Shell Games and Mystery Teams:
Putting the "Fun" in "Non-Refundable"
September, 1994

Even in the best of circumstances, ordering comics is more of an art than a science - we're asked to make decisions, sight unseen, 3 months in advance on some 600 different items, each of which is in some way dependent on the items around it. Even with the best tools we can muster (like, say, cycle sheets, and a subscription program), we're still essentially guessing what books will have what sales.

And the publishers seem dead set to make it less scientific each month, and more whimsical.

In the last two months, we're had 3 major publishers screw mightily with our ability to confidently predict where our sales will be: DC, Image, and Marvel.

With DC, it is, of course, Zero Hour/Zero Month.

By the time you read this, the first of the "zero" issues have shipped, and we'll know whether or not we guessed right - a source at DC suggested to me that orders came in well over 20% higher than "baseline" numbers. Can we actually move that many more DC titles? Who knows? But, it's rather frustrating to have to order 5 issues of a crossover mini-series, and 40 #0's in a two month period without any concrete way to determine whether our orders are sound or not.

Of course, with "Zero Month" we do have at least a "baseline" to work from. I personally went from between 1 and 5 copies higher on each book, on the assumption that some people at least are going to want to sample the "new" DC. But since I've placed my order, I've heard grumbles from many long-time DC fans that Zero Hour is where they're going to step off rather than on. Will readers be converted from other lines, other publishers? Will they magically find more money in their pockets? Will DC dabblers start buying more titles? We hope for the best, but the point is none of us know what the results might be. We're forced to guess, albeit with a base to extrapolate from.

Much more difficult to figure is Image.

Image, as you well know, has announced "X month", where we're asked to order 5 Founding Image titles, each by "An Image Founder" - but we don't know who is doing which book.

We. Don't. Know. Who. Is. Doing. Which. Book.

There are many factors that go into a books sales level - not the least of which is team. Let's face it, the Image Founders don't sell comics equally. Todd McFarlane has a demonstrably different level from Jim Valentino. I know that I'm going to sell significantly more copies of Shadowhawk if Jim Lee is drawing it, just as I'm going to sell significantly less copies of Spawn if Rob Liefeld draws it (your mileage might vary). It's wholly self-evident that creators make a huge difference in sell-though. And to not tell us who is drawing which book is an unconscionable act.

"It's Fun!" the ads proclaim. And, I will happily concede, for the consumers, it may well be. But for retailers, it's an ordering nightmare.

At Comix Experience, here's what we're typically selling:

Cyberforce: 19

Shadowhawk: 6

Spawn: 100

Wildcats: 43

Youngblood: 15

Given this set of numbers, how do you order "X Month", besides "badly"? No matter which book Todd is doing, there's no way to order enough copies of it from baseline. Similarly, whichever book Valentino is doing, it's clear we'll have too many copies.

The only way, the only way this promotion can make fiscal sense to a retailer is if it's the character that sells the audience, not the creator. That is, it's Spawn selling 90 of my 100 copies, not Todd McFarlane. And, if that's true, then Image may as well be Marvel, as that's always been their argument. I thought we were striving for something better than that.

Dave Sim and I were joking that this was the "Ringo ploy" - like how every Beatles album had the Obligatory Ringo Song, so that he could make some money, as well. The net effect of this promotion is likely to be the jacking up of all the numbers to near or equal each other, so that no matter which book "Ringo" is doing, he makes some lucre.

We'll see, I guess. Perhaps the numbers have even been released by the time this sees print. For myself, I did the only thing that I could do, given the circumstances: I limited the books to subscription only.

Yeah, that's right, I knowingly cut myself out of potential sales. And for one simple reason: I'm not in the business of selling raffle tickets. Let's face facts: whichever book Todd does will skyrocket in price on the secondary market. It doesn't matter what the reasons are (and I wholly believe when Image declares that this is "fun"), but the net effects must be taken into account. Just like the "limited to 20% of the print run" special covers the Jim Lee books have sported recently created a collectible item. You may disagree, but, I'm not in business to sell "collectibles". What I sell is Habitual Periodical Serial Fiction. And I'm certainly not in comics to sell artificially created "collectibles.

Make no bones about it: I want to participate in the "fun" of "X Month" - as a reader, I'm sure I'd get a kick out of this experiment - but, it is wholly unjust to ask retailers to take the ordering burden in determining what the audience for these books might be! How do you order it? I don't know, and preliminary conversations say that most of you aren't sure either.

How do you order it? How do you order it? It's not like it's a first issue of something, so you can depend on the following issues to absorb a minor amount of over-ordering, and it's not like you have something else to compare it to, to find the right ballpark. It's a complete shot in the dark.

And what about Marvel? Surely they are not without sin? Nope, they ain't.

Marvel is now soliciting for two different versions of the "X" books. Each title has a "deluxe" format (better paper, $1.95), and a "regular" version (newsprint, and $1.50) - my suspicion is that the "regular" version is the newstand copies, but that's pure hearsay. The idea, in and of itself isn't so bad, until you realize that the "regular" version of these books doesn't ship until 2 weeks later! Remember: we're in the business of selling Habitual Periodical Serial Fiction. This means that most of our consumers are a little...fanatical about their purchases. Wait two weeks? You must be nuts! The most frugal, or on limited budget, might be willing to wait two weeks, but most regular customers are going to buy the first one you put in front of them.

The little, evil suspicious part of me whispers that evidently Marvel needs to increase profitability, and standard marketing practices are no longer working for them. By raising the price by nearly 1/3 on their best selling franchise, they are clearly trying to raise the bottom line. If the market rejects the higher price, they still have the cheaper ones to fall back to, and if (much, much more likely) the market can't wait for their "fix", they can discontinue the $1.50 titles, pointing towards our buying habits as "justification". Bravo! A Master Stroke of Misdirection!

My prediction is that the more expensive versions will get substantially higher orders, and each "family" will get the split format rolled out, before 1 year passes, and once they're all converted, the "regular" versions will get phased out.

Again, we're posed with an ordering quandary. Who will wait? How many people won't accept the price hike? What percentage can we reasonably expect on each permutation, and will they even be close from book to book? Is it not possible that the Cable readers will wait, but Uncanny X-Men ones won't? What makes this even more hincky to guess is that several of the books, if the consumers are willing to wait for the "cheaper" version, will get price decreases (but only, of course, if we, collectively, are willing to stock the "two weeks late" version).

Is it any wonder, with programs like these that our orders are more and more and more conservative? How do you order any of this stuff? And (this is the big question), why are we being asked to take all of the risk in publisher's experiments?

Oh, sure, the publishers all have their platitudes: DC says it's "re-energizing our Universe", Image says it's "bringing fun back to comics", and Marvel is "giving the customer a choice of better quality" - these are all reasonable assessments, I guess, perhaps even laudable ones, but its we, the retailers, with the most to lose, and the least information to work from, who are being asked to subsidize these programs, at a time all evidence says we can least afford to do so!

It's time to seriously discuss returnability again (and it has been for months) - if not across the board (which I still think is the wisest course), then, at least, in cases like these, where all of our information is thrown right out the window.

My proposal (first mentioned, what, a year ago?) is that we be allowed to return a fixed percentage of our orders - say 20% - with minimum and maximum quantities possible - say 3 and 20. In order to pay for this privilege, we'd be charged a small sum per title - say 15 or 20 cents - which would be split between distributor and publisher. The important bit is to cover the distributor's costs in handling the returns. The rallying call of the anti-returns faction is that returns will inevitably lower our discounts. Well, damn it! They don't have to! If we cover their expenses, there's no reason to adjust the discount structure.

Right now our marketplace is very unhealthy - I don't know one retailer that isn't struggling to stay on top of it. It's a stone-cold bitch to order comics today, and you would think that publishers would be more cognizant of that fact. I think we're going to continue to be a marginal business unless and until we have either an external market change (like returnability), or an internal one (like publishers increasing quality, reducing quantity and halting their collective dependence on hype to sell comics).

Hopefully, one or the other will happen soon, but until then, the least you can do is make your dissatisfaction with these effectively anti-retailer experiments known. Retailers don't have a voice until we all speak up, in unison.