START
BY DAVE POTTER

---

The NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament recently concluded, and the high point for me was watching my alma mater's basketball team (The Fighting Trojans of the University of Southern California) storm through the tournament field to be one of the last eight teams alive. This was all the more impressive when you consider that USC was unranked heading into the tournament, and indeed, many basketball pundits considered them lucky to have made it in at all.

One of the great stories that came out of the tournament was one of the motivational tools USC head coach Henry Bibby used with the team. He asked them, at the beginning of the tournament, to give up something for the playoff period as a symbol of commitment to teammates, the program, and the university. With each win, he asked them to give up something else as well. As the team kept winning, it built up the idea that commitment and sacrifice brings results.

No, this isn't ESPN.com or CNNSI.com. This is still SAVANT, and still about comics, not sports. But stay with that concept for a second-- giving up something important to you as part of commitment to a larger goal. It's an important idea. I'm going to shift gears for a second and then come back to it.

I have met an amazing number of people since SAVANT launched about a year ago. All of them are remarkable people who all have tremendous ideas on how to save the comics industry. And they even have something in common.

Not one of their visions to save the industry matches. Sure there's overlap and areas of agreement. But everyone has their own vision of the problems and ultimate solutions to those problems. Hell, Alec, Matt and I don't agree on everything.

That kind of disparity is great for a publication like SAVANT-- there's no shortage of topics or viewpoints to be discussed. But in terms of coalescing as a group around a unified vision-- well, it ain't going to happen. But it doesn't really need to. Because there is a filter that sort good ideas from bad ideas--the marketplace. All of us, really, since we comprise that marketplace.

That's why we push the idea of voting with your wallet. Its not just about supporting a creator or character or company or shop or whatever you want to support. It's about supporting an idea. Economic Darwinism, a culling of the good from the bad.

And since everyone has different viewpoints, it means that invariably, people are going to have viewpoints that are not supported by the marketplace. Everybody's going to be wrong about something. So of those ideas that you hold dear and are passionate about, I ask: What are you prepared to give up? Are you prepared to walk away from your idea if it doesn't work and work on others that do to keep the cause alive?

Because holding on to an idea that the marketplace has doomed-- look, would you grab onto the heavy object or the buoyant object if your ship just sank?

Now, I'll admit that ideas can fail in the marketplace for reasons not related to whether or not it's inherently a good or bad idea. Good ideas can fail. They can also be mistimed or not executed properly. But it still means that they were ideas that didn't work, for whatever reason. And we need to focus on the ideas that do work for right now, get as many of them out there as we can, and after that, maybe look back and try some "noble failures" again, if the timing or execution can be improved. As an example, the other day I got involved in a conversation about a comic shop that had a "minimum take" to open a pull list. One person was adamant in their opinion that such a policy was tantamount to the death knell of the retail comics industry. Honestly, one got the impression that any store fascist enough to dictate terms to their customers ought not just lose their customers, but be firebombed and eradicated from the face of the earth.

Now, God knows I am the first person to go after stupid retailers and stupid retail policies. But the idea of a minimum take is not an uncommon one, and while I understand that it is a barrier to a casual reader, that's actually its intent. Most stores I know have the policy because all too often that casual reader never picks up the contents of their pull box, thus leaving the store with merchandise they probably wouldn't have ordered if not for this flaky customer. It protects the retailer from the flaky customer. It's a risk mitigation tool.

And if the marketplace thought it was a bullshit idea, stores would have lost customers in droves across the country. But they didn't (at least not from that). And while I freely concede that there may be areas of the country (or world) where that kind of retail strategy doesn't work, there are certainly others where it does. One size does not fit all. If we start acting as though it will, and not let local comic shops and markets make these determinations for themselves.

And when confronted with these facts and observations, the person just wouldn't let it go. He wouldn't even admit that one size doesn't fit all. He put himself, and being right, above The Cause. And thus, he showed his lack of commitment to The Cause.

We have to be ready to move on. It sounds simple, but it's not. Nobody likes to be wrong. No one wants to believe that their thoughts are not that deep and that no one agrees with them. But it's vital for us to understand it.

Otherwise, we'll never move forward. We'll just keep fighting battles that have already been fought over and over again, sacrificing The Cause in an attempt to prove that our ideas are correct. Individual ideas and egos can never be superior to The Cause.

That was also Coach Bibby's lesson to his team. And it worked. It's a simple sacrifice to prove your commitment to Saving Comics: Be prepared to admit your ideas might be wrong.

---
DOWNLOAD CURRENT ISSUE:
---