2002-09-14 - 11:54 p.m.

Order Forms

The main feature of today was that the Manager and I spent most of the evening working on our September comic order forms. Every month we get a catalog and an order form from Diamond Comic Distributors, and we have to send our orders back to them on a disc. Generally it takes us two nights to finish the job, working about 5 or 6 hours a night, with a break in the middle for dinner.

This sounds tedious and boring, and a lot of the time it is - it's basically 11 hours of writing down numbers and checking them. Of course, the boredom is leavened a little bit by the fact that we're dealing with comics here, and the fact that the Manager and I are cynical and jaded comic retailers, frequently cracking jokes at the expense of the comic publishers.

Most of it is pretty easy - if your ordering issue #158 of a comic book it's a pretty good bet that it's going to sell very much like issue #157 and #156 did. Actually since we are ordering two months in advance, we generally have to rely on checking how issue #155 did so we can order #158. We are constantly fine-tuning our numbers, raising and lowering them in response to the ebb and flow of comic sales.

For instance, this month we seem to be dropping a lot of numbers by twos and threes. The buzz surrounding the Spider-Man movie caused a general increase in sales, and that seems to have tapered off a little, therefore we are cutting our numbers.

Something I should point out here: whereas newsstands get to return their unsold magazines for credit, we get to keep our leftovers forever, therefore it behooves us to order carefully. A while back Unchbunch suggested that comic companies should start taking returns again, but that will never happen. In the old days, comic companies would often have to print five comics for every one they sold. Now their print runs are very close to 1:1 which I'm sure represents a significant savings for them.

And now I feel a rant coming on. This almost 1:1 print-to-sold ratio is not good enough for some people, specifically the dolts at Marvel Comics. While they are the publishers of some of the better selling comics (like Spider-man) for years they have been the retarded step-sister of the comic industry. Sometimes I think that having Down's Syndrome is one of the requirements for being an executive there.

The other comic companies have a policy of slightly over-printing their comics in case of mistakes, or retailers wanting to reorder more. For example, if I sell out of a DC comic, I think the odds are about 95% that I will be able to get a reorder.

Not with Marvel, no. Marvel "prints to order" so the odds are probably close to 95% that you WON'T be able to get more of a Marvel book once it sells out. In fact, a number of smaller stores don't even get what they ordered due to mistakes or allocations. There are a couple of times where, due to a distributor error, we were missed on a Marvel book, and we had to go scrambling for copies because there were no reorders available. The president of Marvel Comics, a knuckle-dragging sub-cretin named Bill Jemas, called this policy "an intelligence test for comic retailers." Frankly, I consider it a sign that Marvel HAS no intelligence, and is frigging crazy in the bargain.

In the last couple of months we been having to deal with another of Marvel's enlightened "decisions."

The catalog that we use for ordering is called Previews and a new edition comes out every month, and is usually about half as thick as a phone book. Recently Marvel has changed how its solicitations look in Previews whereas before there was some information on the title (writer, artist, brief plot synopsis) with some art, now the solicitation is simply a picture, with maybe one short sentence of text. We are ordering these books based on a picture, which may or may not appear in the issue, since sometimes they used a previous month's cover as the picture. So basically we are ordering Marvel comics with almost no information. We get a line like "A bold new direction!" with no clue as to what that bold new direction is. Lovely.

If they think that this is going to make us order more comics, they are dead wrong. It is going to make us order conservatively.

You know, I almost wrote the phrase "I have no idea why they are doing this stupid thing," but then I realized that wasn't true. Marvel SAYS that it's trying to solicit its comics without giving away important plot details that would spoil the story for its readers, but that's horseshit. Since when has Marvel cared about that? It's easy to write a solicitation that gives you an idea of what's going on without giving away important details, i.e.: "How will the X-Men cope with the shocking events of last issue?" The trouble is that writing copy like that takes someone with brains, and Marvel is too cheap to hire someone to do that. And there is another reason.

Recently Marvel has been trying to weasel out of its "terms of sale." That is, if a book comes out that is not how Marvel said it would be in the solicitation, then Marvel should take returns on it. While this can refer to artist, or writer or story, most often it has to do with lateness. If a book comes out a month late, that can definitely make it sell less. What Marvel is trying to do here, obviously, is to provide almost no information with its solicitations, so they can't be forced to take returns. Obviously this is another scam dreamed up by their lawyers. That's the other hallmark of Marvel's business dealings - stupid, and sleazy.

In another bit of comic business irony, Marvel used to be infamous for supplying far, far TOO MUCH information on their comics. They used to have their own monthly sales booklet called "Sales To Astonish," named after one of their Silver Age titles, Tales To Astonish. I can't even begin to describe what a fountain of bullshit this thing was. It was full to the brim with hype, hyperbole and outright lies. The thing about it that used to make my blood boil was that Marvel's clueless dorks were actually presuming to give me advice on how to run my own business, how to rack & display comics, etc. It was utter shit.

Just thinking about this is making my ears turn red, but I will provide one brief example of Marvel's unbelievable chutzpah.

Even if you don't run a store, you probably know what a "promotional item" is. It's something that a manufacturer of a product gives out to retailers to help advertise a product. The most obvious example is a poster, but it can include things like stickers and displays. Next time you're in a convenience store, look around, I'm sure you'll see dozens of them. They are nearly always free.

Marvel was so incredibly cheap, that it was trying to make us pay for promotional items. What was even worse was that they were clearly selling these things at a profit. The most glaring example of this was something they called the "Tower of Power." Basically it was a rectangular comic rack with plastic pockets on all four sides. They wanted $99 dollars for it, which seemed a little steep for a small comic rack, especially one that had the Marvel brand name all over it. However, a very careful reading of the solicitation would reveal a nasty surprise: the thing was not a metal spinner rack - it was made of "plastic treated cardboard," and didn't even turn! That's right, mode of cardboard! It was a crappy cardboard rack with a plastic base and pockets, and they wanted $99 for it. I remember at the time talking to a neophyte store owner that ordered two of the damn things. He was an unhappy camper.

In 1996-98 when Marvel was journeying through bankruptcy court, it was rather distressing for the comics industry, but there was part of me that was laughing up my sleeve. "Heh, good thing I didn't take any of your business advice, you schmucks!"

So basically, Marvel are a bunch of sleazy liars, which is something to keep in mind when we're ordering their comics. It appears they've had an epiphany that the best way to avoid lying is to not say anything at all. Bully for them.

Well, that rant went on longer than I thought it would.

Doing order forms is not exactly easy now, but it used to be much, MUCH tougher in the early-to-mid 1990s. The comic market was in the grip of a terrible speculation fever, and this made ordering very, very difficult. There were all these gimmicks designed to increase sales, while a lot of comics turned into unreadable crap. It's funny, in a very dark way, that a lot of the things they did were designed to make comics more "valuable," but 99.999% of everything that was produced in the 1990s is nearly valueless - supply is just swamping demand.

Back in the bad old days, instead of doing the order forms in two evenings it would take us as many as five, because there was just so much stuff, and figuring out what to order was so very hard. A comic would be selling 10 copies a month, and then something special would happen, and sales would jump to 50. Sometimes I look at the numbers that we were selling and ordering back then and wonder how we did it. We did get stuck with some stuff, but for the most part our orders and our sales were pretty close to each other.

Hey, we're professionals. We know what we're doing.

The Manager and I have also developed our little catch-phrases to deal with certain situations. For instance, the phrase "cult favorite!" is used to refer to a comic with very, very low sales. We got the phrase from "Sales To Astonish" where they were talking about one of their bottom-dwellers as a "cult favorite," which made us giggle. Can one person be a cult?

Then there's the phrase "tanky-spanky" which is shorthand for: "this book is tanking and we are getting spanked with leftover comics." Sometimes it seems that the all readers of a certain comic will have a meeting when we are out of earshot and decide to stop buying a book all at once. I wish they'd invite us to these meetings, for a change.

And when we order a couple copies of a comic we don't think is very good, I like to use the phrase "after all, we ARE a comic store."

I suppose the most amusing thing that happened tonight happened while the Manager and I were eating dinner upstairs in the Hamster Palace. While we were eating we were watching the antics of the baby hamsters, and they seemed to be fighting a lot. There was one fight in the corner right in front of me where one hamster bit the other on the balls. You can bet that the other hamster lost interest in the fight quickly. I suppose I should have given the other hamster a time-out for fighting dirty, but kids will be kids.

I'm not sure what the point of this long, rambling essay was, other than to give you folks an idea what I spend two nights a month on, every month. It can be amusing, it can be difficult, but mainly it has to be done.