By Brian Hibbs

#124 – August 2004 – “Don’t Shit Where You Eat!”

There’s a general truism that one shouldn’t pollute where one resides – that’s a good way to ultimately do even greater harm to yourself. Yet, we’ve never really seemed to be able to figure it out properly in comics.

Part of it, I think, is that publishers often look in the abstract, rather than the specifics, when they think of their customers. Well, that’s assuming that they think of them at all, really. I don’t think that publishers generally see you as valued life-long customers – they see you as ATMs that they have the PIN code for. And it often feels they look at the retailers as even lower forms of life.

(This goes back forever – anyone remember Jim Shooter’s infamous “little fucks” memo? – that’s how he described the reading audience.)

This frustrates me to no end, because I’m one of the ones that try. That’s not to say I always succeed, nor always manage to do the best thing (ha, no far from that), but my intentions are good at least.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with a publisher about the marketplace as a whole where something generally disparaging hasn’t been said about the retail community. “Excepting you, of course,” always gets added, naturally. Great.

But here’s the thing: if we were treated with more respect, if we were consulted and empowered and valued, then I believe that most of the problems would begin to melt away. In fact, we see this in action every time that DC has one of their RRP meetings – everyone walks away from that filled with a new found understanding of how the other half lives and things steadily get better for months at a time... until everyone forgets what happened at the meetings and falls back into their old patterns.

Comics are often a fragile business – it doesn’t take a whole lot to chase readers away, and it’s often very hard to bring new people in because of the structural barriers we’ve erected. So why is it that publishers seem set, firmly and completely, in making that job harder?

You want an example, to be sure. Perhaps we can start with the simplest part of the equation: shipping.

This week (8/18/04) we’re receiving Supreme Power from Marvel. We’re also receiving the first issue of Doctor Spectrum, the sole Supreme Power spin-off. Does this make sense to you?

We’re also getting in nine different X-Men related titles. Nine!

A couple of weeks ago we got 3 Ultimate titles in a single week, when they’re only publishing 5 distinct tiles.

It’s not just Marvel, of course -- there was the week we got 4 different Transformers comics from Dreamwave, or the week where Devil’s Due published both of their main G.I. Joe titles. We have weeks where DC publishes one Vertigo title, followed by weeks with five. You can tell when there’s a convention coming because that’s when Fantagraphics goes from publishing a comic a week to throwing out five at once.

I mean, come on, people. How is the consumer supposed to absorb this?

Why is it that the last week of the month is traditionally a major consumer gank-fest as every publisher under the sun races to just-barely-beat the Diamond-will-make-this-returnable-if-we-don’t-ship-NOW cutoff?

On a macro level, there isn’t any personal responsibility to shipping material in a timely and even fashion from almost any publisher. The exceptions can be counted on one hand. Why is this? Do publishers not understand how critical cash flow is to small retailers? Don’t they understand that it is a bad idea to have product compete with itself? In that week where we received 4 Transformers comics, our sales dropped to 20% of what it normally is – the customers couldn’t get them all, didn’t want to chose, and so chose none.

On a micro level, I know that publishers can execute pin-point shipping when they want to – hell, Marvel has precisely mapped the shipping of Identity Disk to the shipping of DC’s Identity Crisis. They’re paying enough attention to do this when they’re trying to create confusion in the marketplace. Why can’t they do the same to help their books sell better?

There’s no value in shipping Supreme Power and it’s spin-off in the same week – it doesn’t generate more sales for the brand, and is, in fact, far more likely to either hurt the brand, or to hurt another Marvel brand as consumers work within their limited budgets.

If you want the best possible sales for your comic, then you need to carefully balance shipping between both the dollars and the families. It’s not good when we have single weeks where half of the Top Ten ship – customers buy from the top down, and smaller works get left on the rack; nor is it good for books to “clump”. If you have four different Fantastic Four titles, it is inexcusable to ever have a situation where 2 or more ship in one week while none ship in another.

You’ll notice a lot of people complain about prices of comics. And while the increasingly decompressed storytelling methods we’re embracing often don’t yield a good return when comparing dollars to time, I think that the real problem is aggregate pricing – the final total when they come to the register and they gasp in sticker shock. That’s what happens in weeks with 9 X-Men books and 5 Batman titles.

Do you want to know why it is so hard to launch new books into the market? Why we need “comics activism” for She-Hulk or Fallen Angel ? It’s precisely because we get weeks where there are 9 X-Men books and 5 Batman titles, and that is when those books ship. Of course, that’s also the week that someone at DC thinks it’s a grand idea to ship two of the struggling “Focus” titles. “Uh, but why doesn’t this sell?” they then ask.

Rocket. Science.

It’s really easy to kill the golden goose – as we’ve been busy proving again and again through the years. Not only have we strangled existing franchises by not having the slightest thought for market forces, but we’ve created a circumstance where it’s almost impossible to launch new works because they arrive into weeks where all of the consumer’s cash has already been vacuumed out of their pockets.

Think about it, publishers: market responsibility begins with you. And these are not at all hard problems to solve.

* * *

Ooh, one more late example since I haven’t sent this off to Matt yet – I just got back from unpacking the boxes for this week’s books and lo and behold most of this week’s DCs are poly-bagged with a Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow CD. Joy.

When people can’t flip through their comics, sales are hurt. When the anal-retentive can’t find their perfect copy (because of CD dents, and packing problems), sales are hurt. When your racks look cheap and tawdry with ugly bags popping up across them, sales are hurt. When the stacks of comics fall over because of the CD unbalancing them, sales are hurt.

The insult to injury? Oh yah, man – we have to pay for the shipping. This week’s DCs came out to 18 pounds of weight in polybags and CDs (I’m not even counting the thick mini-poster bound into each book) Retailers pay for that shipping, and we don’t even get any benefit from it whatsoever. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Effectively, we’re being asked to pay for DC’s advertising, and that’s about as perfect of a definition of “unfair” as one could ask.

* * *

The other thing that drives me absolutely, positively stark-raving nuts is convention sales.

This year’s Big Example is probably the Complete Bone book that Jeff Smith did, though scores of books “debut” at San Diego or Chicago or MOCCA or APE each year.

It’s really really difficult to not see this as picking retailer’s pockets.

There are a myriad of excuses that publishers offer as to why they do it – most of them something along the lines of “We have to do it because retailers don’t support us”, and, believe me, I’m sensitive that, yeah, a lot of stores don’t support much outside of the big brokered publishers.

On the other hand, while Marvel and DC and Dark Horse and Image all have their faults (yes, yes they do), they do generally try to avoid directly competing with their client retailers. Maybe, just maybe, this is one of the reasons that a lot of small stores don’t support much outside of the big publishers?

The thing is, when you’re one of the stores that do support a wide variety of publishers, when, in fact, you’re one of the stores that might be providing, single-handedly .5% or more of the sales on a title, you can’t help but ask “Um, hey, why the hell are you selling to my customers?”

My position is fairly simple: if I’ve supported you 365 for year-after-year-after-year, then considering my needs during convention season should just be common courtesy. I don’t really much give a damn that Joe Bob’s Comic Shack doesn’t order your books – this is about your relationship with the people who care, the people who try, the people who do. Not the ones who don’t.

Every year, every convention, I lose sales because publishers rush ship their books to the cons to sell to my customers who don’t have any patience (and why should they, really?) – publishers that I support month-in, month-out, publishers who I order as many of their books as I think I can sell.  These aren’t necessarily huge sums of money, but failure in comics retail has really always been a function of Death of 1000 Papercuts.

I don’t especially want to pick on Jeff Smith and Bone, because he’s a good friend and an astonishing cartoonist, but he’s also a handy example of how the Retailer Seldom Wins via inattention rather than maliciousness.

Bone has been serialized through 55 issues. This serialization has been the mortar to provide for the eventual collection of the Bone library of TPs. Comics retailers have been there every issue, for years (although very few understood Bone from issue #1). This is not to diminish in any way Jeff’s remarkable talent, nor the heroic way he stuck to serialization before people “figured it out” – I personally don’t think I understood what I was selling until around issue 7 or 8 – once the Direct Market was on board it became the foundation for everything that would come later.

Though it’s probably not fair to put this on him, Jeff sorta became the Great White Hope for self-publishing. He was just about the only person who actually completed a long project and didn’t self-destruct. With all 55 issues finally completed, I was looking forward to settling in and having Bone be a “mature“ product where we could sell the entire series as an entire series.

But, of course, here comes the Scholastic deal. I don’t doubt he should have taken it – this has potential to transform how an entire generation looks at American comics, and is, long-term, a no-brainer. In the short term, however, the Direct Market gets dumped upon.

Why? Because it is inevitable that as we wait for the color Scholastic volumes (2 a year – so this is a 5 year project) to be released, some portion of the Cartoon Books black & white editions will go out of print.  And when you’re selling a unified story with numbered volumes, any part of it going out of print dooms the entire series to marginal sales.

Well, at least we have the release of vol 9 to hold us out, right? And we do, except that unlike the last few volumes, the SC actually shipped before the HC, which is going to undercut sales there, plus the One volume came out barely 3 weeks on the heels of the SC, so we’re undercut there, and of course we get allocated on One and look like schmucks for it.

And then, insult to injury Jeff sells it direct at San Diego, before we have a chance to sell a single copy.

Alright, that’s an extreme case of a number of dominoes happening to fall in a particularly bad way, sure. But fractions and variants of this type of thing happen al the time from nearly every publisher. And it hurts retailers.

Convention sales are directly taking dollars out of our pockets, and much much worse, those dollars are almost all coming from the stores that already support you the most! How does that make sense?

I mean, is it just me? When Top Shelf sold Blankets weeks in advance of it hitting the stores, the retailers who lost the most sales were the ones who had supported the book the strongest. Why would you do that?

Time and time again in comics we shit where we eat. Let’s knock that off, OK folks? Or at least try to be conscious about it at least? It’s hard to progress and grow when we constantly undercut ourselves.

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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.