mrgraves

May 22, 2012 10:44 pm "A bunch of new TV shows will be on the air next fall; which ones are you going to feel like watching on a random Thursday in September? Be specific. Everyone you don’t mention will lose their jobs." Sadly, networks DO work that way.

May 22, 2012 10:22 pm I'd trade Northstar getting married for a single issue of anything that I could hand to a gay teenager that would make them feel like there are people out there who are going through what they are. I'd trade both of those for a single issue that I can hand to a straight person that would make them understand that being gay is more than just a GOP talking point. And I might trade all of that to never see another comic with Northstar ever again.

May 6, 2012 12:37 pm To quote my boss: "Those free comics aren't cheap." To get what we had in the store (which ran out of everything five hours into our day), we dropped as much money on them as we would have two weeks of normal Diamond shipments. Small businesses have to consider the bottom line at a certain point. And the fun and goodwill generated for Saturday was wonderful, but in this economy that was HALF A MONTH of inventory purchased for no profit. Sadly, reality creeps it's ugly head around the corner, but we deal the best way we can. Half of the titles were for free, the rest were "free with purchase," which I feel better about than "you only get three books, period."

May 5, 2012 10:49 pm First, HOLY HANNAH, this is a day to be survived. Next time you're in your shop, thank your retailer. FCBD is fun, but takes a lot of prepping and manpower that smaller businesses usually don't have time for. To all of the customers, artists/creators, and Stormtroopers at my store, thank you for being amazing. Second, I'm fascinated by how other shops distributed their books. We had some free for all, and then the rest distributed into variety packs that customers could get for spending ten dollars or more. Did anyone have a store that did something they loved with how the books were handed out? I'd love to hear it. The only ones I snagged for myself were Archaia and Atomic Robo. I'm not gonna lie, I want to be Doctor Dinosaur when I grow up.

April 20, 2012 12:18 pm Phil Noto's piece has a Peter Chung/Aeon Flux vibe I've not seen in his work before. I seriously dig it.

March 29, 2012 12:15 pm @wallythegreenmonster: A key point here is that this particular book has broken the general rule of HOW comics become popular. Instead of being a Locke & Key or Walking Dead, which started out slow and gained speed, it hit like a Batman book.

March 29, 2012 12:06 pm @BC1: I love Vaughn. I love Fiona Staples. Saga excited me. I wanted it to be as big as...well...anything of sufficient size. And it turned out to be about fifty thousand times bigger. And the number of people who subscribed to it was on par with subs for Ex Machina and Y: The Last Man for us. Which is to say, "four." The problem with hype is that it's HYPE. A fad. And people, having been saturated in a fad-induced environment for most of their adult lives, who also have in the past year slowly cut back lists due to how much budget they have to spend each month (not including the people who have stopped buying comics at ALL since the past summer), politely nod. Previews is four-hundred-monthly-pages of "This is the new AWESOME HOTNESS!!!" You take it all with a grain of salt But the situation at hand isn't that we didn't adequately inform people about this, but we had no way of discerning "That sounds cool" from "I'm SERIOUSLY picking this up." Small businesses have to weigh options about what they purchase. This isn't a grocery store where you rely on the fact that people will get hungry and need to buy detergent. This is an entertainment industry, with all the perils attached. The mere act of going on a limb on a book could mean telling an employee "Sorry, we need to cut your hours this week because we can't afford to pay you."

March 29, 2012 11:43 am Bello, I agree. Completely, without question. Diamond takes, in general, two weeks to get anything from "I ordered this" to my store because of how things are shipped out and processed. Which, in this day and age, I find almost ridiculous. There is an order-adjustment that hits closer to ship, but is still not "that week." The figures they show us are a generalized form of "on average, other stores ordered this." That's as much of a heads-up as we have as to what people are ordering. But as Stephenson pointed out, NO ONE ELSE jumped on this too. So when we see the report and see "Ordering 20 copies of Saga seems on par with a store our size" all we can assume is "Yup. Sounds legit." The ONLY way a store can accurately track how much of a book to buy is to go by how it HAS been selling. We only just now got comfortable with our orders for DC to make sure we get enough for subs, how much moves off the wall, how much to leave as shelf presence, and to not sit on a stack that will never sell.

March 29, 2012 12:54 am Imagine it more like "Stephen King wrote 20 pages of a book. That'll cost you a dollar. You need to know how many pages 81-100 you're going to buy before anyone reads pages 1-20." Now replace "Stephen King" with an author who maybe hasn't written a novel in the past ten years. Sure, you're sure it'll be good. But HOW good? This person may be a decent seller, but maybe never had a Harry-Potter-scale-blockbuster. Sure, maybe you can talk about this with the customers, gauge their reactions and what not. ... Except you have ordered about $15,000 worth of single-serving chapters this month to put on the shelf, a not-insignificant-percentage of it is new stuff from hot new people who are just as likely to be blockbuster stars as they are to fall into obscurity in six months. I would LOVE to know for sure what's the next hot thing. I would give a testicle to be able to, without over-burdening these shelves with excessive and never-moving inventory, buy exactly enough of every item each and every single month from Previews to satisfying the Wednesday, Friday, and six-months-later-and-heard-good-stuff customer. I love comics. And when I buy a book, I hope that it's good. No, scratch that. I hope that it's AMAZING. That it takes me someplace else, is full of awesome words and gorgeous art, and that other people will enjoy it as well and we can talk about how great it is. That capitalism can support the creative and prove the system isn't broken. But in this economy, that isn't a gamble that can be taken very often. And Previews is THICK with other books, equally vying for attention, to be that next awesome thing. So to say, "We have to stand by the creators who will be the next big thing," it's a wonderful dream to have. It's a dream I want to come true time and again, rewarding everyone who pours every drop of sweat and effort into their work to entertain and enlighten people they may never meet. But sometimes we can't see which pony to pick. Because sometimes we've gambled on that race, and saw that horse was only good for glue and dog food.

March 28, 2012 9:07 pm Where I work, about 90% of the people who adjust their pull lists come in the two weeks before the book hits or three days after. Ordering is not a science or even an art: it's a guessing game that only routinely proves you wrong about everything you think or believe to be true about new product on the market. It's the whim of popularity and word of mouth. A whim where orders must be placed two months before the book ships. If it ships on time.