2002-09-21 - 11:57 p.m.

Order Forms, Part 2

Tonight the Manager and I finished our monthly order forms that we started here.

This is generally how we do things - we start the order forms on one Saturday and finish them on the next. It's most convenient that way because the store closes earliest on Saturday.

The first week, we ordered the new books from the major comic publishers: Dark Horse, DC, Image and Marvel. This week we tackle the rest of the comic publishers, and the non-comic items. This is easily the smallest half of the order form for us, but the work on the two Saturdays is evened up by the fact that in the second half we also input the orders onto the disk we have to send to Diamond and proofread them.

The fact that we split the work up like this is a reflection of the way that Previews is set up. The four publishers that I listed above are Diamond's "Select" publishers, and all others, regardless of size, are dumped into a ghetto labeled "comics" which is listed afterwards. This division is actually a relic of the comic distributor wars of the mid-1990s.

In the early 1990s there were about a dozen comic distributors, many of them regional distributors that covered certain sections of the country.

All this was torn to pieces when Marvel Comics bought Heroes World, a modest New Jersey operation that controlled about 5% of the market. The comic industry was thrown into turmoil when Marvel announced that Heroes World was going to be the EXCLUSIVE distributor of Marvel Comics. I really can't overstate what a stupid idea this was and what a nightmare it was for comic stores. Practically overnight Heroes World went from having 5% of the market to having 30%, and they couldn't handle it. There were all sorts of logistical problems. For example, when there was a problem (and there were a LOT of them) you'd call the Heroes World hotline and have to wait on hold for over an hour for someone to help you.

The other publishers reacted by making exclusive deals with other distributors. The biggest publishers (DC, Dark Horse, Image) made a deal with Diamond, the largest comic distributor, and so were granted "Select" publisher status. Some of the bigger independent publishers went with Diamond's main competition, Capital City, an operation based in Wisconsin and the second largest distributor. The other comic distributors, abruptly deprived of 90% of their income, went out of business.

Eventually Marvel gave up on the nightmare that was Heroes World, and went exclusive with Diamond as another "select" publisher. Captial City struggled on for a while then threw in the towel, leaving Diamond as practically the sole comic distributor in the United States.

So, in the space of a few years we went from a dozen comic distributors to just one. Diamond has an unshakable monopoly on comic distribution in the United States. If you are a publisher and can't get Diamond to carry your books, you are screwed. Similarly, if you are a store, you have to get along with Diamond, because it's their way or the highway. If they give you crappy service, you cannot take your business elsewhere. For example, a bad relationship with Diamond partially caused this area's largest and oldest comic store to go out of business a couple years ago.

Diamond does not screw around. They are the 800 pound gorilla, and they can sit anywhere they want, even if it's on your head.

For the most part we don't have many problems with Diamond. We get the same shortages and allocations everyone else gets. We are surviving.

Anyway, once you get past the Select Publishers section in Previews, the monthly Diamond catalog, the pickings are rather thin, and they seem to be getting thinner, month by month. This is the classic case of the big getting bigger and the small getting smaller.

Then again, there is the curious case of Crossgen Comics, which looks to breaking out of the independent publisher ghetto. I talked about them previously here. They are just about big enough to be one of the Select publishers, but there doesn't seem to be a way to graduate from one section to the other. Crossgen wants to know what they can do to make the cut, and Diamond really hasn't given them any answer. For course the REAL answer is: "You get to be a Select Publisher by being a player in the comic distribution wars of 1995-6." However, that's not very helpful in 2002.

As I think I've mentioned before, the reason it takes us so long to go through the Diamond order forms is that they are huge. Each month Diamond offers over 3,000 items, but we only order about 400-500 of them. The vast majority of the items on the order form are either re-offers of stuff we've already ordered, or items that we don't really make an effort to carry, like t-shirts, statues, models, posters, games, cards, foreign magazines and videos. Whew!

Let me tell you, there is a lot of weird stuff hidden in the Diamond catalog. Here's an item that had me bugging this month: porn star action figures.

Yes! It's true! There is a company that is making porn star action figures! Their website is here but don't go there unless you're at least eighteen years old.

These disturbingly lifelike little dolls are made using a state-of-the-art laser scanning technique that promises to "reproduce each starlet's most intimate detail." Like, ick.

The dolls come with little outfits, but when you take their clothes off, they are anatomically correct, apparently. I know what they look like because there was a photo in the Adults-only Supplement to Previews.

Good grief, what next?

On a lighter note, every copy of this month's Previews had a sticker in it, promoting the new Simpsons' collectible card game. When I first opened my copy, it fell out into my lap. Here is what it looks like:

Isn't that cute? God, I love the Simpsons. Their comic is pretty good, too.

So as you see, it isn't all grim number crunching. Still, I'm glad it's done for the month.