Unless you closely follow retailer issues, you may not have been aware of an ongoing argument over Wizard’s shipping policies — basically they shipped unannounced special issues without any solicitation. But ComicsPRO, the retailer organization, has lobbied for a solution:

ComicsPRO is pleased to announce that in response to feedback and lobbying from our retailer members and others in the industry, Wizard Entertainment has created new sales incentives and returnability options for Wizard #195 and the 2008 Wizard Movie Spectacular edition.

In the past, in an effort to get products quickly into retailers’ hands, Wizard opted to not solicit their Movie Spectaculars through Previews and instead shipped the magazine to retailers in matched order quantities from previous Wizard issues. When the second of Wizard’s unsolicited Movie Spectaculars shipped earlier this year using this method, the retailer trade organization ComicsPRO began actively working behind the scenes to find a common ground for dealing with future issues.

(more…)

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Numerous studies have reported no significant relationship between construction business loans use and health.

The manga onslaught continues, as PW reports that the 800-900 outlet strong Trans World Entertainment chain had contracted with wholesaler Bookazine to add manga to such places as F.Y.E, , Coconuts, Sam Goody, Suncoast and Planet Music.

Bookazine established its separate pop culture program, Popazine, two years ago and hired John Davis, former director of book sales at Central Park Media, to head it. Since then Bookazine’s sales of pop culture-related titles, including manga and graphic novels, have jumped, according to Bookazine executive v-p Richard Kallman. In 2006, pop culture/graphic novels were 5% of the company’s overall business. This year, Davis projects, Popazine will grow to 7% or 8%.

In some ways the story is a reminder of how far we’ve come in five or six years — in the olden days the idea of ANY mass market retailer carrying comics, manga or Bazooka Joe bubble gum comics would have been clutched at by every comcis true believer as the straw that showed there was life outside the world of longboxes. Now, the story comes with its own history of ups and downs — you may recall that Suncoast/Musicland went bankrupt in 2006, causing all sorts of problems for anime and manga companies. TWE eventually acquired Suncoast, and now they are back in the manga business.

It’s this cycle of bust and boom in the retail market that really shows how entrenched comics, manga and graphic novels really are now. There is no one setback that will hold us back, only a continuing march.

A few updates on the Diamond POS/bar code story that’s been bubbling under for a few weeks now.

Steven Grant is big enough to admit he flubbed (we’ve all been there, Steven) in his previous comments on bar codes:

I guess I lead a more sheltered life than I thought, from all the emails I got from all around the world telling me about the bar code systems their local comics shops employ. (And many that don’t.) The ones that employ the systems mainly seem to be: chain shops; shops affiliated with book or record stores; shops strongly dependent on merchandise sales or the gaming market where comics amount to a special service or an afterthought; well-established independent comics shops. Even Brian Hibbs dropped a line to say that within a couple years it’s unlikely that his Comix Experience in San Francisco will even carry anything that doesn’t have a bar code - and he’s got one of the more inclusive comic shops in existence. So I owe Diamond a retraction/apology: while I suspect more that one motive is at work (no, I’m not implying anything sinister) in their bar code plan, it’s clear they’re mainly looking to better serve their clientele.

Steven does go on to posit that small indie publishers are endangered, just not because of bar codes.

Next, ICv2 has a must read update on Diamond’s new POS system and why its needed.

According to Fletcher, only about 10% of Diamond’s customers currently use point of sale systems (about 25% of stores with a POS system use RMS). That is a serious barrier to success in a business that is increasingly competitive with large chain specialty retailers. In fact, it may be one reason why graphic novel sales in bookstores have been growing much more rapidly than graphic novel sales in comic stores, to the point where bookstores sold twice as many graphic novels as comic stores in 2006 (based on ICv2 research, reported in the ICv2 White Paper at the ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference in February, see “Graphic Novels Outsell Comics”).

Comic stores without POS systems find it difficult to keep key graphic novel titles in stock, order new titles accurately, or get off losers on a timely basis, while book chain software supports efficient execution of all of those functions. Coupled with efficient distribution that gets new titles to stores quickly, returnability, and publisher promotional support for special displays, book chain POS systems provide an almost insurmountable competitive advantage on graphic novels vs. comic stores without such systems. And as the importance of the book channel to comic publishers grows, more product is developed with that channel in mind, it gets more support, and the channel shift continues and accelerates.

Much more in link, including the fact that Diamond’s system is not the only game in town: “Mel Thompson’s ComicTrac, Moby from Bitter End Systems (developed originally for Star Clipper in the St. Louis area), and the free software offered by Hijinx all include features specifically for comic stores.” (Brian Hibbs’ much publicized adventures in POS use the MOBY system, not Diamond’s.)

Details via the D&Q blog — apparently it is the kind of place where a golden afternoon light always shines, as earnest folk in mufflers roam amongst the stacks of fine books — our kind of place, in short.

The new Drawn & Quarterly store in Montreal had it’s unofficial opening over the weekend, and by all accounts it was a success. On the eve of the opening I picked up the store sign (variation pictured above). It was silkscreened on plywood by one of the newest D+Q cartoonists, Pascal Blanchet. The store will have it’s official launch party on October 19th (a co-launch with Blanchet’s new book, White Rapids). In the meantime, come by the store located at 211 Bernard West in Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood and check back here soon for more details on the October 19th launch.

Updates on two stories that are really frosting the ass of the internet these days:

§ Marc Oliver Frisch reacts to the reactions to his original Figure Skating column…

§ …which includes Dick Hyacinth’s lengthy reaction and round-up which qualifies as must reading:

I think the much stronger argument would be that sales charts might prevent stores from pushing marginal DC/Marvel titles to their customers. In other words, why bother recommending Crossing Midnight to a Fables fan if you’re pretty sure the former will be canceled soon? In my experience, “bad” stores don’t make these kinds of recommendations–it’s the better stores that actually go out on a limb by suggesting material that their customers may end up rejecting. (Besides, some of the “bad” stores probably only order enough copies of Crossing Midnight to satisfy their subscription customers, so there wouldn’t even be a shelf copy to recommend.) And, needless to say, any readers who pay attention to the sales charts may very well reach this conclusion on their own, thus robbing Crossing Midnight (or whatever) of additional sales.

MEANWHILE, in this corner, BARCODES. While Johanna has a useful link round-up It’s SLG’s Jennifer deGuzman who really comics out swinging calling Steven Grant’s declaration that barcodes would kill indie publishing “alarmist and irresponsible.” DeGuzman points out that as low margin as comics as a business are, we’re not talking outlays of thoussands of dollars here:

So — $400 initial cost and an additional $300 a year or so, depending on how many books you publish. Is that a “hefty” expense? Typing some numbers into a program and waiting a few seconds while it exports into a .tif or .eps file? Is that a burden? Sending in an application for an ISSN — is that an incredible burden? (I know, we all have a lot to do, but this is business. It requires work.) Some speculate that Diamond might require UPC barcodes, which are more expensive. Getting a vendor number from GS1, the company that controls UPCs, starts at $750 and $150 a year after that — and are what DC and Marvel use on their issues. I’m not sure that Diamond is going to require UPCs, but we already put either a UPC or an ISBN on our individual issues. Other publishers, who aren’t set up for this, need some information from Diamond Comics.

We’ll throw in our own two cents here — this move, while part of the larger move towards POS systems, cold also be an attempt to winnow out the “Hobby publishers” from the Diamond catalog, as SImon Jones suggests, and we’re not sure that’s a bad thing. Diamond must spend time and resources on companies that can’t afford a minimal investment in being professional. We’re not saying that no barcodes = crap, far from it, but perhaps ALTERNATE resources are better spent dealing with such publishers? We’re already rapidly evolving into a two tiered distribution system — bookstores and comics shops — it’s not hard to see other methods developing for micro-publishers.

Or, to put it another way, do we really need to set up a system fpr serious publishes that also caters to folks like SLG blog commenter zitsmyname?

I was planning on making a comic and,no iaww that suckz well thankz for tellin’ the pepz

Thankz, indeed.

Ah, and speaking of barcodes, Scott King runs the letter Diamond has sent to their vendors:

Dear Vendor:

Please be advised, that, effective for product shipping to Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. (Diamond) as of January 2008, Diamond will require all items to be marked or labeled with the appropriate scanner friendly bar code. Solid packed case quantities of items should also include bar codes on the case label or case markings. The preferred placement of the bar code for printed matter is on the front or back cover.

More in link.
Steven Grant also has some of his always-informed commentary on the barcode matter:

Diamond’s logic in this is a little hard to figure out. According to their public statement, the idea is to make it easier for comics retailers to sell your comics, which suggests this is one of those expenses that will pay for itself in increased revenues. Implicit in the statement are two facts not in evidence: are there really a significant enough number of comics shops that even employ a barcode scanner checkout system, and is a barcode on a comic that isn’t otherwise selling much enough to encourage them to order (not to mention sell) significantly enough additional copies to make it worth a publisher’s while to spend the additional money? I can’t imagine a lot of comics shops, which are frequently fairly touch and go financially themselves, are going to want to shell out for a barcode scanner either, unless Diamond is somehow underwriting them but somehow that stretches credulity. I certainly haven’t been in any comic shops that use barcode scanners. If you’re does, please let me know.

While we always enjoy Steven’s commentary, this one seems to miss some of the salient points. Diamond IS attempting to persuade as many shops as possible to use a POS system, making it as affordable as possible. Bribing them, you might say. Implicit in Steven’s commentary is the basic question of “Why is Diamond doing this?” This is another question we surveyed retailers on in Baltimore a few weeks ago, and while some people gave us a straight ahead answer, others were baffled that we’d even ASK such a question: the answer is self evident. It is the way forward. It will make more money for everyone.

The mechanism for thisk, granted, is not entirely transparent. Brian Hibbs wrote a terrific Tiling at Windmills last week which addressed much of this better than we could:

As you probably know, Diamond is on the cusp of offering an “inexpensive” POS solution, with a DM-specific front-end. Some of you will recall the impact on the general level of professionalism that Carol Kalish’s cash register program (Where Marvel provided, at bulk cost, basic cash registers to a whole fleet of stores who had previously been using the “cigar box” method) had on the DM. A lot of it was incremental, but I think a Right Turn can be measured from that event, and I think the impact of POS upon the DM will be ten times greater. While I personally am unconvinced that Diamond’s platform is the best POS solution available to the Direct Market (As most of you know, I’m utterly in love with the MOBY POS system), it’s fairly clear that Diamond’s program will be a major spur for many stores to finally make the leap, because Diamond are the primary, if not sole, source for so many retailers.

Why is POS such a good thing? Several reasons, but the biggest one for our purposes is that no longer will retailers figure out what sells through based on what they WANT to sell through. With a paper and pencil method — a tally system much like a condemned man counting down the days until his execution on a prison wall — retailers may not even pay attention to books that aren’t on their personal radar. With an objective actual sell through system it may turn out that MOUSE GUARD or JOHNNY THE HOMICIDAL MANIAC sells more month in and month out than the latest Civil War or Countdown spinoff. Instead of spending time (as many retailers do) lookingon the shelves of the store to see what they’ve sold out of (a system prone to many lapses of memory) a retailer can see that they are down to one issue of, say Watchmen or Simpsons Comics, and reorder BEFORE they sell out, lessening the chances of a disappointed consumer walking out empty handed. THAT is how it makes more money.

The catch is that good retailers already noted what actually sold in their stores, and crappy retailers may still not pay attention to facts that go against what they want to sell. these retailers are more accurately hobbyists, and that’s fine. The future lies in the thin wedge of stores that are on the cusp. The converts. POS is a tool to convert more stores to selling a wider range of products.

We realize that this short summary may not have convinced the doubters. This is an important topic and it’s one we hope to return to very soon.

While we know readers love our comparative sales charts compiled monthly by Paul O’Brien and Marc-Oliver Frisch, we also know not everyone is a fan.

Several professionals have suggested in the comments section and elsewhere that the charts are a self fulfilling prophecy: retailers see a comic sliding down the charts, decide it’s a goner, start ordering less and sure enough, the book is cancelled.

We took these comments seriously enough to ask several retailers at the recent Diamond summit what they thought of this idea. The notion that we are somehow killing worthy books by running these charts is a distressing one, and we were open to taking action based on the reactions we got. Did retailers, in fact, base their orders on what comics were doing on the charts?

Among the folks we talked to, the answer was a clear no. “I make my decisions based on what sells in my store, not what’s on a chart,” said one, summarizing the general consensus. However, one person did allow that a BAD store might base their orders on something they read on the internet as opposed to actual sales charts. Depending on the number of bad stores, this could be a factor.

This is something that the advent of POS systems MAY (accent MAY) alleviate. We’ll have more on that in a future post, but for now, suffice to say that anything that gives retailers more accurate sell through numbers is a very good thing for publishers at all ends of the spectrum.

And speaking of these controversial sales charts, Marc-Oliver Frisch addresses many of the main complaints against them in this post:

As it frequently does in this context, the question of the usefulness of the available direct market sales data comes up. And not surprisingly, not everyone’s convinced of it - the most vehement criticisms, in this instance, come from creator Brian Wood (DC Comics/Vertigo’s DMZ, Oni Press’ Local). Wood is arguing, in a nutshell, that the direct market sales index information provided by Diamond Comic Distributors, the sales estimates calculated from it by ICv2.com and others, as well as the frequent publication and analysis thereof, are wrong, harmful and - that’s the impression - generally and wholesomely evil.

You should read the entire post for his thoughts.

A couple more people speaking out on Diamond’s new mandatory barcode decree:
§ From the retail perspective, Neptune Comics’ Lisa:

Diamond primarily makes changes to benefit themselves - they have no competition so there is little need to make improvements to make retailers or publishers lives easier. That’s why I believe the new barcode mandate, while it will be helpful to every store that uses a barcode scanner to receive and sell merchandise, was primarily done to help them. And financially it will be tough on small publishers. I think eventually small publishers will start to sell directly to stores much more actively and/or they will be able to find or create some kind of distribution channel other than Diamond that will distribute their comics.

From the small publisher perspective, Scott King

I don’t get why they decided to tell news sites before they contacted the publishers. To find out that we are going to have to spend a couple thousand bucks a year for upc and isbn junk from Newsarama and Pulbishers Weekly is horse crap. It was rude and disrespectful of Diamond to announce it to us in this way. But I guess that’s just how Diamond does things.

The subject of Diamond-carried publishers has been a hot topic of late here on The Beat, and while we hear that official notification is forthcoming to publishers, we thought we’d go to the source and ask Diamond VP of Purchasing Bill Schanes to comment on the roll-out. His response is below.

We did break the news about Diamond requiring bar codes on all products at the Diamond/Alliance Baltimore Retailer Summit last week. As we get final feedback from the beta testing on the Diamond Comic Suite Point Of Sale (POS) system, and more and more retailers put POS systems in their stores (Comic Suite or one of the others offered), without bar codes, any item without a bar code won’t be readable to the growing number of retailers who either already have or will be installing POS systems in the near future.

Diamond is sensitive to our publishers concerns (both large and small) and if one considers that retailers are the front lines of the business to the consumer base, we need to give them the tools they need to run their businesses as best as possible. While we recognize that for some small press publishers this maybe a new unanticipated expense which as a percentage of their overall business could be a challenge, we hope they look at the larger picture, and with bar codes, there is a higher likelihood of more retailers to be willing to bring their comics into their stores because they should recognize that the publisher is doing their part of not only supplying a compelling store, but also assisting the retailers with making the sale as easy as possible to ring up to the consumer.

We also asked Schanes about the Countdown question, but he had no comment.

As reported last week, Diamond will now require bar codes on all the products it carries — a concession to the looming reality of POS systems and barcode scanners. A couple of publishers talked about it on their blogs and speculate that it will lead to even more fragmentation of the industry:

Simon at Icarus points out that it isn’t as simple as it sounds.

I don’t think Diamond in introducing this rule is intentionally whittling down the number of vendors, but there is no doubt this is yet another headache for the many already cash-strapped indy and self publishers. Yet for those who are able to surmount the additional cost (and I think most will), the advantages of an automated system for ordering will work to their benefit; books that retailers would have forgotten otherwise will now have their own trackable sales history.

Elin Winkler of Radio Comix was taken by surprise by the announcement and explains it’s more expensive than you might think:

This will be an unexpected expense (from what I read, a non-refundable $750 registration fee, plus $150 per year renewal), but at least I keep track of news online and found out now, instead of oh, say, January. So, we have some time to start saving up for this. Considering we were also saving up $750 for a ViSA registration for the adult site (NSFW!), that puts us at $1500 we are trying to save up. I could print an issue of Genus for that kind of money.

But, you gotta do what you gotta do. I’m actually more irked that we’ll have to have a big ugly barcode space on the front covers of all our comics. I also worry for publishers who are smaller than us, who will not have the finances or ability to jump through this hoop. I foresee a return to small press comics that are sold more like fanzines, or sold online, bypassing Diamond completely. Which means, sort of how the undergrounds were before the direct market even existed. The comic industry always seems to cycle back to the past.

From where we sit, Winkler’s speculation isn’t that dire: micro publishers are probably better served by alternative means of distribution where they aren’t competing directly with CIVIL CRISIS. It also backs up the idea that the APE-MoCCA Art Fest - SPX circuit is creating a separate market for alternative/art comics, something we’ve been increasingly noticing.

Much more discussion in Winkler’s comment section.

Some online comics sales watchers — and we know there are a LOT of you — have wondered about why COUNTDOWN suddenly surged in the charts this month with the thirteenth issue. Spurge was wondering about it, and DC Sales Chart Vizier Marc-Oliver Frisch wrote in with a startling theory:

Countdown sales in August follow pretty much the same pattern as the sales of 52 a year ago: With the 13th issue, there’s a sudden 20 percent increase, for no apparent reason.

What’s been suggested to me, and what I think makes sense, is that it’s because the first twelve issues of each series were made returnable by DC (provided retailers ordered a specific amount, and at a 10 percent fee per returned copy, mind you), which made Diamond bump off a token 20 percent from the actual numbers for their charts.

In fairness, I’ve only heard it from one source. But it seems reliable, and I’m inclined to believe it, because it fits the numbers precisely.

What is that one source? Well, possibly it’s Marvel’s own communications guy, Jim McCann, who recently posted this on the Bendis board:

Countdown explination: This is the first month that the books were not returnable, so this is the first month you actually see the real Countdown numbers. When books are returnable, Diamond releases the numbers and takes a percentage off. So, these numbers didn’t go *up*, they just didn’t go down any more than the %-off numbers of the month before.

Am I making sense? (sorry, I can’t give what % they take off, but I can tell you it is in double digits…)

Interesting.

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Today mobile payments ranging from mobile banking to mobile credit cards to mobile commerce are very widely used in Asia and Africa, and in selected European markets.

Sometimes it just takes an honest question to bring out honest answers. Writer Marc Bernadin’s frank questioning over the relative sales failure of his Wildstorm mini-series The Highwaymen has got a lot of people talking. perhaps because Bernadin is a seasoned writer in another field (he’s an editor at Entertainment Weekly) and writing comics isn’t his main gig, he’s coming right out and saying what other people are only thinking? At any rate, the responses both in our own comment section and elsewhere have raised more questions than they answer, perhaps.
Jason Michelitch suggests that the book’s failure is more relative than anything else.

Because as far as I can tell, Highwaymen did sell.

What’s that? How can I say that, when as Jim Lee just said, it hasn’t performed sales-wise, and is being cancelled?

Well, let’s take a look at the numbers*.

Highwaymen #1 (June 2007) 9,360
HIghwaymen #2 (July 2007) 6,108 (-35%)
Highwaymen #3 (August 2007) 5,718 (-06%)

Now, sure, if we’re comparing Highwaymen to Batman, the numbers don’t look too great. Like Bernardin said, opened near 10,000 and went over a steep drop from issue one to issue two. But let’s keep in mind: the steep drop-off between first and second issues is more or less an industry axiom. It’s a rare runaway hit that doesn’t suffer a similar drop. And the fact that orders for issue three only dropped a further 6% is, believe it or not, pretty good.

Michelitch compares THE HIGHWAYMEN numbers to other Image miniseries which are considered successes a lower sales levels, a not entirely apt comparison, to be sure, since IMage does have a much lower sales threshhold.

As usual, Valerie D’Orazio comes out and says what everyone is thinking:

What might have been the problem with “Wildstorm?”

Branding.

What IS Wildstorm?

A wing of DC?

A publisher of “Old Imagey” type comics like “Gen 13,” etc?

The edgy publishers of “The Authority?”

Purveyors of fine Alan Moore products?

A prestige artist’s studio?

Vertigo II?

Publisher of licensed product like “World of Warcraft?”

What is Wildstorm?

What does the Wildstorm brand promise me so that I would run into “The Highwaymen” in the store and take a chance on it?

Johanna is similarly blunt.

There is no reason to buy a miniseries any more. If you’re going to do all that promotional work (and they did), then you should be pushing something that will keep selling. That’s true of series — if a reader signs on, there’s another one every month to buy — and books — as long as they’re kept in print, new customers can be found on an ongoing basis — but not of limited-run projects. What’s the point in pushing it when three or five months later, your hard work doesn’t have any more payback?

For his part, Bernadin takes it all in and remains philosophical:

Maybe, finally, the answer to the “why” is: The market just isn’t set up to support a book like this because, ultimately, the readers don’t want a book like this. If they did, there’d be more of them. There’d be more romance books, and more action books, and more war books, and more straight sci-fi books, and more police procedural books. I’d say it was as myopic as TV, but then you’d have to posit a TV landscape where there were only sitcoms set in a bar.

A lot of the answers take the Wildstorm brand itself to task. It’s worth noting that the imprint is in a bit of a state of flux now — Executive Editor Scott Dunbier was removed several months ago, a major personnel move covered only in a so-called “gossip column” and some now removed message board joking. We have several thoughts about this — the first being that Dunbier is a dear friend of ours, and we wish him all the best.

The second is just how wacky comics book “news” is. While the executive shuffle in Hollywood is covered on a minute-by-minute basis by the entertainment trades, no one seems to have even asked about Dunbier’s departure at a Wildstorm panels mere days after the news “got out”. Either comic books are too piddly to really bother with, or the comics press wouldn’t know a juicy story if it bit them on the ass. (I include myself in that, but my friendship with Dunbier more or less recused me from the story.)

At any rate, Ben Abernathy has been promoted to Senior Editor at Wildstorm, and things seem to have settled down a bit or at least be regrouping. Which still doesn’t answer the question of whether anyone wants to read miniseries about new characters. That question seems to go on and on.

ICv2 continues its annual check ins with the heavy hitters of comics with a four part yakfest with Marvel publisher Dan Buckley (with added kibitzing by David Gabriel). Of all the heavy hitters, Buckley has perhaps the least “cult of personality” and the talk puts Marvel’s various forms of outreach in a relatively solid perspective. For instance, Buckley points out that much of Civil War’s success was due to a logline that was easily explainable; the same may not be true of the Skull-based “Secret Invasion”:

We’re not getting into the details of Secret Invasion yet, but we are working very hard with the creators and the editors to make sure that we can distill a simple message that can go out to the mass market. Now, can I guarantee it will be as simple and clean a metaphor as Civil War? Probably not, because I really do think we caught lightning in a bottle with that. As far as the tactical execution and thought process behind Civil War and how we marketed it, I think we also did very good blocking and tackling communication and marketing around it.

There’s also the matter of comics encroachment into once-friendly and now alien retail environments like the chain retailers:

The incremental distribution piece that we’ve worked out this year that’s very product-specific was with Wal-Mart–we did some Spider-Man magazines. It’s also available to everyone else, but Wal-Mart really jumped on it and did very well with it. We have our second Spider-Man magazine out there now–Spider-Man and FF, I think. We’ll probably do about three or four of those a year to help us intercept the Wal-Mart consumer. I tread very warily into the Wal-Mart world, because I want to make sure we get stuff that they feel comfortable with and that can’t harm anything else. They’re taking very specific SKUs that are a good fit for them for a younger demographic read. We’ve been working on Wal-Mart since I got here, and we said no to them a lot and they said no to us a lot, but we found a happy medium with the Spider-Man magazine.

More: Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Journalist/comics scribe Marc Bernadin looks at the sub-10,000 copies sales of his Wildstorm mini THE HIGHWAYMEN and wonders why it sold poorly:

Did we not spread the word adequately? I’d like to think we did. We did oodles of press, interviews with anyone who asked. Had pieces up on Wizard.com, Newsarama, CBR, Silver Bullet, IGN, and Broken Frontier. Some mainstream press, too, in EW and a couple of news syndicates, which got us into a whole host of regional papers. We did in-store signings and convention appearances, a couple of podcast interviews to boot. DC gave the first issue the better part of a page in Previews, and seeded house ads throughout the bulk of its books the month before it came out. It’s possible we could’ve done more—a cross-country tour would’ve been nice, but not in the cards…and we all can’t have Warren’s internet presence, not overnight—but we didn’t let it stumble out there without any support at all.

More intelligent musings in the link.

While the comics medium advances in prestige and material success both in fairly dramatic leaps and encouraging steps , physically moving things around and getting people to reach into their pants pockets, find money and hand it to someone else in exchange for a comic remain the most problematic areas of the business. While the webcomics model does away with all messy papers and trucks and roads for moving things, not everyone is ready to embrace the electronic wonderland. Not everyone will. Or should.

And so we are left with brick and mortar comics shops and bookstores and all the wonders and blunders associated with the same. They are the merchant class. They are not the dreamers and poets. They aren’t the well-coifed actors or the heroic warriors. They’re just the men and women who make money selling us things we want and need. And they have their own wants and needs. Because they deal with numbers all day, these wants and needs are exhaustingly technical and incremental for a non-number cruncher such as myself.
By cosmic coincidence, while Tom Spurgeon was writing his essay on why comics shops matter, I spent two days eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a few hundred of the most enlightened members of the merchant class. While I would be cold-hearted and callous not to say that Tom’s essay was idealistic, heart-felt and included a lot of common sense, it was also, to my mind, almost hopelessly idealistic.

(more…)

Kevin Smith explains he’s closing his west coast comics shop and runs through a gallery of memories:

Part of the charm of those stores, for the fans of the flicks (and, largely, those are the folks who shop there), has always been about the people behind the counter. Walk into the Red Bank Stash, and there’s Walt - the Fan Boy from “Mallrats”, “Chasing Amy”, and “Strike Back.” Walk into the Westwood Stash, and there’s Steve-Dave himself. If the store’s not gonna be staffed by someone who’s not in the flicks… well, there’s little point, for me, in keeping it going.

And while Stash West was always a nice little earner, it’s never been anything close to the earner that the Red Bank Stash is. The east coast Stash sits in the cradle of the View Askewniverse - Monmouth County, New Jersey - so it’s always been the more popular of the two stores. You can visit it en route to see the Quick Stop, or Jack’s Music Shop (from “Chasing Amy”), or any of the other locations we’ve shot the flicks at back home. Westwood Stash never had that going for it. Sure, it had a shitload of props from the flicks on display (like Stash East); but at the Jersey store, you can really immerse yourself in View Askew by taking a five minute ride and buying Gatorade in the actual Quick Stop. If the store was earning twice what the Red Bank store earned, I’d start manning the counter myself. But while Stash West turns a nice profit (albeit a small one: the Westwood rent is double the Red Bank rent), it’s just not worth the effort if one of the key figures in our operation’s not gonna run it anymore.

A couple of people drew our attention to the following quote from Paul Levitz’s interview with Newsarama on DC going with Random House for their book distribution.

“There’s a combination of things that we think are important about this – one, it’s the first time that any of the major US book publishers will be handling any of the major American comic/graphic novel publishers. There’s a neat little alliance inherent in that.”

We hadn’t paid much attention to this at first, but when you call it out like that, it is a little…odd. Viz has been distributed by Simon and Shuster for years. Fantagraphics has a deal with Norton in place. Tokyopop is distributed by Harper Collins. In fact, DC was previously distributed by Warner Books — a major US book publisher. While it is true that Random House is #1 and the deal should yield great things, it’s not quite as revolutionary as it seems at first blush.

MEANWHILE, ever since Time Warner sold off its book biz to Hachette, people have been wondering who would be distributing DC’s book line. Well wonder no more, the winner is book giant Random House:

Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics, said the decision to change its distribution after so many years with Warner Books was spurred by Hachette’s purchase of the Time Warner Book Group and the end of its longtime distribution agreement with Warner. “We’ve had a very positive experience with Time Warner/Hachette, but the sale gave us an opportunity to explore the marketplace. The graphic novel business has changed to an astounding degree over the last 20 years and we decided to look at the market and see what the distribution market is like now and what it might look like in the future.”

Jeff Abraham, president of RHPS, said “We’re thrilled with this new relationship. Most of my staff and sales force have been fans of DC Comics long before we ever thought they’d be a partner.”

In business terms this is Brangelina — the biggest and deepest backlist in the biz coupled with the marketing power of Random House should equal continuing ka-ching for all involved.

Newsarama hasmore:

NRAMA: But in terms of the book trade, are there large outlets left that aren’t carrying graphic novels, or are you really looking at getting say, Borders and Barnes & Noble to stock a wider selection of the DC trade catalog? PL: If you look at the dynamic of the business versus book publishing in general, graphic novels succeed today disproportionately well with Amazon, disproportionately well with the larger books changes, and disproportionately more poorly with the independent bookstores, and practically not at all for anybody in the mass side of book distribution. There’s a little bit there, where a couple of the manga publishers have succeeded in from time to time, and some one-off things that many of us have done over the years, but if you weighted us against a book publisher of similar size, you would say that we’re inordinately concentrated in our top five to ten major customers.

Keep an eye on: As Random House has its own sales team in place, will this mean any downsizing in DC’s in-house team?

For those of you who haven’t been glued to the computer, there has been a bit of a comment war raging here on the Beat in the wake of Eric Reynolds’ report of a less-than-up to date comics shop. A frequent argument posited by those outraged is that folks like Reynolds are being completely irrational in their demands that struggling comics shops carry material that no one wants to read like Chris Ware and Peanuts. While this argument seems logical on the face of it, is it really true that all people want to read is Marvel and DC?

We noticed that CBR’s John Mayo just posted his monthly sales analysis of the Diamond figures. While not as chatty as the sales charts supplied by Marc Oliver Frisch and Paul O’Brien here at the Beat, these charts are worth looking at for another take on the raw data. Mayo also supplied estimated sales figures for all 100 graphic novels on the Diamond charts, and he also keeps a running total of sales to date. We thought it would be interesting to look at the top 20 books on the charts based on their sales to date. It’s completely unscientific (these are not the top 20 books for the year just the ones that charted in July) but no more so than all the anecdotal evidence everyone has been throwing around in the comments. We’ve made a cunning little table, calculated the dollar totals, and highlighted the superhero books in yellow. (Click for a readable version.)

What’s immediately interesting is that only 8 of the books on the chart are superhero books. Transformers are a gray area, admittedly, but if you include them, it’s still only 10 or 50%. (And, honestly, The Boys is about as much a superhero book as BLADES OF GLORY is a sequel to ICE CASTLES, but it certainly trades on the superhero audience so it stays in the yellow.)

Far from being dominated by Marvel and DC, the chart includes titles from Image, Tokyopop, IDW, Dynamite and even Gemstone. One of DC’s books isn’t even superhero — it’s manga. And the titles that dominate the chart? WALKING DEAD and FABLES. Marvel’s tally includes ANITA BLAKE, which is already closing on six figures in print (through both channels.)

Like we said, this isn’t completely scientific. These are total estimated sales, and NOT, as far as we can make out, the 2007 sales to date. But we look at the charts enough to know that a list of actual year-to-date bestsellers would be just as diverse.

DIVERSE.

Say it with us.

DIVERSE.

We are quite sympathetic to the very real plight of underfunded comics shops that live on tiny margins. They cannot afford to take a flyer on ordering 20 copies of the Comics Journal. They need to move books. But if this chart is any indication, diversification is a way to do just that.

Okay, let the comment storm begin.

UPDATE: John Mayo of ComicBookPage.net was kind enough to supply the ACTUAL best sellers for 2007 through July which I’ve included as a clipping once again. (Sorry my html isn’t good enough to post it as a table.)

OOPS LIST DELETED PENDING NEGOTIATIONS

This list is MUCH more Marvel-centric than the inaccurate one posted above — only 7 books are non-superhero. It’s still a not insignificant showing, however. At least from where I sit.

Aside: I just don’t get all the Fantagraphics hate in the comments. Maybe it’s just because I see all their books at the office, but stuff like I SHALL DESTROY ALL CIVILIZED PLANETS, Krazy Kat, Popeye, HOUSE, PERCY GLOOM, Love and Rockets repackaging, the Ignatz Line, BLAB!, Monte Beachamps new Devil postcard book — it’s not for everyone, but the quality speaks for itself and hardly “drivel.”

ALSO OF NOTE: PW’s monthly graphic novel bestseller listing, which takes into account BOTH Bookscan and DM numbers is also out this week.

Mild-mannered Chris Butcher chimes in on Eric Reynolds’ adventures in retailing:

Well of course! I mean, just visit the comic book store in question’s website! Totally looks like a thriving, well-run establishment to me. That’s totally the ASSUMPTION that I would make, if it came down to Eric Reynolds (20+ years in the comics industry ) versus a store owner that didn’t know Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly still published comics, that store is obviously thriving. And knowledgable too, apparently. Just like I wouldn’t expect a store with a luggage department to have the luggage I was looking for, or the SHOE INSOLE DISPLAY to have only one shoe insole for men amongst 30+ for women, or for the employees to know about their product, I think it’s fucking snobbish to expect a comic book store to carry comic books I want to buy, or to at least know about comic books.

Chris also chides us for not chiming in more, which sadly we didn’t have time to do at the moment of posting. Suffice to say that the idea of a comics shop that doesn’t know Fantagraphics and D&Q are “still in business” seems to speak, at the very least, of a very poor product knowledge. While not all small retail establishments can carry as wide a mix of products as every publisher might hope, nowadays, limiting yourself to just the DC-Marvel-verse is limiting the kind of customers you will draw. It’s true. See just referenced Paul Levitz interview.

Via Flog Reynolds and wife check out a comics shop called 4 K R A Z Y K A T Z in Pullman:

Sadly, they didn’t have a single independent comic at all, despite a captive and diverse student population (none of which were actually in the store when I visited) and plenty of empty space in the store. Their “mature readers” section amounted to a copy of WATCHMEN and a few Vertigo comics. The guy behind the counter could see my dissatisfaction, and asked, “Can I help you find anything?” I told him I was looking for indie comics, stuff like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly publishes. “Are they still around?” he asked. I assured him they were and then told me, wait, he might have something I want, it was a comic he’d mistakenly received from Diamond. He then went flipping through the back issue bins and pulled out a single copy of Gilbert Hernandez’s SPEAK OF THE DEVIL #1 from Dark Horse. Mind you, this is a brand new comic, which he immediately filed in a back issue bin. What a fucking tool. And this is a comic book shop in a college town, IN OUR HOME STATE, AND NAMED AFTER A COMIC STRIP THAT FANTAGRAPHICS PUBLISHES. And yet the owner (yes, he mentioned to me that he was the owner) didn’t even know we were still in business despite the fact that we solicit books and comics every single month in the very catalog he orders from. And people wonder why the direct market often seems utterly doomed.

ringtones through bluetooth online

Even with this information, the State of California recently passed ringtone uploader i870 phone law that requires drivers over the age of 18 to use a hands-free device while using the phone in the car.

PR from the new reaielrs organization akes on the scourge of VARIANT COVERS:

ComicsPRO, the direct market’s retailer trade and advocacy group, has released its first official position paper, detailing the group’s desire for positive changes with the solicitation and use of variant covers on comic books.

The opinion paper, which was vetted by ComicsPRO’s position paper committee and then voted on by retailer members, passed with a resounding 90% majority.

“Given the diverse stores, expectations, needs of the individual stores involved, and the overwhelming vote in favor of this position paper, I think it is pretty clear this is an important topic our suppliers should pay close attention to,” said Brian Hibbs, owner of San Francisco’s Comix Experience, and chair of the ComicsPRO’s position paper committee.

Carr D’Angelo, owner of Earth-2 Comics in Sherman Oaks CA added “Every retailer deals with variant covers in very individual ways. This position paper passed because it asks publishers to operate in a way that allows each retailer to make the choices best for their stores. Divergent points of view came together in one voice and that’s what ComicsPRO is all about.”

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The rumblings of the Cold Cut sell-off seem to have uncovered a rift of disquiet among the Guardians. In some cases it’s downright dissent. As usual, Tom was the first to chart the anomaly:

My basic thesis is that despite measurable gains in the specialty Direct Market, the emergence of a traditional book market and even signs of a rapidly developing on-line market, a lot of the celebrated growth isn’t wholly reflected in a beneficial way where it deserves to go most: the creators who make the comics, and those on the front lines of putting them into people’s hands.

Indeed, mirroring the widening haves and have-nots economic distribution of America itself, the direct sales market, despite this month’s epic surge in graphic novel sales, is still a vastly misshapen beast with a huge head reeling atop a shrunken body, as this month’s Market Shares show:

Publisher Comics, Magazines, & GNs Dollar Share Comics, Magazines, & GNs Unit Share
MARVEL COMICS 43.62% 48.42%
DC COMICS 27.02% 28.57%
DARK HORSE COMICS 6.73% 4.80%
IMAGE COMICS 4.42% 4.79%
IDW PUBLISHING 2.54% 1 .96%
VIZ MEDIA 1.95% 1.02%
DYNAMIC FORCES 1.73% 2.05%
TOKYOPOP 1.13% 0.50%
WIZARD ENTERTAINMENT 0.96% 0.68%
DEVILS DUE PUBLISHING 0.83% 0.87%
AVATAR PRESS INC 0.64% 0.82%
RANDOM HOUSE 0.57% 0.20%
GEMSTONE PUBLISHING 0.49% 0.11%
FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS 0.49% 0.19%
ARCHIE 0.42% 0.56%
A. D. VISION 0.38% 0.15%
DMP 0.34% 0.11%
VIRGIN COMICS LLC 0.33% 0.25%
ASPEN MLT INC 0.31% 0.47%
BONGO COMICS 0.26% 0.30%
Other Non-Top 20 4.83% 3.18%

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