by Brian Hibbs
The strangest part for me? Honestly, it would have to be sitting up at the front of the
room.
What you have
to understand about me is that, at industry functions, I usually
sit at the back of the room, in the very last row available, which
allows me to crack wise and make snide comments when things get
dull.
So, to have to
be up at the front dais, helping lead the meeting, well it was pretty
surreal for me.
“What,” I know
you’re asking, “the hell is Hibbs talking
about?”
Vegas, baby.
Specifically ComicsPRO’s
first annual member’s meeting, held last week at the Orleans
hotel in Las Vegas, where retailers from all around the
country came to make common cause under our own auspices. To the
best of my knowledge, this is the first time that a retailer gathering
on this scale, unconnected to any other industry event, has ever
been attempted.
Let me back up
another step, and remind you what ComicsPRO
is all about.
For me, at least,
it all started in the wake of the Class Action lawsuit over
Marvel honoring their terms of sale. While in the end everything
worked out alright, with Marvel offering comics retailers worldwide
nearly a million and a half dollars worth of credit to make up for
the huge mass of late shipping and otherwise non-conforming-to-solicitation
comics under the Jemas tenure, I also knew that I had taken a pretty
huge potential personal risk in initiating that action. A risk that
not only should no single retailer have to bear, but, more importantly, a risk that should never
have gotten that far in the first place.
No one ever (ever!)
wants to sue their suppliers; but the fact of the matter that Direct
Market publishers and distributors have a tendency to “play us off
one another”: “No, (store name), that’s just a concern for you.”
“Well, (store name), we heard from another retailer who wants exactly
the opposite thing”, and so forth.
Ultimately, I
never wanted anyone to ever have to be in the position I
was then, ever again. I wanted something where, through our collective
voice and collective buying weight, we could negotiate through the
problems before they ever got bad enough that anyone would need
to even think about having to sue anyone else.
So, yeah, I think
there’s an enormous value in “advocacy” – where we can make crystal
clear what our collective needs and wants are, and we can encourage
our retail partners to enact the Best Practices that help retailers,
and, thus, ultimately help themselves sell more comics in the Direct
Market.
Other members
of our initial Board of Directors have other foci that they want
to pursue – whether it is a “mentoring” program to encourage more
entrepreneurs to enter the Direct Market, and to provide a base
level of experience that can elevate new or expanding stores; or
aggregating our purchasing power to save money on everything from
credit card processing fees to health insurance to supply purchases
like bags in bulk.
We started with
six Board members – myself, Joe Field of
Flying Colors, Amanda Fisher of
Muse Comics, Gary Dills of Phoenix Comics, Chris Powell of Lone Star, and Michael Drivas of Big Brain Comics, representing a pretty
wide variety of store types and sizes and styles.
We began by trying
to build the organization, both from a structural by-law oriented
solid base, as well as from an opening suite of programs that could
provide an instant and tangible benefit for all member retailers
(like what I believe to be a pretty wonderful credit card processing
deal through Chase / Paymentech)
Our bylaws called
for nine members on the Board of Directors, and we quickly decided
that the best way to ensure continuity from year-to-year was to
rotate the Board membership. Each year we’ll have elections from
the membership, voting for three new BoD members. A term will last
for 3 years, so we’ll always have new, energized blood coming into
the Board.
Since we needed
to have elections, we reasoned, maybe it would be better to do them
face-to-face. There were also a number of policy items (like “what
constitutes a consensus of members? Do we need a quorum on all issue,
or just a majority? What kind of majority?” that kind of
thing) which are useful to face-to-face on.
So we decided
to find a cheap meeting space in a cheap-to-get-to-town, and hold
the meeting, and see if anyone would show up. I’m honest about that
last bit, too – in the earliest parts of planning this we were seriously
thinking we’d be lucky if we had twenty or thirty people showed
up… including us!
We ended up with
more than sixty retailer attendees, plus more than a dozen
publishing and distribution representatives.
Not too bad for
a fairly ad-hoc, late-to-start-the-planning (for example we wanted
to notify publishers no later than Thanksgiving ’06, and I don’t
think we really got started until after the first of the
year in ’07) first meeting!
In fact, as far
as I am aware, ComicsPRO
is the most successful retailer trade organization in the DM’s history
– we were at (as of the first day of the meeting) 91 paid retailer
business as members, which means we’re well above 100 individual
stores. Further, with the energy and enthusiasm that the membership
seemed to be crackling with after the meeting, I think that number
is going to quickly zoom upwards as everyone goes home and starts
proselytizing their local retailers to join.
What was probably
most exciting about the meeting is that it was about US. Generally
speaking, when retailers meet en masse it’s a function of either
a general comics convention (like San Diego or NYCC), or it is at
the invitation and organization of one of our suppliers (like DC’s
RRP meetings), or Distributors (I can still remember the days when
both Diamond AND Capital would have annual trade shows). This can
yield some valuable and productive meeting time, but in those cases,
the focus is about something other than Direct Market retailing.
There’s a subtle
psychological benefit to it being our meeting on our terms on our
turf. In fact, the meeting itself wasn’t even open to publishers
on the first day – it was about our needs and our
organization. I’m not sure if I can actually convey to you just
how refreshing that is.
Anyway, like I
said at the top of this, it was really weird for me to be up on
the dais, as one of the original six Board members, helping lead
the meeting. I’ve always held my greatest worth was kind of off
to the side, being, dunno, “the loyal opposition” (or, perhaps,
“the lunatic fringe”, depending on who you’re asking), but I’ve
apparently become the Establishment as I’ve gotten older. Owning
land, siring heirs, I guess it’s inevitable that you get older and
you become The Man, but I honestly never thought it was going to
happen to me.
I suppose it was
even weirder for the new Board members we elected – Ben Trujillo
of Star Clipper Comics, Carr D’Angelo
of Earth-2, and Rick
Lowell of Casablanca
Comics – who we rushed up to sit at the front the second we
announced the election results. Without telling them first! Heh
heh heh.
You know, we often
talk about organizing retailers as being like “herding cats” (I
know I’ve been personally guilty many times of making that analogy,
and always thinking of us like “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” from
Sandman #18), but if you’ll allow me to torture
that metaphor even more, in this first ComicsPRO meeting, it was like we all heard
the can opener turning and we came running in the same direction.
That is to say: when you give us common cause, we can and do respond
in a way that represents our common interests.
Both solidarity
and humility were well on display from every attendee. We didn’t
always agree on every topic, no far from it, but the dissenters
on whatever topic made their views known, and then moved on to the
next topic. There were no prima donna reactions, there were no “yes
but my individual or regional concern trumps that” moments, there
wasn’t any of the gamesmanship or unhealthy competition that you
can sometimes see when retailers get together. None
of that.
And that was extremely
heartening to me. It makes me think that if we achieve the membership
goals we discussed, can make the first steps towards getting an
Executive Director (so that getting work done isn’t dependent
upon dipping into members “free time” --
that is, when we’re not otherwise occupied by running our stores),
can grow both the breadth and the width of our membership, that
we’re really going to be able to make a big difference in Direct
Market retailer’s businesses.
In our meetings
with our partners, there was a striking unanimity of purpose among
the retailers. Virtually every time someone piped up with a problem,
there was a multitude of “here here!” that accompanied it. We focused,
for the most part, on Big Picture issues, and no one bogged down
into “last week, I had a box missing in my shipment” that too many
of us veterans are used to hearing during open Q&A.
It all just made
me very very hopeful.
There were several
topics that I think the retailer’s position was made very clear
to our partners (the abuse of using Match-To’s to skip the solicitation
process, ala the Wizard Movie specials would be one example
of the kinds of things we addressed), and I think a lot of really
positive suggestions were made that were well taken by our partners
– for example, we suggested that new stores keep their Diamond “New
Account Rep” for a six month period to ensure that new stores are
handed off into the system before they’re sure they understand the
minutia and peculiarities that Direct Market ordering can be.
I’m not going
to make a whole laundry list of things I think we “did”, because,
quite honestly that’s for our partners to do, if they want, as they
enact our suggestions.
I also think we
got a good five or ten steps into any number
of “Thousand Mile Journeys”, and we laid any number of seeds that
are really going to payoff down the line.
All in all, probably
the most productive Industry “thing” I’ve ever attended in 18 years
of owning my own store.
I want to make
a couple of public thanks, too. First off to Chris
Powell and Amanda Fisher for doing most of the “heavy lifting” in
organizing the meeting. It came off very professionally,
and you’d think they’d been doing it all of their lives. I also
want to thank Gary Dills for handling the election procedures, it
went smooth as silk.
Brad Bankston
of Austin Books
video taped most of the 18-ish hours of meeting. Once that gets
edited and cleaned up, we hope to present a good portion of it on
line for people to watch.
I want to thank
our meal sponsors: DC, Diamond, Wizkids, IDW and Virgin. Those last
two, especially, I think showed us something by stepping up to play
with the “big boys”, and to take Q&As. Image sponsored the (much
needed) hospitality room with snacks and drinks. Dark Horse sent
a rep to join us at the meeting, and Marvel and Dynamite sent a
pile of stuff for the Goody Bags. Thanks to them, one and all, for
recognizing that our future is working together.
I’m more excited
about possibilities in the Direct Market then I ever have been before,
because we’ve just proven that retailers can work together,
can put aside their egos, can
find common ground. And that’s an amazing lesson.
ComicsPRO needs every member it can get,
so we can move our agenda forward faster – now is the time
to join, the time to raise your voice into the chorus of comics
retailer’s best interests. If you’re a retailer reading this, it
is time to stop waiting – the org is doing things now; if
you’re a consumer reading this, print it out and bring it to your
retailer’s attention. The stronger the retailers are, the stronger
our publishers are, and the stronger comics are.
**************************
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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