RETAIL // 10.17.02

THE TRAIN NOW ARRIVING
By Alasdair Stuart

Certain phrases are guaranteed to send people in my line of work into spasm. Near the top of the list are phrases that retailers often encounter when dealing with Diamond, the primary distribution company for comic books:

And my personal favourite:

Comic retailing is often like trying to shoot fish in a barrel from about a mile away. As we're required to order two months ahead of time, we find ourselves constantly having to struggle through three hundred pages of PREVIEWS, assembling an order like a jigsaw puzzle.

A good case in point is the upcoming QUEEN AND COUNTRY-DECLASSIFIED mini-series. It's not Q AND C itself, but it's directly related to it so we naturally have to match orders with QUEEN AND COUNTRY. On top of that though, it's a mini-series which is a fantastic jumping on point for QUEEN AND COUNTRY, so we'd better order above Q AND C numbers slightly so we have copies on the shelf to recommend to people. But not too many more because then we can't afford to pick up something else, or we might end up not getting enough of something else and so on and so forth.

Fish. Barrel. Now go stand waaaaaaaaaay over there.

It's actually not that bad a process for us, and oddly quite a lot of fun. PREVIEWS-the catalogue retailers use to order products from Diamond--is very far from perfect but it's also one of the most dissected pieces of comic industry press out there. Previewsreview.com, orderingcomics.com and THINGS TO COME at ninthart.com are just three of the places dedicated to pulling the bloody thing apart and finding out what's good and what's blasphemously dreadful. It's not an easy process, but there's a lot of satisfaction in getting to the end of it and knowing that you've done it right. You get your orders in on time, tell people that the books are coming and then wait two odd months and there they are.

In theory.

When I was just starting out, the Cliffhanger imprint was in the process of getting off the ground. At the time, it looked like a great idea, three wildly disparate series run by talented creators that looked like nothing else out there. Bear in mind, a lot of what Cliffhanger did pre-dated some fairly major market changes by a good couple of years. CRIMSON proved that the apparent oxymoron of near-all ages horror could be done and BATTLECHASERS and DANGER GIRL did halfway decent jobs of reminding the buying public that things other than spandex were not to be feared. They didn't do a great job, and to my mind they were dull comics, but they raised the profile of genres other than superheroes and if nothing else, that's a very good thing,

However, the problems arose when they failed to ship again and again and again. It was especially painful to watch CRIMSON merrily chugging through it's two years of continuity pretty much on time, whilst BATTLECHASERS and DANGER GIRL, for various reasons, limped to a quarter of that material in at least as much time.

The reasons behind those delays have not only been dissected to the point of nausea but also aren't the reason behind this column. Late comics in general are a bugbear of the industry, and hopefully after reading this you'll understand why..

What we retailers caught with DANGER GIRL and BATTLECHASERS was a constant line of questioning from our customers. Every Thursday, the new books would come in (EDITOR'S NOTE: In the United Kingdom, Thursday is new comics day, as opposed to the Wednesday new comics day we have in the US) and we'd have people come in and ask about the Cliffhanger titles. And every week, we'd have to tell them that we didn't know when they'd be shipping, Diamond didn't know when they'd be shipping but as soon as Diamond knew and told us, we'd let them know.

Most people took this with good grace and a fair few stuck around and bought something else. However, there were some who were less than happy and didn't hesitate to take it out on us. We are the retailers; we are, in the eyes of these customers, THE INDUSTRY given glasses and vocal chords and therefore we clearly knew where these books were at, were hiding them and would only put them out when we were good and ready.

Obviously this wasn't the case. Equally obviously these people had some communications problems but the fact remained that in their eyes we were failing to do our job. They came to us to buy comics and if the comics weren't there for them to buy, well, whose fault was that?

Yours truly.

Ultimately, two things happened. Some DANGER GIRL and BATTLECHASERS customers simply kept the titles on their standing orders, were pleased to see them when they turned up and bought other stuff when they didn't. Others simply cancelled their standing orders and we never saw them again. Others still set up mail orders for the books and, eight months later when the next issue finally shipped, had moved and not bothered to tell us. The bottom line is, we lost customers over this one and we never got them back.

At the time, I could cheerfully have throttled those concerned but with hindsight, I can see the situation was a little more complex than it first looked. The problem wasn't so much that the books were late but that that they were beneath our radar. We had no idea where they were, neither did Diamond and neither did the publishers. More importantly, no one further up the chain of command thought to tell anyone lower down what to expect. End result? No information travels anywhere, and paying customers leave never to return.

Thankfully, the situation's very different now. A few years down the line, we're a lot more switched on and the lines of communication are a lot more open. As a result, from our side of things, customers have become a great deal more forgiving. Last year, when a slew of creators were hit by illnesses, there was genuine concern amongst our customers and an unspoken acknowledgement that the situation was beyond anyone's control. When faced with a newborn baby, bereavement, long lasting illness or a dozen other things, it's impossible to begrudge anybody time off. Life, as the greetings card says, is what happens when you're making other plans and not one of our customers has a problem with that.

So from that side of things, lines of communication have improved immeasurably. Similarly, Diamond do a fantastic job of letting us know when books are expected in the local warehouse which is useful as comic companies seem to be having some difficulty on that score.

The line between comic publisher and retailer is arguably the most important line of communication there is, and one which it's in everyone's interests to keep OPEN. They make the product which we sell, therefore we rely on them for stock and livelihood and they rely on us for sales and, by extension, livelihood. Again, a discussion of the merits or lack thereof of the Direct Market is not the point here, what is the point is that this is how the system works:

COMIC PUBLISHER
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RETAILER
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CUSTOMER

We're the NCOs of the business and as a result, we need to know what's going on. And recently, that's not been happening.

DARK KNIGHT RETURNS Issue 3 is a prime example. This was DC's flagship event for the year, if not the last few years. Miller back on the book that made him famous, his original DARK KNIGHT is still quoted as one of the best stories of all time, rightly or wrongly. This is the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Elvis on the same damn stage. We were shown sketches a good year ahead of time, DC rolled out a different publication schedule for it, promoted it left right and centre and…

Issue 3 was late.

Not only was issue 3 late, but no one could tell us why. This was a series that had people coming through the doors that hadn't set foot in a comic shop since…well, the first DARK KNIGHT series, creating a wave of customers who, for us, were a God given opportunity. Ninety percent left with standing orders for the book, eighty percent for DK2 and other things. This, in my neck of the woods, worked.

And almost all the momentum went out of it once issue three was delayed. People stopped coming in, stopped asking about it. We even stopped asking about it when despite phone calls to Diamond and frantic searching of the best news sites, the best we could get was "It'll be worth it when it arrives."

Which wasn't nearly good enough. To be left dangling on a book of this magnitude was farcical. If you've had the Beatles and the Stones on stage, the last thing you want to do is tell the audience that Elvis will be a few months late but he'll be worth it when he turns up. If you do, some people will stay, some people will ask for their money back and others will just leave.

Which is what we got. The biggest thing to come out of DC was stalled by a disappearing publication schedule and an almost perfunctory air to the updates from DC on it's status. Fair enough the book was made returnable and fair enough there was no clear publishing date but if that's the case, then SAY SO. By the time the date was announced, we'd lost customers because of the disorganization, plain and simple.

Now in all fairness to DC, once they had a date the publicized it and stuck to it. But leading up to that moment (which was a couple months in coming), they seemed unable or unwilling to admit what the problem was with the book. And that created the informational vacuum that annoyed customers. With ASTRO CITY, its an easy thing to explain that Busiek was experiencing an illness delaying his work on the title. That satisfied customers. But with DK2 #3, we couldn't even give that simple explanation, which infinitely better than just having to say "We don't know. And I don't think DC knows, either."

DK2 was a prime example of this due to it's status as an 'event' but it's happening elsewhere too. At time of writing, LIBERTY MEADOWS 27, one of our most pre-ordered titles, is three weeks late in getting to England and counting. It's been released in the States and parts of Europe just not here. Apparently it's due in this week, a piece of information I found out after spending two days checking in with Diamond on it's status.

This then, is the problem with late books, the lack of information. It doesn't matter if something's late if we know when it's coming. Get that information to the retailers, or even an acknowledgement that there is no clear shipping date but we'll be told when there is, and everyone goes home happy. The information's out in the public domain, the retailers can tell the customers and the customers can come in when the book does arrive and buy the damn thing. That way, everyone goes home happy. Because information is oxygen in my job, and some days I can barely breathe.