infinite Crisis Special. Without the potential of returns, I would have been much more conservative on 52, and ordered it much closer to the spin-off/tie-in numbers. Without returns, I probably would have ordered 90/85/80/75 on the first four issues of 52. Instead, I ordered #1 at 160 copies, and decreased from there. My thinking was that even if I never sold those “extra” seventy copies of #1, it was only costing me $17.50, the equivalent of 7 copies of sales. If it got me seven more customers buying all fifty-two issues of 52, that’s 364 copies over the next year, or a gross of $910. That’s therefore a reasonably “safe” bet.

(That’s chump math, of course – it isn’t counting the incoming freight on those issues, the extra labor in processing returns, the “opportunity cost” of tying up that extra money in that inventory until they’re made returnable, and so on – but it was basically a good “back of the envelope” calculation. Even extended out to an average of fifty extra copies of the first 12 issues, at a quarter a piece, that’s still only $150, with a potential upside of a lot more than that)

Of course, if 52 sold more like OMAC than Infinite Crisis, then that would have been salt in the wounds, but the audience responded to 52, so it all worked out.

Ultimately, I don’t expect 52 to sustain these kinds of heights over the course of an entire year. I would, of course, be very happy if it were able to do so, but I’d be very surprised as well. The only historically similar example we have would be Action Comics Weekly, which launched huge (like 52), but which soundly and dramatically dropped off several months in, and where we spent the rest of the year desperately trying to slash orders fast enough so that we’re not drowning in unsold comics. These are two entirely different beasts, of course, and the market has changed dramatically since Action Comics Weekly was published, so the comparison is probably invalid, but that’s what’s in the back of my head when I contemplate how many copies to order for eight weeks in the future.

Because there will be drops (there are always drops). The only question is when and how much.

So, how do I order #13-17? Without the “cushion” of returnability, there’s just no way to stick your financial neck out too far, so I’ll be tightening those orders right up. If next week’s cycle sheets continue to indicate a slight and slow decline, I suspect that I’ll be ordering at or around 100% of my first week sales for #6, plus the average of second through fourth week sales of #3-5, assuming that the natural sales decline by the time we get to #13 will yield me enough copies to sustain inventory for weeks five through thirteen of racking. If not, we’ll have to hope that DC will overprint enough of these first non-returnable issues to make sure that copies are available to cover conservative dumb-asses like me!

I’ll probably place the same order for #14-17 as I do #13, because there’s just no way to predict the curve this far out, not yet. Then I’ll reanalyze the numbers every week once we start the FOC process. Every week. For the rest of the year.

Either way, we’ll check back in on 52 later in the year to see how right or wrong I was.

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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.

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