lighthouse

I think more than anything they didn’t want to release comics under their own banner with print runs as low as these would have been. But they didn’t want to abandon the story arcs unfinished either. They’ve had a few weeks to see how retailers are slashing and burning at FOC time and it’s the third tier titles getting the sharpest axe. My shop is top 20% in Marvel accounts and I had 5 total subs for those three titles combined. In better times I might have ordered 25-35 copies total for those titles. (Perhaps slightly higher if there was a 1-in-25 cover a sub wanted to preorder). But my last combined FOC order was for those 3 titles was 8 total copies. Rather than viewing this as a test of digital sales I view it as Marvel honoring its commitment to writer and artist that they’d at least get to see their story “published”.

Only 106 months off on that 100 Bullets

DCBS isn’t the new DC distributor. Lunar is. Common ownership but separate companies. Just like Kay Jewelers, Zales, and Jared are all owned by the same owners. Just like Hot Topic and Staples are owned by the same people. Just like GEICO and Dairy Queen. DCBS is the largest Diamond account for Marvel product. They’ll be the largest DC account for Lunar. It’s an easy tinfoil hat to put on. And it may even fit. But they are two separate companies.

A few back from Sarasota today. These are (almost) all from that collection of 1995-1997 newsstands we picked up just before Covid.

I disagree with you here. It wouldn’t benefit DCBS or Midtown to see a widespread closing of comic shops. They might benefit if specific shops with a heavy online presence closed. But local comic shops create new customers and grow the size of the market, which feeds new customers to internet retailers. If the national LCS count dropped from 2700 to 1350 and stayed there, there would be lots of titles (and a few publishers) that would no longer be viable because the economies of scale would be gone. Midtown and DCBS might see their share of that smaller pie go up. But I’m confident they do better the larger the overall market is.

No doubt. I was chatting with a store owner friend of mine during lockdown and we swapped 2019 sales counts on a few items. The differences were astounding. Last year I sold: 37 copies of Infinity Gauntlet TP 71 copies of My Hero Academia v1 21 copies of Killing Joke HC 29 copies of Saga v1 TP 3 copies of Daredevil Guardian Devil TP He’d sold half again as many My Hero and Killing Joke, less than half as many Infinity Gauntlet or Saga, and five times as many of Guardian Devil. Some of it is about what you push. But towns are just different. Even beyond the standard “East Coast loves DC, everyone else prefers Marvel” differences. I happen to be in a town where no one buys Justice League but everyone loves Nightwing. Could be a function of long ago stores here and what they handsold to people. Or something else. But Justice League doesn’t sell at all here from any time period. Silver, Bronze, 80s, Morrison, Current. None of it sells. Nightwing I can’t keep in stock.

Street dates are an on-or-after proposition. We have to abide by them for lots of product we receive in advance (Comics, Funkos, Magic, etc). Shipping delays are common. No one would be able to enforce an “on” date.

Of course. And we frequently direct regular customers TO Amazon if we are out of stock on something and they need it quickly, just as we direct regular customers to mycomicshop if we don't have a particular back issue they need. We are happy to check the in-stock status elsewhere to find customers what they are looking for. It's been a Miracle On 34th Street approach since day one. Are there a percentage of customers purely motivated by price? I don't doubt it. But the presence or knowledge of a cheaper option isn't the automatic death knell many folks assume.

I don't believe any such thing. In any industry there are businesses that choose to compete on price rather than on service, selection, or any other factor. And in any industry there are businesses subject to local market factors that would not apply universally (local unemployment higher or lower than average, local market oversaturated or undersaturated in that industry, etc). But the common misperception overstates the price sensitivity of a typical consumer. We don't all drive the cheapest cars, wear the cheapest clothes, eat the cheapest food, visit the cheapest dentist, use the cheapest cell phone, get the cheapest haircut, drink the cheapest beer, rent the cheapest apartment, sit in the cheapest seats at an event, or hire the cheapest plumber. Consumers happily pay more all the time if their consumption experience brings them happiness.

People grossly overestimate how price sensitive consumers are. My customers are well aware that every single item in my store (other than wall books) can be instantly purchased cheaper online. They aren’t stupid. They know that they can get discounts buying from Amazon or Midtown or any number of other online options. They don’t care. I charge full price for new comics. I charge full price for trades and hardcovers. I charge full price for statues, figures, Funkos, t-shirts, all of it. We do have a rewards program (and automatic discounts for first responders, educators, and active duty military). But we charge full retail. Customers don’t care because we provide great customer service. Employees are well compensated (we start part time employees at $4 over minimum with profit sharing) and are specifically hired for customer service attitude. The store smells good (something mentioned in several reviews). It’s quiet with pleasant music. We shut down spoilers and gatekeeping immediately. My customers would rather pay full price and get an outstanding shopping experience than chase discounts. Just like the customers of Nordstrom or REI or Chik-Fil-A or H-E-B or Trader Joe’s (all among the companies we emulate when defining who we are as a comic shop). I’m not in the comic business. I’m in the customer service business, and just happen to sell comics.

I’ve mentioned this several times. But as a retailer I don’t hate digital. My shop is very family friendly. Very LGBT friendly. Judgment free. You love My Little Pony? So do we. Here’s our section of MLP comics and I’ll be happy to talk the Mane 6 with you. You think comics as a medium died when Coletta stopped inking? No worries, let’s geek out on some Kirby Thors I’ve got right over here. You want a great LGBT story with BDSM themes? Got you covered. You’re gonna love Sunstone. I can’t tell you how many customers bought their first printed comic from me that had already fallen in love with comics digitally. It’s dozens and dozens. Might be hundreds by now. Folks who see Moon Knight memes trying to collect his money from Dracula on Reddit or Imgur and come to my shop to get the real thing. Folks who read Ultimate X-Men 41 on Imgur (probably the most digitally shared Wolverine story of all time) and realized comics aren’t what they thought they were. Good brick and mortar shops benefit from digital.

Companies like IDW and Boom have been profitable and growing the last several years. Selling print comics. With none of the built in advantages DC has with two of the most recognized characters in the history of fiction. They’ve been taking market share from DC for three years now (Marvel is essentially unchanged) because they’ve been publishing stories worth reading. 83% of my subscription customers do not subscribe to a single DC title. Those folks will be completely unaffected if DC ceases print publication. If anything there will be more shelf space available for the horror and sci-fi and fantasy and robot and crime and thriller and licensed-TV/movie comics they love to read. If DC can’t sell floppies profitably with Superman and Batman in their stable, when Boom and IDW can? That says a lot more about DC than it does about the direct market.

This is not the case. I see around 26% of shelf sales the first week. Weeks 2-4 range around 10-12% each. Weeks 5-8 around 6% each. Weeks 9-12 around 3% each. Less than 10% of my subscription customers come in consistently on Wednesdays. The few that do are disproportionately higher tickets as you would expect. But my most common subscriber transaction is a customer who comes in every 2-3 weeks on a day convenient to them, who then supplements their pull with books off the rack that came out in the last 2-3 months. I have lots and lots of “only comes in on Friday” or “only comes in on Sunday” or “only comes in on Thursday evenings” etc customers. The only DC customers I will miss by not shelving my books on Tuesday are flippers.

To clear up a few misconceptions from earlier in the thread... There aren’t 1400 comic shops in North America. Current (pre Covid 19) number is over 2700. And at least 80% of them were closed to browsing in April. Curbside service is a fine model if you’re driving to a shop to buy a copy of Infinity Gauntlet, turning around, and going home. But it isn’t “being open for business”. The contract between DC and Diamond had its expiration date coming and needed to be renewed. This wasn’t a “Diamond decided to pay us late, quick find a different option” decision. Everyone points at Midtown, but for the record DCBS is actually a bigger Diamond customer. Titles were canceled and delayed by other publishers because that’s what we asked them to do. Publishers reached out to retailers and asked what they could best do to support their retail partners. Did we want bigger discounts, more returnability, fewer titles, something else? They asked. And we told them. Our best route to ordering lots of product from them in 2021 and seeing nice profits for everyone next year was for them to publish fewer books during the summer of 2020. We gave them that feedback. And every publisher other than DC said if that’s what you need, that’s what we will do. (Several also gave large discounts and/or returnability. Marvel gave my shop a backdated discount that amounted to a $2,000 reduction in my cost.) I don’t love Diamond. Being a small business owner who is also a de facto Diamond employee has never sat right. But Diamond’s infrastructure is the product of decades of improvement and it works really really really well. My damages most weeks are so small it’s not worth the time to even report them for replacement. Diamond introduced new shipping boxes just before Covid that have no bottom seam and allow comics to be unpacked from flat stacks rather than reaching in, grabbing a chunk and pulling them out (adding bends to the books in the process). Diamond maintains a dozen drop points around the country to reduce shipping costs, trucking full trailers across the country and only using UPS for the final 1-2 days of the journey. If you’re lucky enough to be in a drop point city your freight charges are often under 2% of retail. Even folks at the perimeter of the system rarely see a shipment with freight charges over 6% of retail. (I got to see the full impact of the difference last week as we had a weekly shipment handled by UPS from the point of origin and my freight charges were 13% of retail). Are DCBS and Midtown scaled to take on 2700 new accounts with a median volume of $1200-1500 in retail product week in and week out? What are the chances that two competing distributors simultaneously both built out enough capacity to smoothly transition to taking on that kind of volume? I suspect Donut is right. And this is a stopgap measure on the road to ceasing print. I suspect that the powers that be decided they wanted to end print sometime in the next 12-18 months and rather than re-up on a new longterm deal with Diamond they are using Midtown and DCBS while they run out the string. I strongly doubt they gave Midtown the discount they used to give Diamond. Midtown most likely offered to meet them in the middle, letting DC keep a larger share of the revenue. That’s the sort of choice you make when you’re looking for short term profits rather than long term stability. Making major announcements that take effect the next business day isn’t something a longterm partner does. If your employer decided they were going to rearrange the office plan and your office was moving to another floor, would it affect your opinion of them if they didn’t tell you until Friday morning that it was happening Monday?

To give a concrete example of the lack of thought from DC lately: Diamond has distributed statues and action figures for DC for decades. These items are a significant component of most comic shops’ aggregate spending with DC (which determines the discount received on periodicals). Nowhere in the email from DC today are statues and figures addressed. Retailers are directed to two new distributors for floppies and trades, or to PRH for trades. No mention is made anywhere of statues that are FOC’d six months ahead of shipment.

I’ve tried to let this simmer for most of a day. But mostly I’m disappointed in DC. They’ve been sending out emails like a petulant child for weeks and have been less and less a partner since March. Every single other publisher has pulled together and made it clear that all of us, Publishers-Distributors-Retailers, are links in a chain between creators and the customers who love their work. Either all of us succeed or none of us do. Marvel, Image, IDW, Boom, Dynamite, Valiant, Aspen, Aftershock, Titan, Oni Press, you name it. All of them in the huddle with us. One team. Together. And here’s DC sending emails that are the equivalent of a football player at the podium in the post-game saying “man we could have won if our quarterback didn’t suck”. I don’t care whether DC and Diamond ended their relationship. You need to make a business decision as a multi-billion-dollar company, you make it. But no sophomore marketing major would have approved the emails DC has been sending out. I can’t believe there are functioning adults involved in keeping them on brand right now. You’re the publisher of freaking Superman. Act like it. When I opened my current shop a few years ago we had a standing policy that I would order at least two shelf copies of every Marvel and DC book no matter how badly it was selling, and at least one shelf copy of every title from Image, IDW, Valiant, and Boom. I’ve wasted money every month on supporting dreg DC monthlies and miniseries. But no more. I’ll pick out the top 10-12 DC books each month and those will be the only ones I shelve. Currently my DC recent releases take up 66 slots on the rack (out of around 300 total). They’ll get 12 going forward. And the other 54 slots can go to other publishers. I’ll fill any subscriber orders. But I’ll spend my shelf dollars with publishers that are partners. And no, DC, I’m not putting out your books on Tuesdays. They’re going out on Wednesday with everyone else. Your new releases represented 8.4% of my shop’s revenue last year. I’m not designating a special day every week just for you.

Regarding the Marvel Action Avengers 10, Diamond’s shipping has been really wonky since the restart. I’ve had books arrive two weeks apart (cover C one week, cover A the next week, cover B the week after that). Specifically for Yellow Hulk there was a gap between the weeks I got my regular and incentive. You used to be able to judge scarcity of a book based on how quickly it heated up on eBay because the presumption was every shop got their books at the same time and if $30 buyers were available, the sellers would show up until you knew where real demand was. That is not the case in these first few weeks of relaunch. Books may heat up for a week or two and then see a flood as other shops receive their own copies. On an unrelated note, expect a flood of previously hot variants from the last 12-15 months arriving in the next couple weeks at an eBay near you. Marvel started their annual variant sale and last Thursday featured a ton of 1 in 200, 1 in 100, 1 in 50 variants at a buck a piece. All those Marvel Tales 1 in 50 Bartel variants that used to be incredibly scarce? They were on there. Some quick-to-the-trigger dealers now have more copies of some variants than were previously in the wild. The sale is still running and there’s still some nice 1 in 25s and whatnot. But the sharks ate the best meat a week ago.

I haven’t been able to keep any Jurassic Park comics in the shop for over a year now. Doesn’t matter if I slap $8 price stickers on them they all move.

I sent off a few samples from that big newsstand collection (some Marvel, some DC, some Image). Here were the 4 Image books shipped back to me today.

Well and it makes it easier to get a designation on the label, since "newsstand edition" alone often isn't enough, but "price variant" is.

It’s not in line with your handle. There’s a spot of gloss loss in the center of the cover. This one from same box is probably 9.4 though. Also one I hadn’t seen. And also a price variant. Both from same collection. Guy bought most of his stuff direct. But a few interesting newsstands.

Not one I’d personally come across before. And counts as a price variant.

That's still one of my favorite board moments. And somehow I went all the way past "way past starting to dislike you" to " @THE_BEYONDER is my homeboy." Probably because he was such a good sport about it. And in the time of Bug, and Khaos, and Hammer, and JC, that was positively group-huggy.

Officially yes. But it's going to be a VERY small shipment, as the DC stuff didn't reach Diamond in time and will instead arrive with the May 27th stuff.