I Hate To Say I Told You So, But...

Last time round, I said that the DC Villains Month had cut the legs out from under a couple of their newer, struggling titles.

And lo! Here among the solicitations for January:

Katana and Vibe also gone, without even an official notice to wave them off. 

AND ANOTHER THING... (Warning: contains exclamation marks. Lots of 'em)

Look, I know it seems that I'm spending a lot of time pummeling DC Comics, but this is something that just bugs me.

Batman: Black & White is a really enjoyable book. Honest, it is. But this is the contents page of #2:

I mean, look at the talent there! And a cover by Jim Steranko!*

But also look! There's a listing of all the DC executive staff! And look! Just under that! There's a listing of all the DC executive staff! Again!

I know, I know. That indicia is in every book the company publishes, and the same sort of thing is in every Marvel book - every comic book available these days, in fact. I know it's the result of some kind of in-house decision, or slip-up, or something, and there's absolutely no malign intent.

It's just that having that same listing appear twice on the same page makes me think DC consider Jay Kogan or Alison Gill or Jeff Boison to be twice as important as JG Jones or Rafael Albuquerque or Alex Nino or dammit Jim Steranko.

I know that's probably not the case.

But this is the second month in a row this has happened in this book.

It annoys me.

That's all.












*Admittedly, the cover is of a Batman who looks like he's got some weird kind of Crown of Thorns thing sticking out of his cowl, but what the hell. It's Steranko!

GLAD IT'S ALL OVER

It’s another Hypothetical Comic Shop post! Remember, the HCS  doesn’t actually exist no matter what you think!

We sold the last copy of the DC Villains Month 3D covers on Saturday; it was the one remaining copy of Batman/Riddler that had stayed on the shelf for a week or two, sitting there sadly like a fat lass at a disco while the Harley Quinns and the Joker’s Daughters were whisked off their feet by tall good-looking lads.

So what was the impression left by the month? Well, it didn’t increase our sales of DC books, as, along with almost every other retailer in the world, we didn’t get anywhere near the number of copies of the 3D covers that we’d ordered. Furthermore, because the covers gimmick far outweighed the content of the comics, the 2D covers didn’t sell nearly as well as they usually would in an ordinary month. We were scrupulously fair with the 3D covers and made sure that everybody who’d ordered them got as many as possible, but where standard copies had to be supplied, quite a few were refused. I have no problem with a customer who does that: they ordered a certain product in good faith, that product was not available and they had every right to refuse what they felt was an unsatisfactory replacement.

As a result, the extra revenue from the higher price on the enhanced covers has been more than negated by the number of unsold standard copies we have (although, as a shop that specialises in old comics, we hope to shift those standard covers either as back issues or when we put them on sale online).

What’s really struck me over the course of the month is something we won’t really feel the effect of for another few weeks: the number of standing orders that have been cancelled as a result of Villains Month. The nature of the event has meant that most regular titles have had to either interrupt their storylines or bring them to an end, then see those storylines replaced for a month by material created in the most part by different talent than usual and therefore in a different style than usual. All this in the service of a short series that’s really only of interest to those who read the ongoing series it spins out of.

God, that’s complex.

So what we’ve seen a lot of is regular customers coming in, some of them excited by the cover enhancements, some of them not caring either way, but all of them deciding that the break in storylines is the ideal place to drop a title or two. Or three. Or, in a couple of cases, all of them.

That isn’t going to help us, especially in the next two or three months while the cancelled items are still filtering through the direct market system (though that system was kind of torn up and spat on by Villains Month’s infamous allocations). For a while, we’re going to be shelving extra copies of low-selling titles. Maybe they’ll sell off the shelf. I doubt it. If they were going to sell off the shelf we’d order more copies for just that purpose. Experience has told us these titles don’t sell off the shelf, so essentially we’re eating them (unless, as above, they shift as part of the long tail that’s a major part of the shop’s business model).

It also isn’t going to help those low-selling titles: the Katanas and the Vibes and the Stormwatches are going to take a hit, while the more recently-launched books – I’m talking very directly here about The Movement and The Green Team – have been dealt a major blow far too early in their lives, and it’s one they’ll likely not recover from. To disrupt the flow of a struggling new book while it’s still trying to build an audience, and moreover to not give that book a look in on the promotional stunt it was withdrawn to accommodate, is pretty much slitting that title’s throat.

The Movement: will soon go
 to live on a farm

There’s another aspect to this: those low-selling titles tend to have a small but very loyal following. The Movement and The Green Team actually attract exactly one standing order customer each, and are the only titles those two customers read. So we’ve not seen those customers this month, and we’ve been told by one of those two that he’s now fed up with buying titles that last less than a year (yes, we’ve tried guiding him toward books with a greater chance of survival, but some people have very very distinct tastes) and is unlikely to replace the book when it reaches its inevitable early end. So that’s at least one customer gone. Yes, a very low-spending customer, but a customer nonetheless. Every single one is valuable. Every single loss is a blow.

So generally, the month has been an overall loss. It’s been ameliorated a little by the increased sales on Marvel’s X-Men and Avengers books as they dive into yet another crossover (surprisingly, the bright yellow trade dress on the Battle Of The Atom books has been a terrific eye-catcher, while people have stared at the shelves for ages before asking where the 3D covers are). What we’ve taken from it is that these annual gimmicks only work if they’re inclusive: they have to be a continuation of, or close adjunct to, the regular content, and they have to be available to everybody.

There’s been something else we’ve learned recently, though; the shop’s location – and indeed the nature of the business itself - means it’s never really attracted very much in the way of footfall, outside of the regulars who make the trek to see us. In the last few months, as our area’s begun attracting a new, younger type of resident, we’ve been getting more requests for the material we’ve not traditionally stocked, material outside of the basic spandex melodramatics. If this keeps up, as I hope it will, we’re gong to see a major shift in our customer base and what they consume, and that, with luck, will make us less reliant on the books from the two major publishers.

Which will mean that in a few years time, when there’s another gimmick month like this September, we’ll be able to do what we really wanted to do this time around: just not bother with it.

And you know what else? If you’re short-sighted like I am, those covers give you one hell of a headache. 

The Hypothetical Comics Shop stays open late on Wednesdays, unless there's something good on the telly.

Normal Service May Possibly Be Resumed

We've been having a bit of a rest.

We'll make up for it.