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"Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding." -Plato -
Swamp Thing seems interesting enough, it is weird reading a different Swamp Thing than the one in JLD so I will be picking this up, what bothers me is the include the DCnU (slaughter-porn) Swamp Thing & Animal Man. These two I would not want a kid to get introduced into Swamp Thing. I do like the fact that the included Shadowpack. I would have liked it better if the would have included vintage Swamp Thing and Demon Knight to go with and the new tales of Swamp Thing but that would make since.Visit my wiki site:
Comic Books in the Media
To view my custom works of both JLU and Megos go to:
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I am still skeptical...
a) it's Bleeding Cool so I take it with a grain of salt
b) It's one retailer (who was notoriously whiny because they were exclusive to Wal Mart and not available to shop owners through Diamond anyways) saying on Twitter this is what they said at Comics Pro when I have seen no other retailer in attendance yet corroborate this and I am not going to take his word for it with his track record concerning the books
c) There's be no official announcement form DC about the books except they were selling so well they just expanded the line from 4 to 6 books starting this month
d) the storylines they are supposed to collect in trade form from the Wal Mart books are 12 parts long and have 4 months worth of installments to go before being completed and need indivudual issue sales to pay for production costs of paying creators and such before sales trades would be enough to be profitable
it could be accurate, but until I hear officially from DC in a press release or official statement that they are cancelled, I will remain skeptical.
-M"Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding." -PlatoComment
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The biggest disservice Diamond and the Big 2 have done is taken it out of the hands of retailers...Comic books should be everywhere in my opinion. Prices of the books should be about half of what the books are priced at these days. I hope that these don't disappear from the shelves at Walmart...but the way DC is going these days (See articles on them taking an axe to the amount of titles they publish) I wouldn't be shocked at all if this will happen.
Oh...and did I say that Diamond should get some competition? Still a Monopoly after the last 25 years and NOBODY has done a damn thing about them. They manipulate the market because they are the only game in town. I still don't understand how they have gotten away with it for the last 25 years.Comment
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A couple of things to remember-
1) the direct market does what it was intended to do well i.e. sell comics to people who already know they want comics and what they want of the titles published. That's what Phil Seuling and others designed the direct market to be in the early 70s and that is still what the direct market, i.e. Diamond, does fairly well in today's market.
2) the comics industry did not give up on the newsstand market, the newsstand market gave up on comics. Mass market retailers did not want to carry comics because they took up too much space and had too small a cover price to make it worth their while to carry, sort, sell, and then return for credit what didn't sell. Lots of vendors who received comics never bothered to unbundle and display them for sale and just returned them for credit when the time came so companies like Marvel and DC were printing huge print runs that never went out for sale in many places and had a sell through of under 30% by the end (a great seller only had a sell through of about 50% so you were paying for twice as many copies to be printed than you sold for your best selling titles, but usually paid for more that that on most totals, so the profit margins became razor thing on that. Vendors didn't want the comics, publishers couldn't afford to keep sending them to vendors at those sell through rates and still make money. When places like 7-11 and such decided to stop carrying comics even when newsstand sales were still available, many other newsstand vendors followed suit limiting Marvel and DC's options for mass market outlets. It was then they decided to cut back on newsstand distribution and focus on the direct market which offered 100% sell through because they were sold on a non-returnable basis. More and more newsstand vendors stopped carrying comics until it got to the point that print runs were too small and the economy of scale began to work against publishers, which is when they stopped newsstand distribution altogether. You can't distribute to vendors who don't want to carry your product because the price point was too low to make it worth their while. Returning to newsstands wouldn't lower prices, they would have to raise prices to the point where it is worth the while of vendors to carry them, which if you go by Wal MArt and Target today is $5 to $10 per issue. Anything less, and they just won't carry it.
Which brings us to #3-the core of the problem is that without the newsstands to make comics accessible to be discovered by new readers, your customer base shrinks. The direct market is very good at selling to fans of comics but not at reaching new customers who don't know they already like and want to buy comics. As the customer base shrunk because of attrition (people aging out, changing life circumstances, losing interest whatever), there wa sno longer a stready flow of new readers coming in to replace them and that has been the case now for close to three decades, so two generations of comic readers has essentially been lost, the result is that state the industry is in now.
And another thing to consider is this-Diamond's lifespan (And at the moment the direct market's be default) is tied to Steve Geppi, the owner of Diamond who is 69. He has recently closed his comic museum and donated his personal collection to the Smithsonian, not the actions of someone who is still all in on comics for the long term. If something happens to him, or he decides to cash out and retire, there is some question as to whether he will be able to find a buyer because with so many titles being published and each selling so few copies, it is a very labor intensive business with bad margins and little growth potential, somewhat limiting it's appeal to potential buyers, so there is a chance he will just close it up when he is ready to retire or if something were to happen to his health. If Diamond closes, there is no more direct market and no way for publishers to get print copies to market.
There is a part of me that suspected/hoped that things like the Ink and Zoom lines form DC aimed at younger readers in the book market and not the direct market, and things like the Wal Mart deal were the first steps of DC thinking about life after Geppi and what kind of infrastructure needs to be in place for them to survive the transition if and when Geppi cashes out and Diamond is either sold, parcelled up, or shuttered.
-M"Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding." -PlatoComment
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So how does signing exclusivity contracts with Diamond, which DC and Marvel did (Marvel after the failed attempt at setting up their own distribution through Heroes World) , NOT turn it's back on other retailers besides JUST comic book stores??!!?? To this day you can't get comics unless you have an account with Diamond. In essence Geppi/Diamond created his/their own problem by becoming a Monopoly in the market. Only thing that I can see happen if Geppi/Diamond stops is digital which basically will kill comics, in my opinion, for older readers/collectors. I personally will not buy digital downloads of books. Marvel is basically done for me and DC was my last hope as far as keeping things somewhat normal as far as a physical medium. This Walmart deal had that last glimmer of hope, in my opinion, to reach an audience outside of the LCS. DC did their own damage by that Superman book they put out last month with the character being burned (Dream sequence??) The only thing that is basically left now is True Believers comics from Marvel and now Marvel is messing with that concept too. Facsimile version reprints for $4...Marvel Tales reprints for $10. I just don't get it. Couldn't they just leave a good thing alone for once??
Could you imagine going to comic cons in the future "Hey, do you have that download of Wolverine #1000?? How much...$1...DEAL!"Comment
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A few things. DC signed the exclusive with Diamond in response to Marvel buying Heroes World and making it basically a Marvel only distributor. This was done at the height of Toy Biz/Fleer when Marvel had more money than sense and was buying up everything. THe deal proved Marvel's undoing, HEroes World failed and MArvel wound up in bankruptcy and had to go crawling to Diamond to get a distribution deal when Heroes World went belly up and had to agree to Diamond's terms at the time (much they same reason behind them signing horrible deals with Fox and Sony for the X-Men/FF and Spider-Man film rights in which Marvle gave up almost all of the licensing money for products from the movies just to get the deals done and get an influx of desperately needed cash.
Secondly, at that point the mass market had already stopped carrying comics for the most part because it wasn't worth their while at that point. Publishers only had one viable option at the time, which was the direct market because the mass markets had abondoned them. This was why MArvel went all in with Heroes World and DC was left scrambling to find a deal that worked with them, and Diamond came knocking offering them a deal they couldn't refuse at the time. The losers here wasn't the mas market, the mass market had already told comics to kiss off, the losers were smaller distributors like Capital and others, who only dealt in the direct market, who lost all the big publishers and eventually shuttered their doors.
And the key here-the exclusive deals with Diamond only applied to the DIRECT MARKET. There was still limited newsstand distribution through place like Barnes and Noble and others that had NOTHING to do with the exclusive deals with Diamond for the Direct Market.
However, the margin was so slim and those retailers were concerned the price point was too low that both Marvel and Dc started charging $1 more for the non-Diamond versions of the books available through other retailers to try to improve margins and pleas their retail partners, but to no avail, the market wasn't profitable and B&B and others decided to stop carrying comics as periodicals at which point Marvel and DC stopped distribution outside the Direct Market. It had zero to do with the exclusivity to Diamond, which as I said applied only to distribution on the Direct Market.. The Diamond deal didn't end newsstand distribution. Lack of sales on newsstands making it unattractive to the few retail partners outside the direct market Marvel and DC had and thos epartners ceasing to carry comics ended mass market distribution.
-M"Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding." -PlatoComment
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Regarding the $1 True Believers-as much as you or I like them, at a $1 a pop they don't pay for the space they take up in comics shops nor offer enough margin/revenue for shops to make carrying them worth their while, especially when you add shipping charges onto it making them at best loss leaders for shops rather than profitable products. It's pretty much the same reason newsstands stopped carrying comics-the price point wasn't high enough to make it worth their while.
-M"Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding." -PlatoComment
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Just to give it some hard numbers-those $1 books cost comic shops on average 50 cents each from Diamond (depending on the size of discount which is based on overall volume of your orders). And then shipping per book works out to anywhere from 10 cents per book (for high volume stores) to 25-30 cents per book for lower volume stores. That can be made up for if you have a margin of a couple of dollars per issue, but not if your margin is 50 cents per issue. Then add in labor costs to check in, display and sell the books, plus all the other operating costs a brick and mortar business has, and you start to see that those dollar books make the store no money unless they lead customers to buying other products as well with higher margins.
-M"Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding." -PlatoComment
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Another Diamond anecdote about shipping costs-a few years back I had a pull list at a shop that is no out of business. One of the book on my pull list was Robert E. Howard's Savage Sword, a square bound prestige format book form Dark Horse with a $7.99 price point. It was a small shop, his discount was about 50% so the book cost him $4. Diamond shorted him his copy (I was the only one getting it so he only ordered 1 copy. He called Diamond, and they said they would send him a copy. Rather than sending it with his next order, they shipped it by itself, and when he got it, shipping was $6 for the book. So it cost him $10 to get a book with an $8 price point, so he lost money selling that book. Margins are razor thin and just one extra shipping charge can turn a book form a small profit to a loss.
Brain Hibbs (a well known long-time retailer who writes the Tilting at Windmills column about comic retailing) has worked out the numbers that stores need to sell 4 out of every 5 copies ordered to make any profit at all, and if you have less than an 80% sell through on a title you order, you will not break even. With a book at a $1 price point, that sell through rate likely needs to be 100% for them to have a chance at turning a profit by carrying those books.
-M"Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding." -PlatoComment
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And here you go, the official announcement from Didio and DC... https://www.bleedingcool.com/2019/02...s-comic-shops/
RE: the 100 Page Giants...
so not ending, line will be expanding, getting more original content than the 12 pages, and become available outside of Wal Mart as well. The only thing ending is the Wal Mart exclusivity, but they will still be available at Wal Mart and through comic shops.Successful and continuing. For those fans of the DC Giants at Walmart, have to clear up some misinformation making the rounds. Just want to let you know these books are doing well, so well that we are looking to expand the number of original pages in each book and include distribution to the direct market. Look for these and new titles later this year. The promise is to keep it one of the best values and reading experiences in the market. Best, DD
So again, it was a disgruntled retailer spinning what he heard at Comics Pro the way he wanted it to be, not the way it actually was.
-M"Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding." -PlatoComment
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You know enough comic books cried because they were missing out. I stopped buying most of them anyways because it I have most of the reprint stories. I expect down the line the original stories will be collected in TPB and then I will get them. I will buy Swamp Thing but that it. I read the rest (when they show up).Visit my wiki site:
Comic Books in the Media
To view my custom works of both JLU and Megos go to:
Monitor_EP Deviantart page
Action Jackson Road Trip logComment
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