Comics vs merchandise. I think comics are winning - reflections on a modern comic shop.

A while ago I went back to Birmingham and visited my old workplace Nostalgia & Comics. As usual it was lovely to catch up with folks, pick up some comics and books to review over at PROPAGANDA at the FPIblog & it's always nice to get myself back into the retail environment again to have a look around.

Since moving up to Yorkshire I've really missed being in a comic shop. Missed that actual physical sensation of standing at the shelves and actually browsing the racks. My nearest is Travelling Man in York and although it's a nice enough store there's just something about it that doesn't appeal. Until recently they had everything in comic bags, making browsing just impossible for new comics. And the Graphic Novels are always a bit cramped and difficult to get, with a small selection plus the small shop and a lack of music just kills the atmosphere..

With Nostalgia & Comics it was more than just feeling part of the store as a customer. It was the sense of family that came through working there. Of course, despite still thinking of it as my store, that sense of ownership, being part of the family and having a hand in shaping where a great comic shop was going has passed. Nostalgia & Comics is no longer "mine" and quite rightly it is changing and moving forwards. The big fear with N&C is that one day I'll walk in there and know no-one behind the counter. I'll just be another customer, rather than Richard; the guy who did 19 years there and helped shape the store for many years.

Anyway, melancholy over with; the most interesting thing about N&C is that it's been changing in a way I think is reflecting a positive change for comic shops as a whole. I know the credit crunch is biting and that sales all over are down and that the economic climate has meant that Diamond Distributors have increased their prices due to a stronger dollar. But the change is still a positive one and makes me quietly confident for the future.

You see, Nostalgia & Comics is, relatively speaking, a big store. Certainly big for comic shops. It's also part of the Forbidden Planet International chain. And over the years the size of the store and it's membership of a comics chain have meant that we've had to adapt to changing mores of comic retailing. Hence, a few years back, when we were first inducted into the fpi family, we saw the amount of merchandise increase incredibly fast. The product mix changed radically and that scared us all. Because, we were, are and always will be a comics store. It's what Nostalgia & Comics does best. So when staff at Nostalgia & Comics, all of us dearly loving comics and graphic novels, saw the space for comics shrink and the merchandise increase we didn't like it, even if we understood that financially it was a good policy for the time. But none of us wanted to turn into a pop culture store. None of us wanted that and we all did anything we could to keep Nostalgia & Comics as a comic shop. Mostly this involved getting out there and selling, selling, selling the comics, selling the graphic novels and making sure our comic shop was as good as we could make it. And we made it work. Our comic and graphic novel sales have always been great and held up far better than other neo-pop culture stores in relation to merchandise.

The irony of all this is that after leaving the store I got more involved with FPI and started reviewing over on the FPI blog. Getting to know the folks there; people like Joe & Kenny, has shown me that we weren't alone in all this. There's an awful lot of folks at FPI that really still see the company as a comic shop company rather than a merchandise store. It's been a nice eye-opener.

But on visiting N&C over the last couple of years I noticed an important change. It looks like comic shops have seen the peak of the merchandising boom. There's merchandise still on the shelves, but crucially, there aren't the guaranteed money spinning core lines that we used to have.

Back in the height of the merchandising boom I could look at the shelves and the stocks downstairs and point out several core lines that were guaranteed pots of money; Star Wars, Buffy, Simpsons, MacFarlane Toys, Marvel Legends. But every one of those lines has either finished or stalled. And nothing is replacing them. Sure the Doctor Who toys have taken up a bit of the slack, but nowhere near the levels of the aforementioned core lines - and the Doctor Who merchandise is ubiquitous. The great financial benefit of the Buffy toys or the early Marvel Legends is that we were the only place you could get them.

But as the popularity of the merchandise increased, we found that suddenly we weren't the only place in town to get that Wolverine figure. Whether it was Woolworth's (when it was still around), ToysRUs or Argos you could pick up these lines easily everywhere, often at prices less than we were able to sell them at (economies of scale and all that). Marvel Legends figures used to disappear from the shelves in big £15 a time chunks. Now Woolies, Tesco, Asda and Argos are pumping them out cheap and suddenly, the pile of unsold second rate Marvel figures grows to heights where oxygen is recommended.

And once that happens, the comic shops lose every time. We just can't compete with them on volume, discounts, profit or availability.

It happened to us before with anime dvds. For a long time many years ago, when manga and anime was a relatively niche market we stocked a lot of anime and sold it really well to the growing numbers of manga fans that flocked to us as the only game in town. But as soon as manga and anime hit big and reached a mainstream recognition, HMV started stocking them in depth, with discounts that they could absorb due to their greater buying power and killed our sales dead practically overnight. Over the years we clawed some of the sales back, through careful manga marketing and building up our customer base through being the only store in town that gave a large amount of shelf space to manga graphic novels and genuinely caring about what we sold. These manga fans gave us their custom and loyally bought anime from us as well.

So merchandise sales are changing. No longer driven by a couple of core best sellers, the merchandise seems to be far more thinly spread, with lots of different lines, all selling less.

But we always felt we were a comic shop first and stocked merchandise as an extra line. And this is what will see us through; the belief that comics and graphic novels are our core market. Like we always used to say: Nostalgia & Comics, because it's what we do best.

(And obviously, this is just my thoughts on the shop I used to work at, not backed up by anything other than observational evidence and certainly shouldn't be seen as anything officially connected with Nostalgia & Comics or FPI. So there.)

May is Spawn Month - but what's the year?

Take a look at this Previews cover, but try not to look at the date. Now, doesn't it just seem like it's something from 1995?

This is how far the comics industry seems to have moved in the intervening years.

For those of you who aren't into comics, Previews is the main catalogue of the main comics distributor in the US & UK. It's too thick, hideously laid out and has far too many pictures that I'd be rather uncomfortably with Molly seeing and associating them with comics.

Richard (over) analyses the comics industry?

Over at the FPI blog I have a looooooong piece about the comics industry and what I think about the recent changes that Diamond comic distributors have brought in regarding their minimum order threshold. If you're a comics person it's important and may well change the comics industry in a pretty big way. If you're not a comic person its 2000ish words of gibberish.

Leeds Light Night 2008 - Tonight at OK Comics....

Leeds Light Night 2008 is an evening event where the nocturnal city comes alive with art, performance and other mad stuff, giving locals and visitors a glimpse at city that may usually be hidden in darkness. This year's Light Night is tonight: Friday 10th October.

OK Comics in Leeds is celebrating the night with comics from Tom Plaskitt & Lizz Lunney (who does some great stuff - I've got a pile of her mini-comics here waiting to be reviewed) and a live art event by Andy Sykes and will be open until 10.30pm.

(Thanks to Marc Ellerby for the heads up)

I'm the goddamned ******* ****** ****** ******* Batman.

You know, after seeing all the fuss over the farce of the pulping of the latest issue of All Star Batman & Robin I just really am despairing over a couple of things:

Oh, before I do this, a quick recap; Frank Miller & Jim Lee's All Star Batman & Robin just looks like train wreck comics. I haven't read it in any more depth than skimming the occasional issue, but from what I've seen it's something so incredibly bad that it almost beggars belief that this is the same guy who wrote Batman Year One & Dark Knight.

The latest controversy all stems from the fact that Frank decided to have swear words in the book. But instead of using the traditional method of #*!~# or somesuch alternative or even to just put a big black bar in to denote the words, Frank decided that it was vitally important to have the words lettered in and then put the black bar over them.

Surprisingly, the comic was then printed up with the black bars a shade of black lighter meaning the cussin was clearly visible. And not just average cussing either. We're into serious George Carlin territory here. Much gnashing and wailing at DC who issue a blanket recall on the book, asking retailers to pulp them and promising complete refunds on the books. Of course, the book only made it out to certain west coast USA retailers and predictably a lot of them did exactly what you would expect and slapped them up on ebay.

There's no actual law broken here, nothing implicit in the Diamond distributors / DC contract with retailers that means they have to pulp their copies. So no-one's actually doing anything wrong. Except it means we're one step further away from being a proper grown up professional organisation again. And each time it happens we go backwards.

Here's the scan, courtesy of Rich Johnston at Lying in the Gutters:



So what I want to know is:

One: Is DC really that desperate to keep Frank Miller on board that they will agree to anything?
What moron in DC thought this was a good idea? What next? Do we assume Frank's going to start demanding full anatomial correct genitalia first and the costumes drawn on second?

Two: When, oh when are the retailers going to grow up just a little bit? The industry still operates on a model of decades ago; the ship on Wednesday, on sale on Wednesday (or Thursday here in the UK) model. So delivery day is also new comics day and chaos then ensues. For years we've been asking why we can't get early delivery and a guaranteed on sale date for new comics and books, like the grown up professional folks over in the bookstores and record shops have. Well, here's the reason why; because every so often something like this happens and retailers just fall over themselves trying to fuck each other over for a few dollars. Short term money is made sure enough. But it just perpetuates the idea that the industry consists of comic shop owners and managers who look and act an awful lot like this man:



And just in case you were wondering, this is another post triggered by reading something Brian Hibbs wrote and agreeing almost completely with him.

Comic Shops, the Graphic Novel glut and a retailing class from Brian Hibbs

(Interior of Brian Hibbs’ Comix Experience, San Francisco)

Brian Hibbs has been in this business for a long time. He’s owned and managed Comix Experience in San Francisco since 1989 and is regularly talked of as one of the first shop owners to really attempt to move comic shops out of the dark, seedy, unappealing business model so many adopted.

So it’s always interesting to read his Tilting At The Windmills column at CBR. But the last two have been not only interesting but, in my considered opinion, essential reading for anyone connected with a comic shop. Whether you own it, manage it, work there or just pop on the till for an occasional shift, this is the stuff you should be aware of.

It all comes off the back of installing a new Point Of Sale (POS) system in the store and then actually bothering to use all of this information at his disposal to look at ways of making his store better. I know it’s obvious but there are so many retailers out there who don’t bother with any electronic POS systems or, perhaps worse, once they have them in, they just treat them as a more complicated cash register.

Column 1: Churn Or Burn:

Hibbs on the ever growing problem of more and more and more graphic novels:

When I first opened, in 1989, there were less than 100 “graphic novels” in print and available; ten years ago, that was probably closer to 2000; today it is something along the lines of 20,000 different books that are in print and available to sell.

I’ve been seeing the “trade paperback bloat” on my shelves for some time now — as a greater and greater percentage of my racks wind up as spine out. This makes what is on those shelves harder and harder to sell, as any given title gets lost in a sea of spines (even with good genre-driven shelving, and aggressive straightening and alphabetization!), and means that (generally) only books with “pedigree” or “buzz” turn with an appreciable regularity.

Like I say, I’ve been able to visually see this for quite some time, but now with the POS, I’m able to quantify some of this in ways that I would never ever have been able to do with a pen-and-paper driven system.

For instance, I can quickly see that there are approximately 3800 book format SKUs that we stock that we’ve sold one or more copies of in the last twelve months. Then there are the roughly 1400 books that we’ve sold no (none, zero, zilch) copies of since our initial inventory and installation of the POS system.

Yeah, that’s what I said, too.

That’s just utterly shocking. MORE THAN ONE QUARTER of his Graphic Novels with zero turn in a year. And you have to remember that Hibbs is one of the more enlightened and turned on retailers out there.

He then takes a long hard, cold look at what he has to do. And gives details of some of the dead stock as well. The results are illuminating.

Column 2: The Leftover Bits

After the shock of the realisation that he had so much dead stock, this is a column devoted to what Brian did next. And along the way he gives one of the fullest and most illuminating essays on the nuts and bolts of comics and graphic novel ordering and stocking I’ve ever read.

These two columns should be required reading for your local shop.

(A Manga-led Graphic Novel glut? Row upon row upon row of digest format manga says yes.)

My own take:

I’ve worked in comic shops for 19 years. 1987-2006. My shop was Nostalgia & Comics in Birmingham. But the lessons I learnt there can easily be applied to any shop.

I saw the horrible fallout from the black and white glut and the speculator boom in comics. And it frightens me to see that it’s possibly happening again with the absolute glut of graphic novels that a shop has to consider stocking nowadays.

The main problem is one that’s affected shops for years. Fear. Fear of getting it wrong, fear of missing out on the latest hot trend, fear of missing out on something/anything. What this has traditionally led to has been a willingness to over-order on the whole line just to catch this.It happened with comics and now it seems just as likely to happen with graphic novels.

There’s no way we’re going to be able to stop the publishers churning every crappy comic series out into a book and drowning the shelves with product. At least not in the short-term. (Long-term is another matter, if we follow the logic and the numbers of Hibb’s example, stopping ordering these graphic novels that have zero sales will, eventually, impact upon the publishers and force them to be more choosy about what they collect).

But what we will have to do is take long hard looks at our shelves. Then get the data and be cruel, very cruel. Make the necessary cuts to the stock. I imagine any shop will be as shocked as Hibbs was with the data. After that the shop needs to decide what it wants to be. I believe we’re in the realms now where it’s impossible to be a full service store anymore. There’s no way you have the space (or, given the unsolds, the money to burn) to order everything. It’s time to be selective. Stock what you know will make you a great profit, stock what turns. But after that, when you look at the other 80% of the available books you will have to decide which way you want your store to be perceived. Do you want to be the best superhero store? Or the best manga store? Maybe you want to be a literary store? It’s very possible you could develop your store to be a mixture of many of the types of store. But you can’t do it all, not anymore.

But it occurs to me that the possibilities from this are potentially huge. If we take Comix Experience as the example, Brian suddenly has 30% of his Graphic Novel space free to do with as he pleases. We’ll assume that Brian has been making money on his store before the changes, he doesn’t necessarily have just treat this as an immediate opportunity to expand his profitable lines into the space as they’ve obviously been doing well as they are. Instead it’s a perfect opportunity to look at where he wants to be positioning himself in the market. He could decide that this 30% of his space is to be given over to marketing books he absolutely loves but feels aren’t getting the sales they deserve.

(My own solution at Nostalgia & Comics to attempt to stop books I loved and thought deserved spotlighting from being lost in the shelves beyond: The Propaganda shelf, a regularly rotated, annotated display rack. A classic example of a cobbled together solution employed by a willing staff member but with the wrong racking and too little space. Too many comic shops suffer this way, despite the best intentions of all concerned.)

After writing this, I sent it off to Kenny Penman, one of Forbidden Planet International’s directors and half of the team behind Blank Slate Books. I thought it may be interesting to see what his take on this was, from both sides of the Publisher/Retailer divide.

Here’s what he had to say on the subject:

Kenny Penman’s Take:

1. A full service store was never a possibility in some locations even 5 years ago - if you are in San Fran, London, Glasgow, New York, Boston, Sydney this is relevant if you are in Dagenham, Wonga Wonga - less so. The ability to be full service was always an equation which needed to take note of the potential customer base. In small towns most stores will not stock Indies - as they can’t afford to stock, and represent, the full range knowing the high risk of unsolds - they probably stock none. they don’t have the time and money to develop a market that probably doesn’t exist.

2. Our competition are full service stores - Amazon stock everything - and notably most comics commentators who allege they love the direct sales industry link to Amazon as the default place to buy (a business who do a great job but let’s be honest don’t give a stuff about comics) - irrespective of the fact that the direct market often does compete on price - this quickly diminishes the return in stocking obscure material, for comics retailers, as anyone wanting to buy it after reading a review you’ve probably been pointed away from the direct market already. This becomes a self fulfilling prophecy with stock range in comics stores shrinking - making them less and less interesting to customers like myself who have fairly catholic tastes. With the exception of a few stores like Hibbs, Jim Hanley a few other comics stores in the US and UK most comics shops would probably bore me now and I’m a long term comics fan and still a big buyer and reader. You just need to keep abreast with the argument on the upcoming Kramers Ergot which at $125 looks like almost all the purchases will go through Amazon or BV directly, as most stores simply won’t take the risk on an item like that. The part of the industry which could be a wider readership future for comics shops is slipping over the horizon unless you have already built the trade. You don’t need EPOS to see this.

3. I think the sell or burn attitude set in a long while back - I’d say at least 3 years now. Mostly this was because of Manga and largely the enormous in print glut is also due to Manga - Manga sales are down - and people like TokyoPop who initiated this land grab are in trouble - the market has a sort of in-built self correction mechanism even through the worse stores with the least info. Almost all retailers are now treating Manga as if it were a comic - not a GN - they buy to sell out - and only keep the real big sellers in stock on a total collection basis - Naruto, Death Note, Battle Royale etc. The same has crept into GN’s - people, with shelf space shrinking relative to output, are returning to core - and giving more and more of that space over to Marvel/DC.

4. It was always thus - there were always items that had no or little turn in a store. Russ Cochrane EC box sets for instance - took up a lot of room - sold maybe once a year. But before I was in this as a business, as a comics punter, the fact one store had a row of those always in stock and I could dream of saving to buy them - made that my store of choice over others. That will still be the same today . I would be more likely to go to a store with those books on their shelves, copies of Kramers Ergot, Any Given Sunday Nemo reprints than one that didn’t have them - irrespective of which seemed the more efficient store. There is still a place for a number of ‘Trophy’ books in any store. OK the space and turn may not work out - but think of them as a cheap form of advertising.

5. The publishers will slow down and stop turning out product that doesn’t sell. That will start to happen soon with the likely contraction in the retailing base in the current economic downturn. As you say many stores order just to have it - with fewer stores - there will be less in the way of ’spec’ orders. These won’t be made up by online sellers who buy to order. It won’t take long for that to impact on publishing.

6. The one worry I have here - now with my publisher hat on - is that this approach will slam the door shut in the face of new small publishers - how will they ever get into a market which is totally risk averse. Unless they can sell their books directly online they will never get a start. So the comics stores will retrench even further into straight superhero mainstream which I fear in the end is a ‘dead end’ option.

I think you are essentially right - but this isn’t just science - a good comics retailer should also be able to sprinkle a little alchemy - either through look and feel and presentation or through the personality of the owner/s - Page 45 being the best example in the UK - and transform the marketplace. Sadly almost no-one is achieving that right now, even some of our own stores fall short of what I would want a store to be as a comics buyer.

(Perhaps not what Kenny meant by sprinkling a little alchemy in the look and feel and presentation but there has been a recent vogue in the US for boutique comic book stores. From left to right: The Drawn & Quarterly Store, Secret Headquarters, The Fantagraphics Store. These are obviously not viable models for a larger store, but do provides certain ideas that the larger stores could appropriate and certainly look absolutely gorgeous.)

& back to me again:

Okay, that’s it for now. Obviously being part of the FPI blog we have a vested interest in seeing comics go from strength to strength. It does us all good to have a vibrant, thriving market. Here at the blog we’re determined to bring you the best in comics news, reviews and articles because we passionately care about the medium. But we also care deeply about comic shops and would encourage you to simply make one choice about where you buy; choose somewhere that treats you well & has the stock you want to read. If you’re as passionate about comics as we think you are, you’ll be with us when we say that there are many great comic shops out there and many horrible ones. It’s up to you to keep the good ones going with your patronage.

I have in mind the idea of doing a few posts on comic shops, good and bad. If you've got anything you want to say on the matter feel free. Even better, if you're a comic shop owner or manager, get in touch and tell me what you do and why you're doing it right.

Warren Ellis talks numbers ....

One great thing about Warren Ellis (aside from the obvious of being a bloody great writer) is that he's the comic equivalent of the magician revealing his tricks. He's always talked about the mechanics and ideas behind the genre. And Ellis' ideas of what makes the business end of the comic market work are always worth reading.
He's also never been scared of putting cold hard numbers up to talk about his work. Take this from warrenellis.com:

We just got the numbers on NO HERO 0. The initial orders have come in at 18000. That’s the same number we had for initial orders on BLACK SUMMER 0, a project on which we did the same thing. The reorders on that book were so massive that we eventually sold twice that number — and that’s before we did the special reprint book that contained 0 and 1 because the reorder action on issue one also wiped out the overprint (copies printed above and beyond the order number). So we did a 100% overprint on the issue 0 unit and still couldn’t meet the eventual demand.
NO HERO appears to be following the same pattern. Now, how does this affect you, the potential interested party who’d like to read it?

Ellis has long been one of the most interesting characters in comics. But what he contributes to the backend is pretty important as well. There just isn't enough of a dialogue going on, and there never has been, regarding the retail side of the business.

Graphic Novels - too much of a good thing?

I've been thinking this for a long time, but it's been a while since I last ventured into a comic shop to put the thoughts into some semblance of order.

(As I recall I think Stephen L Holland of Page 45 said something similar in an old issue of Comics International, but, having no print copy to refer to and the official website being very sparse indeed I'll just acknowledge that I may merely be repeating Stephen's words and carry on).

The big problem, as I see it now, is that there are simply too many graphic novels being published.

When I first started dealing with Graphic Novels as an employee at Nostalgia and Comics back in the 80s and 90s it was easy to keep on top of stock using nothing more than a piece of paper and a good memory. Last time I did it, nearly two years ago it involved a Diamond Comics Star System over 20 pages long with type so small that it gave me a headache to read it and concentrate on it. It used to be that the essential "in stock" list - that bible list of all of the graphic novels that we should not be without was a few hundred items long. Now I imagine it's in the high thousands if not the tens of thousands.

As the graphic novel became the predominant format for the comic medium everyone slowly realised that in the majority of cases, they wouldn't have to gamble on whether to get it as a comic or hope that it might get collected. Generally if it's a major series from a comic publisher (Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image et al) it will be collected. And if it's from a literary publisher (Top Shelf, D&Q, Fantagraphics etc) then the graphic novel will almost be their preferred means of publication nowadays.

The problem now is that everything seems to be collected. EVERYTHING.
And this removal of even the most rudimentary sales or quality threshold has the potential to cause a catastrophic industry effect. Because it doesn't take much imagining to transform this graphic novel glut into a very similar situation from the 80s - the black and white glut. Following the success of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the market was flooded with black and white comics of all kinds. And retailers, completely overwhelmed by the selection and not wanting to lose sales, overordered on the majority of titles. These comics sat in stockrooms and scked working capiatl out of comic shops, many of whom went out of business through a cash flow crisi when it became pretty obvious that the next tutles wasn't going to be happening.

The majority of retailers are in a similar position now with graphic novels.
There's just too many of them. Far too many of them. It doesn't make sense to try to order them all. Financial suicide coupled with a physical inability to rack them.

The only answer has to be going back to a principle all sensible retailers started to use a decade ago when the back issue market practically disappeared from comic shops. The smart retailers realised that there was very little point keeping huge back issue sections that realised almost no money and started ordering comics to sell out in the month of release. If it was a great series with a lot of second month sales or something the retailer was passionate about then it was worth ordering to sell out over the course of a few months. In rare circumstances the comic might actually have a very long shelf life but this was incredibly rare (Acme Novelty Library, Tomine, Lenore etc).
Generally a safer bet for the retailer was to sell out in the first 2-3 weeks. The smart thinking says that any lost sales in weeks 4+ are not worth the risks associated with over-ordering.

I can see a time where intelligent retailers have to decision to divide their graphic novel ordering into two very distinct groups.
The first is the traditional graphic novel. The perennial seller. A book that will be selling from your shelves over and over down the years. Think Maus, Palestine, Sandman, Preacher, Mouse Guard, Watchmen, Love & Rockets.
The second group is those graphic novels that you treat as comics. You only order enough to sell through in the first few weeks. Essentially you're deciding which ones you're going to treat just like a throwaway, transitory thing. I'm sure you can all think of examples in this class.

I'm guessing that many stores are already doing something similar with Manga books. Of course, the serialised format of these books makes it a lot easier to rationalise this. Manga volumes are essentially comics anyway goes the thinking. Therefore we can treat them as comics and not do regular restocks. It's a lazy way of thinking perhaps, but I'm sure it happens all over.

Of course, another option available to everyone is just to not order a large proportion of the books. That works just as well. But how many retailers would have the guts to try that one.

One thing I know for certain is that retailers who don't decide to do something about the problem, retailers who just go on ordering a little of everything published without a definite strategy for ordering are just going to find things getting tighter and tighter.

Mike Mignola's advice to young folk making comics....

First thought of the evening on firing up the computer:

Comics 2008. It's not the best position we could be in, but it's a damn sight better than it was even 10 years ago.

And this little nugget of wisdom came coutesy of this post from the First Second blog where they have a very interesting little piece up from Mike Mignola where he reminisces about advice given to him by Frank Miller when Mike was starting out. It illuminates exactly how far we've come in so few years:

"I CAN pass on something that Frank Miller told me when I was about to start Hellboy--It's as good advice as I've ever gotten on this subject. He said something like "just do it, do the best you can, don't drive yourself crazy, just KNOW that when you look back on it you're going to hate it. It can't be helped. The next one will be better.

I don't know if that really helps here. Your problem is that you're dealing with GRAPHIC NOVELS and they are a lot scarier than comics. They're sold in bookstores and are going to be in print for a long time. The beauty to doing comics in the old days was that you did a shitty job, it came out, and then it was gone. Now everything is collected and we have to live with our mistakes--Of course that also means we keep making money (which is good) and when we DO finally do a job we're proud of it stays in print. I wouldn't want the old days back, believe me, but it was easier to learn as you went, knowing that your early work would be forgotten."

If there's one thing that really has changed over the years I've been around comics it's an availability issue. Gone (thank god) are the days of worrying about missing a hot comic or a new book by some favourite but unpopular creator that you know the shop isn't going to order. Instead everything is available.

Of course, this leads to it's own problems. After all, if everyone is keeping everything in print, how the hell is any retailer menat to keep it in stock?

(Answer - they're not going to. The smart ones already operate at least a two tier system, with a whole host of graphic novels being allowed a small shelf life very similar to those we used to give new release comics)

This was originally posted at the FPI blog, but because it's a nice little think piece rather than a news piece I thought it would be nice to share it here as well.

Guardian: Brilliantly Drawn Girls

Matthew Badham passed me a piece from the Guardian entitled: Brilliantly Drawn Girls.

Go and have a look and report back here.

Problems?

Number 1: Brilliantly drawn girls? girls?
Number 2: The byline - Comics never used to be much fun for their rare female characters, but with more women in the industry, kick-ass heroines are taking over. No, that's just not true. See below.
Number 3: In an article about women in comics does the first and only image have to be a shot of a glammed up Wonder Woman?
Number 4: Is it just me or could the article be summed up as a love-in for Gail Simone tied up in a suitably relevant issue piece?

Surely this is just rubbish:

"Simone is perhaps the most public face of the revolution - a highly popular voice, she has been appointed by comics giant DC as the first female ongoing writer for Wonder Woman"

No. Simone is merely one woman writer at DC who happens to be on a highly iconic character. But the most public face of the revolution?
No. That has to go to Manga as a whole. Or maybe Marjane Satrapi or Alison Bechdel. But they get barely a mention later on and when they do it's with this context:

And beyond the comics mainstream, some of the most groundbreaking and exciting graphic novels of the past few years have been written - and devoured - by women, including Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

Of course women read and write comics "beyond the comics mainstream". That's because the comics mainstream wears bright stupid costumes, has superpowers and tends to be about as likely to appeal to women as Mills and Boon do to men.

And before I get complaints, I'm merely using the Mills and Boon as a simple example. Generally Mills and Boon is written for and read by women. It is the mainstream of romantic fiction. And it's about as likely to get men reading fiction as superhero comics as the comic mainstream is likely to get women reading comics.

Manga is incredibly popular to women. Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel are very public faces of women in comics. The article just brushes this aside and misses the fundamental point. If women are getting into comics and thankfully, years of experience in and around comics shows me that they are, then they certainly aren't coming into it because Gail Simone is leading the way in writing "Kick-Ass heroines".

To it's credit the article then goes on to talk about DCs Minx line and has the ever interesting Trina Robbins talking intelligently about the changes we're seeing.

But perhaps the most shocking thing: In a Guardian article there was not a single mention of Posey Simmonds. Women in Comics in the Mainstream. But no Posey. Terrible.

Oh well. At least the thing didn't start with "Biff Bam Pow, comics aren't just for boys anymore".

Comic Exhibition at bookartbookshop

Sean Azzopardi sends word of an exhibition of comics at the bookartbookshop shop in London. It's another part of the ever growing, world dominating comics juggernaut that is London Underground Comics and the Camden Comics Stall:

Over to Sean:

Bookartsbookshop, an independent book distributor will be hosting an exhibition of
comics from the Camden Comics Stall.
Regular titles such as Modern Monstrosity, Summer Ball, Tongue of the Dead, Monkeys might Puke, Ninja Bunny, Twelve Hour Shift will be displayed along with the vast talents of the ever changing table stock.
Opening night and private view will be April 11th 2008 around 6ish, and the show will run until the 25th.

Bookartsbookshop, 17 Pitfield St, N1 6HB, London
Contact Info: on Sean's site here.

This is what 5000+ Manga titles looks like .....

Christopher Butcher has been having a little reorganisation and restock. The Beguiling now has rather a lot of Manga:

"Age no barrier for graphic fiction followers" All it needs is a sign in the window: NO Women. NO Kids

Dirk linked to this Inverness Courier article on the city's first comic shop, Heroes For Sales and I clicked through because it's always nice to see a new comic shop opening up.
Oh God.
Oh my God.

The photo is a complete giveaway for a start.
Dan Dare and Spider-Man is fair enough. But Witchblade?
And look - it's a really bad Superman cover, isn't that nice?
I know that local papers like to get comic shop owners to adopt stupid poses in front of a Superman or Batman figure but it's up to the retailer to say no and try to put themselves forward as a shop for everyone.
However, it appears that everyone is not the target market this guy's going for....

“I always said my target market was 18 to 35, because comics are fairly adult in nature these days, but its good to see teens picking up a few comics,” “It’s good to see them reading. When I was 15 I loved comics, but couldn’t get them for love nor money. So it’s nice to see them getting into comics.” At the other end of the age scale, Davies has been surprised by the number of older comics readers. “It’s mainly male — there are some women into comics, but they are a rare breed. It quite surprised me. I thought by their 30s people would stop reading them because of families and things, but there are people who have their families and come back to comics later in life,” he revealed. “And they generally have more money so they buy the collectable things like the hardbacks.”

So, that's completely dismissing the children's market. How does he think all these 30 somethings coming back into comics got their first experiences?

And women are a rare breed?
I bet they are in your shop.

Just as a quick aside, Jeff Smith was in New York a while back giving a series of lectures and signings. Look at the picture below. See all of those small things with comics in their hands. They're children. They read comics. Just not in Heroes For Sales.


and then this:

“They would go to Glasgow and pop into Forbidden Plant or A1 Comics. I’ve got them on board now, the ones who know me anyway, and I know for a fact that I offer a level of service when it comes to finding them stuff that a big firm like Forbidden Planet doesn’t want to or can’t give. Because I’m an independent it’s important to me to keep the business going. A big firm isn’t really caring if you get number 22 of Astonishing X-Men.”

Now I used to work for Forbidden Planet International through their ownership of Nostalgia & Comics in Birmingham.
So to hear this guy saying he offers a level of service that he "knows for a fact" Nostalgia & Comics couldn't or didn't want to give is just wrong.
And bloody insulting to me and my friends who loved to find a customer not only something they were after, but loads of stuff they'd never heard of. Even better was when these customers would come back, time and time again, overflowing with gratitude that we turned them onto something wonderful.

I can't speak for the Aberdeen store or Glasgow or Edinburgh in the FPI chain, but through doing reviews for the FPI blog I know how passionate and customer focused the people I deal with are I and to say they don't care about getting their customers the comics they want is just an untruth.

I'm not one to normally jump up and down and bang on about how unfair some of the views expressed about FPI as a chain are, but this really, really got to me. After all, by saying that he was, so I saw it, having a go at me and my colleagues and friends. How dare he say that we were the sorts of retailers who didn't care about our customers.



And I must admit now that I did a bad thing.
I phoned up Heroes For Sales with a list of 12 Graphic Novels I was after just to check on what he meant by:

"I know for a fact that I offer a level of service when it comes to finding them stuff that a big firm like Forbidden Planet doesn’t want to or can’t give"

I fibbed and said I was after a leaving present for a colleague. This was the list:

Maus
Palestine
Exit Wounds
Fun Home
Absolute Sandman
Watchmen
V For Vendetta
Tamara Drewe
Love & Rockets
Shooting War
From Hell
Bone

All they had in was Watchmen, V For Vendetta, From Hell and Love and Rockets.
5 out of 12. (update March 25th. Obviously it's 4 out of 12. Obviously I can't count. But we shouldn't let that stand in the way on realising it makes it worse retailer wise!)

I know I picked stuff that was fairly left field, but it was all stuff that's received immense praise over the years for their crossover appeal, with books like Fun Home, Exit Wounds and Tamara Drewe getting national press and attrating readers from outside the small circle of traditional comic readers.

So that gives you an idea what sort of stock depth they've got. And I don't think it's good enough. And certainly not from someone who goes in print to say how he's better than the big boys.

On the plus side, he did phone me back to confirm that he hadn't got what I was after and then (oh, the irony) suggested going to Forbidden Planet for them.
So I did. I did the same thing with an FPI store, just phoned up with the list and asked what they had. They scored 11 out of 12.

I'll leave it with you to draw your own conclusions.

Borders announce new US concept stores.This is pretty big news in comics

Borders new Graphic Novel section in their new concept store. (via Heidi)

Borders announced this week that it was starting a new series of 14 concept stores. These stores will specialise in five areas: Travelling, Cookery, Wellness, Childrens and most importantly for us here - Graphic Novels.

From their PR:

Certain categories within the new Borders concept store — Travel, Cooking, Wellness, Graphic Novels and Children’s — are so popular and rapidly growing that Borders has designated them as special destinations within the new concept store — giving these categories their own “shop within a shop” look and feel.

This looks very, very important to me. The four other categories are huge areas in bookselling, just pop into your local store to see how important. The inclusion of Graphic Novels to this pretigious little club really highlights just how important Borders sees Graphic Novels as a huge source of revenue.

Is it bad news for comics retailers? That's still to be decided. No doubt many will be wailing and crying foul, but I think that a smart retailer is already so comitted to Graphic Novels as the cornerstone of their business that some extra competition from Borders, although it may hurt the bottom line, can be seen as an important step towards recognition for the existing comic shops. The raising of cultural awareness in these new fangled comic things should never be seen as a bad thing in my opinion.
It all boils down to that essential nugget of marketing:
If only 1% of the population even knows about your product, it doesn't matter how well you sell it, at the very most you're going to be selling to a large proportion of the tiny percentage.
But if 20, 30 or 50% of the population are interested in what you want to sell to them, think how many more sales that could potentially be?
If Borders succeed in expanding the comic buying market, then I think any sales they "take" from good comic shops will be far, far outweighed by the increase in visibility of Graphic Novels. Of course, it's then the job of every good comic shop to go and get these extra readers and sell to them.

Of course, if your local store is an old fashioned, dirty, badly lit little hovel from the 80s, then they've already missed the boat and are living on borrowed time anyway.

But stores that have looked into the future and see that it's got a spine, a barcode and a long shelf life may well find that Borders opening up the Graphic Novel market to more and more people could, if we all play it right, be a good thing.

No doubt time will tell......

Borders announcement
The Beat on Borders new stores
ICV2 on Borders

Page 45 Eddie Campbell signing. Sunday 3rd August 2008

I found about this a while back, when Eddie mentioned it on his blog, but no-one else seemed to be mentioning it and out of respect for dear Stephen at Page 45 decided to let him announce it in his own time.

So, here's the my space announcement: Eddie Campbell signing. Sunday 3rd August. 1:30-3:30. Meet in Page 45.
Then, as Stephen is known to be partial to alcohol (Preferably red, but he's not that fussy really), they're all off down the pub. And so could you. Turn up at Page 45 for the signing and be let in on the secret pub location for a night of revelry with Eddie (who's also partial to a drop of the good stuff so I'm told).
I may get around to going. I hope so. I still owe Holland a drink from many years ago.

For those of you who don't know Page 45 is one of the best comic shops I've ever been into. In fact, purely on shops I've visited; the top three are Nostalgia & Comics, Page 45 and GOSH. I know I'm biased about Nostalgia & Comics but I really believe we are a fantastic shop, passionate, great stock and continually striving to get better.
In terms of other UK shops I really mean to visit but haven't yet; OK Comics at Leeds is meant to be really good, as are various FPI stores around the country (Edinburgh, Glasgow et al). Again, I know I may be seen as biased about FPI, but just talking to some og the folks at FPI about the business has proven to me thatFPI, despite it's flirtation with being a pop culture store is predominantly a Comic Shop.
Like we always used to say at Nostalgia & Comics: It's what we do best. And if, as reported by those who should know, other FPI stores are doing the same as Nostalgia & Comics; putting comics and graphic novels right at the heart of everything we do, then the future looks bright.

And with stores of the caliber of GOSH, N&C and Page 45, the future does indeed look extremely bright indeed.

Brian Hibbs Tilts at Windmills, Dirk Deppey calls Farce.....

Brian Hibbs posted his latest Tilting at Windmills looking at the Bookscan figures for graphic novel sales through the major book stores in the US.

Dirk has just posted the most wonderful repost. There's too much stuff to really summarise and I'm too tired, so I'll leave you with this nugget:

Since Hibbs provides exactly zero evidence for his assertion, it’s pretty much pointless to attempt to refute it. Instead, let’s go in the other direction, and assume that both Hibbs and Reynolds are right: Art comics don’t sell in bookstores, and most sell only a quarter of that in comic-book shops. (What exactly does one-forth of nothing look like, I wonder?) Questions then arise: How are companies like Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics managing to afford all those pricey hardcovers that they’ve been releasing lately? And where do they go? Do Chris Oliveros, Brett Warnock, Kim Thompson and Dan Nadel all get together in some hidden forest somewhere, back dumptrucks into a big bonfire and burn copies of Storeyville and Acme Novelty Datebook while they dance around laughing? How long before the credit-card companies and investment bankers who are probably supplying the money for all of this get wise?

I really should update my resumé, shouldn’t I?

Moreover, it occurs to me that since art comics, “with the exception of a tiny handful of ‘anointed’ books, do not appear to be selling in the bookstore environment,” and they sell less than that in the Direct Market, publishers really needn’t worry about harming retailers’ pocketbooks with pre-release sales at conventions, do they? I mean, with the sales numbers being in negative integers and all, they’d practically be adding to comics-shop owners’ bottom lines…

Next week: Fantagraphics goes bankrupt, and the countdown to this website’s disappearance begins as next month’s Internet bill won’t get paid. Bye! It’s been fun! Until then, there’s always the news…

And that, ladies and gentlemen is why Dirk is always one of the first things on my blogroll I read each night.

Oh, and while we're on the subject here's Tom's two cents on the subject from which I'll pull this little quote:

So I can say this with some confidence. No matter how you get there, to state at your conclusion that the comic book Direct Market of comics and hobby shops sells more Western books "with only a handful of exceptions" is completely ridiculous. There are now publishers whose entire trade lines are believed to sell more copies book by book through their book distributors than they do in the DM. There are at least two well-known publishers whose trade sales to the bookstore market in aggregate have outweighed DM sales in aggregate for between a half-decade and a decade now. There's one major American comics publisher for whom more aggregate sales and greater sales by individual item has always been the case.

Comics vs Graphic Novels...... I think that noise was Paul Levitz throwing in the towel for comics!

Came to this one a little late, but Newsarama had an interview with Paul Levitz, DC Comics' Publisher & President. They talk about the year gone by and the year to come. And a little down the page get into the whole comics vs graphic novels debate.

This is what Levitz has to say:

"Nobody knows exactly the size of the present audience for graphic novels as a category. My suspicion is that there are probably more people reading graphic novels today than there are reading periodical comics. I think that has probably crossed in the last year or two years."

Of course, for every nugget of interesting speculation or truth he comes out with theirs something so obviously wrong, so upside down in his thinking that you just scratch your head in wonder.....
On piracy in the comics medium, Levitz gives us an analogy to the Music industry with the contention that:

"When I look at the music industry, I think less music is being created and marketed today than there was 10 years ago. I think the effect of piracy has been to discourage creativity. You have a tremendous amount of ground level creativity – the group that would’ve only been a band in somebody’s basement, who now have access to the market by putting their stuff up on YouTube or in some other fashion, being able to have a shot at a moment of fame and some income, which is wonderful. The internet has been very positive and powerful that way. But the amount of music that’s being created by any form of an established group has diminished enormously..... I don’t think it’s as vibrant a marketplace as it was years ago. I think that’s a bad thing."

I know for a fact that my broadband connection has vastly increased the amount of previously unheard music I'm now listening to. Granted, my cd purchasing hasn't really gone up, but it certainly hasn't gone down.
I know for certain that, if I was somewhere with a good gig scene (and that somewhere isn't York, trust me), I'd be spending a lot more money going out to see bands I'd never heard of previously.
Paul's got it wrong. The marketing model for music is changing certainly. And to big record executives, that's a scary thing. But to say that there is less new music is just wrong.

But nice to see that DC's President has a reasoned take on the rise of the graphic novel.

Of course, this still doesn't stop him from being the complete bastard who stopped the UK getting copies of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier through our local comic shops.
Well done on that one Paul. What a great way to drive a wedge between the consumer, the retailer, the creators and the publisher. You horrible, petty little man.

The ongoing retailers vs comic companies on convention sales debate:Comic Companies win.....

Over on the Fantagraphics Blog Eric Reynolds and Gary Groth weigh in with their thoughts from a comic company that does sell at conventions in their view on the whole ComicsPRO position paper debate.
This from Gary Groth:

"The main reason we go to all this trouble is for the long-term promotional value it has for our company and our authors - and for all the retail channels that sell our books. If I was persuaded that we a) sell no more books short- or long-term due to our convention appearance, and that b) retail stores were losing sales because of it, I'd be happy to refrain from all that work, believe me. However, I'm convinced of exactly the opposite. In the event, I think ComicsPro's "position paper" is short-sighted and provincial. This may be a case where we have to continue promoting our books in this fashion for the good of retailers despite their wishes that we stop the practice. Which is pretty damned weird, but there you have it."

Heidi also has a lovely summary of it all:

"When all is said and done, the retailers who vocally oppose the practice have been asked again and again what would be the absolute, provable benefits of stopping the practice of pre-selling at conventions for the publishers. The answer almost always comes down to “Retailers will like you more.” We’re sorry, but given the very strong case that Reynolds and Groth make in the above linked post about the benefits for the entire medium, that just doesn’t wash.

Comic Companies win.
ComicsPRO really needs to think next time before publishing such a badly thought out, unhelpful and (perhaps most importantly) unquantified piece of rubbish like this.

Comic shops - what you really, really want...

Alan Daid Doane has recently been posting about what core values and practices he would like comic shops to adopt. (All of which are simple, reasonable, essential for growth and something we've been banging on about for ages.)

But I think Tim O'Neil does it with a bit more style and a hell of a lot more snark....

• When I see retailers making a point to cultivate casual customers, I feel jealous and unwelcome.
• I want to feel when I walk in the door of my comic book store that I am entering a dark, wet womb which envelops me and protects me.
• I like to be able to look around the shop and see isolated, sullen loners buying their comics.
• I like knowing that my fellow customers and the clerks in my store hate the hobby as much as I do, and hate it for the same reasons: I hate comics because of the person they made me.

ComicsPRO position paper rumbles on.......I'm with Dirk on this one...

I've seen this one building for a few days and to be honest, haven't the energy to post about it more than this.

But I just read Dirk's take on it and think he's pretty much bang on about it.

To summarise: ComicsPRO, the retailer organisation for comic shops, came out with a position paper that essentially complains about comic companies debuting books at conventions before making them available to comic shops and then pretty much demands they stop.

This was very quickly rounded on by Tom Spurgeon, Johanna, Alan David Doane, and I'm sure, many others (but like I say, no energy for this sadly). Brian Hibbs does put a good argument on the opposing side as well.

As for me, I can sympathise with the retailer's lot, having worked in one a goodly portion of my adult life, but feel it's a little akin to bullying, and seems to completely miss a lot of the main points about the failings of the direct market. Of course, the UK, having far fewer big conventions, probably has never seen the impact upon sales that ComicsPRO asserts is happening in US stores.

ComicsPRO are having a go essentially at publishers like Top Shelf, Fantagraphics, D&Q, SLG and others who routinely sell at shows and, according to anecdotal evidence sell a goodly portion of their stock at shows.

(from Dirk's piece: "In his interview with Michael Dean for The Comics Journal #277, Top Shelf co-publisher Chris Staros noted that roughly a third of his sales come from “mail-ins and convention appearances.")

Similarly these publishers are by and large ignored by the majority of retailers. If you want a UK specific example of that look at Paul Grist's interview with Matthew Badham on the FPI blog a short while back:

"I think I ended up printing 3000 copies of the first issue. Then I decided to try and sell them. That was a matter of sending out a sample copy to all the comic shops in the UK and selling it directly to them. And from that I found that, out of the hundreds of comic shops in the UK, there were about 15 willing to sell something like that."

15 shops willing to even try to sell something as obviously good as Paul Grist's Kane. It's the same, or even worse in the states. So if you're someone like Top Shelf or Fantagraphics and are never that far above break even are you really going to stop selling these books at conventions just so you can be routinely ignored by the majority of the shops that ComicsPRO says are being hurt so badly by your actions?
I think not.
Remember this is Top Shelf and Fantagraphics; both of which nearly went bust a few years back when a distributor went under. They had to beg, literally beg, for us to buy extra books that month just to keep the cash flow going so that the banks didn't close them down. But ComicsPRO is expecting them to cut off maybe up to 1/3 of their sales?
(And as is the way with these things I can find no direct link to the plea they put out, but try these anyway.... here and here.)

The shops it does hurt, people like Brian Hibbs and others who do stock a full range, are caught in the unfortunate middle ground.
I'm sure people like Brian do all this anyway, but surely, this is just one of those things to grin and bear? Indeed, based on our smaller experience in the UK convention sales don't bite that hard.

Take the most recent convention. The Birmingham Comics Show. Loads of people there selling books that the fans could have bought from us at Nostalgia & Comics. And quite a lot of new books as well that were being sold on debut. But, although this is only anecdotal and frankly guessing, evidence, I don't think we did all that badly out of it. I'd be guessing that 75% plus of our standing orders wouldn't buy new when they knew they were getting it from us, such is the customer loyalty we try to foster.
And the good thing about conventions is the amount of extra trade we do on those days from people from all over the country who travel especially down to it. How do I know? Well, just by looking at the fans - there were an awful lot of Nostalgia & Comics bags at the show and we don't just give those away at the till.

We also tend to get actively involved in the shows, hosting extra signings at the store, buying extra copies of the convention debut direct from the publishers or creators so we've got it in as well. Like I say, maybe this is unique to the UK with our smaller (geographically and financially) market.

Another thing with these publishers, most of the convention debuts are perennial stock items, things we plan to have on the shelves for as long as they're in print, things that sell over and over again. Take Andi Watson. He sells at shows. But for the distributor shipping late, he would have debuted Glister 2 at the Birmingham Show. My take on that is that if Andi sells someone a Glister 2 and they shop in Birmingham then maybe, just maybe, we'll get the sale for Glister 3, and then a copy of Breakfast Afternoon, Slow News Day, Love Fights, Paris and everything else he does. It doesn't have to be a sale lost in the long term.

So maybe I'm really wrong, maybe I'm talking out of turn. But I just can't see it.
Yes, it's a bad deal on retailers in the US if they really get hit that badly by convention sales. But do ComicsPRO really expect these publishers to just roll over and go out of business waiting for the majority of the comic shops to stock them? This is precisely the reason that publishers like Fantagraphics and Top Shelf are trying to get their books carried in major book stores. They need the sales. They need more exposure, more outlets stocking them. And if the direct market isn't doing that they have every right to look elsewhere.

In the end it comes down to a simple equation. Would the good shops, like Nostalgia & Comics, a lot of the Forbidden Planet International stores, Page 45, Gosh, Comix Experience et al rather lose a small proportion of sales to the conventions and keep the publishers in business years down the line, allowing us to sell their quality works over and over and over again or would we rather lose them for good for the short term gain?

And this was meant to be quick.