the midnight album sale, opening weekend, the first broadcast airing of a tv show, day of release video game sales.. I know I've engaged in all these activities. there will always be musical artists you don't discover for yourself until later, that movie you catch on HBO that you never considered bothering catching in the theater, a syndicated rerun of King of Queens you found yourself amused with, and that 9.99 preowned game that came out 3 years ago you heard such great things about. there will also be those books you eye for a while you never consider until later.. I had never some much as glanced through a issue of Cerebus before november of last year.. by may I had polished off the whole series, all 16 phonebooks.. post-Reads and all.

we are always looking for the next big thing... consider that a side effect of the "youth is God" American way of "out with the old and in with the new". but there's something great about catching up with your books to share your thoughts with like minded people while the info is a fresh as possible. monday morning after that new sopranos... the day after a midnight premiere.. shooting the sh** on xbox and talking new games you've picked up... last nights football game.. that new mindless celebrity gossip of someong making drunken racial slurs as they break up with their boyfriend during a sex video for their cult.

the power of topicality and the giant watercooler status of the internet does make the new book wednesday imporant for the social aspect of comicbookdom.... that being said, there's no way in hell you've exploited all the great collected works available in trades. I've never really read Powers until the HC came out, now I'm dying for volume 2. I'd never touched Invincible until I gave into peer pressure to read the damn first trade... now I have both the HCs. the duality here is a bit like the movie industry once the DVD market (to a lesser extent the VHS market) really exploded. there's no reason to see either dying off even if there is a fluctuation in attractiveness for consumers. I'm addicted to x-factor every month, whereas I'm waiting to hardcover trade for the last 12 ish's worth of Whedon Astonishing.

maybe there aren't the 400,000 seller books of decades gone past, but there also aren't books that don't sell 400,000 copies that remain left behind after. I don't think I'll ever run out of things to read with things like the marvel essentials line and great Vertigo back catalogs to keep me going. the sheer amount of choices now is overwhelming. I buy 90% of my tpbs at my LCS, regardless of the money I could save on amazon.com or somesuch. the social aspect of getting recommendations beyond some amazon.com algorithim drives the experience.. as does having your local purveyor find something you swore was out of print.

it's ok to embrace your inner fanboy, just don't dwell on it. fill your bookshelf with trades.. fill your longboxes with fresh books.. it's not like there's a gaping lack of talent in either pool right now.

Overall though, an active fan base craving new releases and willing to make time in their schedules to go get them each weekis a very good thing. Hollywood now relies on it and the music industry would kill for that to be the case for them again. The phenomenon of fan support is a good thing. The current monopoly distribution system is not."

Wow, it took 67 posts, including a bunch of rambles by myself, but yeah, that seems perfectly accurate to me. What I would have said, were I coherent enough. Nice work.

Retailers will be the ones who will pay for Marvel's actions not Marvel. Comics are in the end periodicals just like newspapers and magazines. If they aren't delivered in a timely fashion, people lose interest in them because they are old news. Even though comics are fiction, with the active comic websites and blogs these fictional events also become old news quickly.

Comics are shipped on a weekly basis much like Time, People, or Newsweek and when Diamond misses or screws up a shipment by even one day it costs the retailer. For most retailers around 30% of their sales on new comics happen on Wednesday a.k.a. New Comic Day. Diamond at best gives lip service about being apologetic for such mishaps which happen to retailers each week.

Diamond should make all items that do not arrive on Tuesday (when most shops now receive their books which are then processed and put on the shelves Wed.) fully returnable. They know how much it cripples a shop to receive late comic product but seem to consistently fail to deliver. This is particularly shocking given that there are at most 5000 comic shops in the U.S.

Overall though, an active fan base craving new releases and willing to make time in their schedules to go get them each weekis a very good thing. Hollywood now relies on it and the music industry would kill for that to be the case for them again. The phenomenon of fan support is a good thing. The current monopoly distribution system is not.

My work experience even in book stores is that regular releases sell better from romance which is dead on schedule to best sellers which also rely on dated PR. Harry Potter midnight sales anyone?

Unless I'm missing something in Greg's proposal, which is entirely possible, eliminating floppies could make the sales at Pol's store on Monday and Tuesday more reflective of the whole week, whereas I'm sure Pol and Ian like having Big Days on Thursday and Friday, even if the occasional late shipment gets in the way sometimes. Correct me if I'm wrong, obviously.

Unfortunately, the loss of sales from late shipments would appear to be the simple result of operating in a free market economy; not a uniquely geeky comics thing. (Kudos to T. for saying everything I mean to a trillion posts before I get around to it!)

The thing about what happens when all stores' shipments are late is pretty weird, though. Any theories for why that is, Pol?

Seriously, it's massive.
Our weekly sales are pretty regular. Terrible on Sunday, low on Monday and Tuesday, Pretty Good on Wednesday, with Big Days Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Our shipment arrives Wednesday evening, and is on the shelf by Thursday.

The simple fact is that if we don't get a shipment Wednesday evening, we end up with low sales Wednesday and Low Sales Thursday... and oddly enough, we don't make up the sales on Friday and Saturday, they're just 'lost sales'.
Additionally, if something 'big' is coming in (say, Justice League #1 or Civil War) and we don't get the stock ON new comics day, we end up with more unsold issues.

And oddly enough, it's not just the days when we don't get a shipment but the other stores do (there are at least two stores within 5 minutes walking distance of ours), even when all the stores' shipments are late, it still slows down... even if it's a public holiday delay at Diamond or something like that.
It's the damnedest thing.

Fortunately, the store I work in is fairly diverse, and we can make up lost comic sales in sales on Trade Paperbacks, RPG's and (gods help us) Magic Cards.

Actually, having worked in an entertainment store that included movies, I can tell you that dvd retailers do that, too. If this week's newest discs aren't in on Tuesday morning, people go elsewhere. They cancel their pre-orders, get their down-payments back and go to the next place. And that's a medium that isn't in as real a danger of experiencing sell-outs than comics. Even a "limited edition" disc is still going to be on shelves two months from now, no matter how hot a release it is. Same goes for cds, as well.

Watching Lost on tv is the comicbook - buying Season 1 is the tpb.

Of course, the people must have the discs as soon as the doors open are the hardcore fans, and music/movie stores exist by catering to a larger audience than just them; something comicshops still need to work on. How do you do that?

I really don't know. But I find it interesting that, in any discussion of how to save comics, the discussion eventually gets around to which group of fans we need to get rid of to make things healthy again.

Personally, I don't think that's any better than Frederick Wertham pointing at comics or Jack Thompson pointing at videogames, trying to find the one item that, if taken away, will just magically make everything all better again. "If kids stop listening to heavy metal music, they'll stop talking back to their parents; if we could just get rid of the Wednesday-morning customers, comics would be big business again." That's crap.

You want to save comics, it doesn't mean killing the LCS any more than saving the movie industry means shutting down your local art house cinema. It doesn't mean cutting out the Wednesday Morning Demanders, the (comparitively) "casual" fans or the indy snobs. It doesn't mean getting rid of Civil War or Love & Rockets. It's not ignoring, overwriting, retconning or expurgating anything. You have to accept and embrace everything the hobby is if you ever want it to be anything more, because the second you try to say anything it isn't, you're the one holding it back.

Now, if you're one of those who don't want it to be anything more? Fine, you're welcome to your opinion. Feel free to stay quiet though, because that will kill the industry faster than anything: silence. Keep your mouth shut and comics will die just as fast as they have been.

Comics should be good? Comics are already good. What comics need is press, public recognition, and that's something none of us can do, because none of us lead a public life and have a truly public forum.

Whether you agree or disagree with the opinions here, this blog is preaching to the choir. Every other comics blog, too. Because they're being read by comic fans, and that's it. My mom's never heard of Newsarama. My uncle has no idea what The Comic Wire is. Right now, comics are too small, too niche to afford advertising - that means we need to be the advertisers. We need to be the hype machine. If that happens, it won't matter if five fans go to another comic shop on Wednesday morning, because ten more will be during the rest of the week.

So we need to change the system? Yes, we need to change the system. But we don't need to change everything, and we certainly don't need to drive any fans away, no matter when or where they want to buy their books...

--yo
just doesn't know when to shut up

Sorta. Jaime and Gilbert do generally try to stick to a schedule and tell us when the next issue's gonna be out.

I agree with Greg here, though. The periodical model was borrowed from the pulps and the high-end short story magazines, none of which really exist anymore.

The smart thing t'do is to borrow from the book publishing model, which people already understand and are used too. Monthly serial fiction is kind of a bizzare anacronysm now-a-days.

Wow - I couldn't disagree more with this answer but as you say it is predicated on the A- art model which I don't buy as on either/or proposition that departs from being timely.

Love and Rockets great comic, great A artists. Publishing whenever they feel like it only because it exists in a sea of timely work, like a novel appearing when the author is done, in a flow of real time events. That is what shared universes do; replicate the feeling of real time. There isn't a Classic Spiderman story that doesn't exist in the context of that sense of real time. Dark Knight, Watchmen…are stand-alones that the Indy creators took to out of zero option not some sort of integrity so I don't see how elevation of the novel form over seriality signifies capital A art. Frankly I know and appreciate the novels graphic approach for what it is but if that was all there was then I would stop reading comics altogether as a moribund place of, whenever they feel like it, capital A art already out there.

The story about Howard was just what got me started thinking about the idea that comics MUST arrive on Wednesday within a certain number of HOURS or retailers take a big hit -- to the point where they have to send employees racing all over town -- that's all. I still think that's nutty, and uniquely addictive behavior for an entertainment subculture... except maybe soaps, as Loren pointed out. But certainly some of the arguments presented against that idea have been reasonable and worth a look.

I still wish actual RETAILERS would pipe up, though. Are none of you out there reading this? How big a hit do you take if you lose the Wednesday sales?

Erm, that's called cancellation, not a delay! The fact that a) DC brought it back five years later and b) they brought back the original team (including one of the original British series letterers) to do it are two of the biggest miracles ever in comics history.

And France is choke full of comic shops, so the
publishing model won't be bad for the LCSs.

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

Basically, to me, this whole debate comes down to how much you value the fan community. It comes down to how much you value the format that comics have come in for quite some time now, too.

Because in this case, format is important. As Greg and others have noted, you lose the element of serialisation when you move from floppies to OGNs, but I'm not sure that we've noted how important that is.

Fiction may not "go stale" in a literal sense, but out of interest, how many articles had been posted on this blog spoiling Civil War #4 before Howard's full shipment arrived?

There's a social element to serialised floppies that shouldn't just be denied. Being able to discuss the developments of an issue with other fans, and having a common interest in what's going to happen in the next issue, is an important part of our culture.

And if people want to change that, then keep in mind, you're the ones making the (IMO, unneccessary) changes. So you need to come with better reasoning than the implications we've seen in this article and the comments section, you need to come with more compelling arguments than 'geeks be junkies!' and 'geeks are pathetic losers who ruin the industry's reputation and make shops look bad'.

The geeks, the fans, are the ones who have held the industry up, and they're not going to rush into a system that clearly patronises them and looks down on their traditions.

I'm NOT one of the guys who has to have my comics on new comics day. I'm quite happy to wait for the trade on occasion. But I don't see the point in forcing my buying habits onto other people who are happy doing it their way.

EVERYBODY is a geek for something. We, as an industry and as a pretty damn impressive sub-culture, have nothing to be ashamed of, despite what the more pessimistic members of our community think.

So, yeah, screw Diamond for their errors, and hate on Marvel and DC if you must for shipping late product. But it's not the fan's fault.

And I ended up buying Union Jack at a different comic shop because they didn't get it. *blush*

I pretty much never notice if a title's been delayed by a week or two. It's a small shift, and that's okay. It's the monthlong delays where I notice and get annoyed and wonder if there weren't ways this could have been prevented.

There is artistic serial fiction. There is mainstream serial fiction. Most comics may be neither, but they have been both in certain cases.

The 20-page floppy is a valid storytelling format. Whether or not it's still economically viable I will leave to the people who actually know something about business, but right now it doesn't look like DC or Marvel could just jump to all OGNs all the time. (Of course, if they really want to avoid another crash, they could jump to publishing no comics whatsoever and just licensing their properties for as long as copyright law will allow.)

"I think its incredibly telling how angry and defensive fans get when confronted by questions and statements about how niche the market really is. It becomes impossible to have a real discussion because suddenly everything is personal (”you’re not attacking the niche market, you’re attacking ME!” of course that might be a bad example, because I actually am attacking you, but Greg wasn’t)."

Based on the comments posted on this thread and elsewhere on this blog, I would say that most fans here agree that the industry has problems on a number of levels: marketing, format, and distribution. What I see many people taking offense to is that Greg related a story about how Diamond screwed over his local comic shop, then turned around and blamed the fans for that shop's predicament because they are such...well...fans!

I don't want to waste time restating what T. and others have already stated so eloquently, but the "fans" (Aren't you one, too, Joffe?)are guilty of nothing more than buying a product that they enjoy, and expecting some degree of professionalism from the company that produces that product. Who cares what the format is? Book, monthly, whatever, I wil buy something if I find it entertaining and enjoyable. When I complain about Civil War or any other book being late, it's not because I'm some "junkie" that needs his "fix," it's because I was enjoying a story and now, right in the middle of that story, the narrative momentum and suspense have been disrupted by a long gap between issues.

This is not a problem unique to comics: TV shows are produced in a serial format, and their fans complain when they are late, as well ("Lost," anyone?) I will be the first to admit that the comic industry has major problems, but don't blame the fans for the unprofessionalism and errors of the publishers and distributors. What are the fans supposed to do? Boycott superhero comics for years until the publishers see the light? I still enjoy reading them, and if the current sales model, flawed as it is, is the only one available, I'll take what I can get. If I don't like a particular book, I simply won't buy it.

Are you even reading the same comments thread as the rest of us? Not to break up your one-man condescension party, but hard as it may be to believe, sometimes when people disagree with you it isn't because they are blindly reactionary, stupid, personally offended or just incapable of "getting" it. Sometimes, believe it or not, people can totally get your argument and simply disagree on reasonable grounds. If you read the critiques to Greg's post, a lot of them are well thought-out, point out inconsistencies and have plenty of examples and reasonable arguments.

To be honest, you seem to be the person taking this personally most of all, even more than Greg and he's the one who WROTE the original article. Bully, Rohan, Kevin and others are considerably more relaxed and unemotional than you are.