When I was a kid, I didn't have a "my comic shop." There wasn't anything close enough for me to get to regularly, so I relied on subscriptions for my new books and local comic conventions for back issues. When I got to college, there was indeed a local shop I could get to but the manager there was a real asshole, so I didn't go there often. (You know how some comic shops managers, particularly those back in the '80s and '90s could be jerks in the vein of Comic Shop Guy? Yeah, this guy was that certainly, but he was just a straight-up asshole too. He ended up running that shop into the ground a couple years later... before the late '90s bust. Think about that -- he couldn't run the shop decently even during one of the most lucrative periods of the direct market!) A little while later another shop opened nearby and, although the guys there were nice, they were very much NOT cut out for running a business and it closed after less than a year.
I didn't actually find a shop that was reasonably run, that I could get to on a regular basis until I was in my mid-20s, after I'd been actively reading/collecting comics for over a decade. Then, for the next ten years or so, that was my weekly Cheers. I'd stop in on Wednesday after work and there'd be a round of "SEAN!" and we'd all chat about whatever was in comics news that week. I'd hang out for an hour or so, and then head home with $20-$30 worth of comics.
I eventually changed jobs and was commuting in the opposite direction, so it stopped be feasible to hit that shop on the way home. And it turned out that there was another shop right around the corner from my new job, so I started going there. I got to know the owners/managers there, but before I really became a regular staple for the Wednesday crowd, I ended up moving to another state. I bounced around for about half a year, and when I finally settled in a new permanent residence, I was thrilled to see there was a comic shop barely over a mile away!
I was less thrilled when I stopped in and discovered it was one of the worst shops I've ever been in. I honestly have no idea how he manages to stay open, particularly when the Chicago area has so many great shops in general.
But what I think is more interesting is that, by this point, my buying habits had changed significantly. See, up through my early 30s, I pretty much only bought Marvel titles. I did start branching out as I got into my 30s but to pretty direct tangents in a similar vein: sci-fi and fantasy. I'd occassionally pick up something like an autobiography or historical fiction, but typically only if it was getting a lot of good press. But this meant that I could walk in to most comic shops and find the titles I was regularly looking for.
As I got into my late 30s and early 40s, the Marvel stuff started dropping off, and more esoteric, independent stuff was catching my interest. Stuff that a lot of shops wouldn't normally stock. I'd wind up ordering a lot of it online, sometimes from Amazon, sometimes from an online comic shop, often from either the publisher or creator directly.
But here's the interesting thing: even though some semi-local shops might carry these books that I'm primarily interested in, I don't have any desire to visit them. Because the camradie that tends to build up in those shops, even though they might have a good selection of independent books, still tends to be centered around the best selling direct market books: Marvel and DC. The chats and discussions that I hear in those shops is the same that I used to participate in back when I had a "my comic shop." Which was fine when I was actively following Marvel, and keeping tabs on DC, Image, Dark Horse, etc. But since I don't really follow those publishers very closely any more, I can't really join in the banter around what's going on in the X-Men right now or who the latest Justice League member is or anything like that. The discussion is around comic book superheroes, not the medium of comics itself.
There's nothing wrong with that, but it's just not what I'm interested in these days.
So if the discussions I'm having about comics aren't particularly tied to the week-in-week-out cycle that following lines like Marvel and DC entail, I don't really have a need to hit a comic shop on a weekly basis. And, further, if I'm not interested in the discussions being held at most comic shops anyway (and, to be fair, there are shops that do focus on something other than superheroes -- just none that I can reasonably get to on a regular basis) I don't really need to actually go to a comic shop at all. I can perfectly contently order my comics through a mail delivery service like Mile High or Lone Star Comics have. Which is what I've been doing for the past couple of years. The discounts I get offset the price of shipping, and any back issue ordering I do can piggyback off my monthly shipment so I don't have to pay additional shipping to have back issues sent over.
I'd be curious to learn how mail order shops have been doing since the pandemic started. Honestly, I don't think I've heard anything one way or the other. I'd assume their businesses have increased, like most online retailers, but that's just a guess. I know brick and mortar shops took a big hit this year, but I'd be curious to hear how many of those customers switched to ordering online entirely. Presumably for safety reasons initially and possibly for convenience later. Or has the lure of the comic shops being a destination in and of themselves -- which I've been arguing for YEARS is the only real way shops can continue to stay afloat -- drew people back more quickly than other retailers.
Regardless, I find it curious that my relationship with comic shops in general pretty closely tracks with industry retail trends. Although the trends seem to be more correlation than causation. I'll be interested to see how brick and mortar shops come out of the pandemic, and how it will affect their general business models from a long-term perspective. What are they doing now because of the pandemic that they end up continuing afterwards just because customers like it? What will they change later because of new buying patterns cusomters have adopted? What about stores that don't adapt -- will they go out of business quickly or will we see a long, slow decline? Lots to keep your eyes on, to be sure!
I try to be a forward-thinking guy. I try to look out down the road to see what's coming, so that I have a better chance to zig and zag as needed. I'm by no means a futurist, though; I'm nowhere near adept enough at predicting sociological behaviors or extrapolating wide-spread trends based on current technologies. I have my moments of insight, but they're not as frequent as I'd like. I was forecasting wide-spread cloud computing years before the term was commonly known and saw "video blogging" coming a few years before YouTube was founded, but I was completely side-swiped by social media when that came on the scene.
On the plus side, I think even the most prescient futurists aren't exactly batting 1000 either! :)
But guys like Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler (both of whom I've referenced on this blog before) were able to see some of the broad strokes coming down the pipe. McLuhan didn't know what the internet was but he saw a vast communications network that reduced our entire planet to the equivalent of a single community: a "global village." And that's the type of thing I try (in my decidedly unprofessional and seriously inadequate way) to do. I try to look at the information of today and figure out not only what's going to happen tomorrow, but also in the next several years.
At some level, many people do that. Whether you're planning a wedding or booking gigs for your band or saving up to buy a house, that's all about looking toward the future by extrapolating as much as you can from what you know right now.
How all that relates to comics is, of course, the question of what's going to happen to comics as a whole? Where is the industry headed? What will overall sales look like? What technologies will enhance production and distribution of digital comics? What properties will become "hot" and garner population attention? Those are the questions a lot of folks in comicdom are asking.
The problem, obviously, is that we're all speculating. We don't know the future, so we all have to guess. And we're all making these guesses with incomplete data. Sales numbers are often a big blind spot for us. Retailers know their own numbers, but not for the industry at large or any of their direct competitors. Publishers know their own numbers, but not specific retailers or other publishers. Creators don't provide their financial information (notably, income from making comics) to anyone. Bloggers like myself don't know any of that. So any predictions any of us make are based on less than ideal information.
That's where a lot of arguments come from. A retailer can say, "Listen: I make X amount of money selling just Marvel comics and I'm doing fine. I don't see what the deal is about DC distributing separately." While the next retailer might say, "I've seen a decline in sales because of COVID, and many have switched to digital." And yet another retailer might say, "New people are coming into the store because of comics they read online." Those three retailers are going to see the future of comics differently, based on the information they have that is biasing their view.
I use "bias" deliberately. I don't mean to suggest that they're actively altering their opinions to fit what they're seeing in their respective stores, but the information at their disposal will push their thoughts and ideas in a certain direction. I'm very cognizant that my constant work in web development focuses my attention toward online behaviors over print, and colors my outlook.
But it's not just a single factor like that impacting my thought process. I pay more attention to independent creators than the larger publishers any more. I got hooked on comics in the early 1980s. I went to college for design. I went to graduate school for an MBA. I have an 8-to-5 job in a beige cubicle. (Or, at least, it would be in a beige cubicle but for the pandemic!) I've done freelance work. I am familiar with printing processes from previous jobs, but my knowledge there is primarily based on technologies from 20 years ago. I don't drink. I got a divorce after ten years of marriage, and eventually married someone else and moved to a different state. I have a dog and a cat. My favorite color is green.
All of that, regardless of how irrelevant it seems to comics, has some measure of impact on how I think about the medium. The same holds for everyone else. Their first car. The parent that abandoned them at age 7. The house that burned down across the street a week ago. The childhood friend who they hadn't talked to in 25 years committing suicide after a long struggle with PTSD that originated with their military service. The Spelling Bee their cousin won in fifth grade.
All of those things, many of which you're probably not aware of, have an impact. Which is to say: take EVERYTHING with a grain of salt. I'm certainly going to talk and act in what seems to be my best interests, and that's one of the reasons I'm bullish on webcomics in general. If you see/hear someone else speaking with a contrary point of view, there's almost certainly a reason for that.
I think my point here is that you, as a consumer of information, need to keep alert of not only what people are saying about the future of comics, but who is saying it and where they're coming from. As much as I like and respect guys like Brian Hibbs and Joe Field, I always keep in mind that these guys are both retailers and have a retailer perspective. Nothing wrong with that, of course! I'm just saying that it's different than a creator or a fan perspective.
But the future is a big question mark for all of us, and our backgrounds and current situations are going to impact our outlooks. Just something to keep in mind the next time you see someone touting the demise of the direct market or the rise of competitors to Diamond.
Like any industry, comics has its own lingo. Language that is used pretty exclusively for comics, or at least have their own definitions unique to comics. Gutters, word balloons, TPBs, etc. Sometimes industries overlap, though, and marketing industry language gets used when talking about marketing comic books. As I happen to work in marketing, I thought I might take a blog post to make sure we're all speaking the same language when it comes to that.
One of the first things he mentions are POP Displays. "POP" is an acronym for "point of purchase." It's a general term used to describe any promotional material that's designed to be placed at the location where you actually buy something. It could be a sticker meant to actually be adhered to the cash register or a poster intended to hang behind the counter or an old-school spinner rack that's displaying comics or even a life-size figure. Sometimes they're made by the publisher, sometimes the retailer. Really, it's just about anything that a retailers utilize as a way to promote their products.
"POS" stands for "point of sale" and is a sub-set of POP. The point of sale is where the actual transaction takes place, where the cash register is. These are typically smaller items, and try to play more heavily on the impulse purchase mentality, whereas POP can be (but not necessarily always are) larger and geared more towards overall awareness.
There are some standards that often get thought of with regard to POP. The "tent card" is a classic because they're easy to create and can be tweaked to fit a wide variety of sizes and proportions. It's essentially just piece of heavy paper folded in half. The V shape is placed upside down on the counter, allowing the text and graphics to be seen/read while the customer is standing near it. Because there's so little involved in the actual production of tent cards, creators not infrequently provide PDFs for retailers to print out themselves.
"Table tents" are essentially a more elaborate version of tent cards. Unlike their namesake, table tents do not necessarily fold up in a tent-like shape but, rather can be nearly any sort of self-standing piece designed to be placed on a table or counter. You see this type of thing a lot in mid-scale restaurants. Sometimes they're just cardboard standups plugging the desserts, sometimes they're more elaborate and hold copies of the menu or napkins. (Though don't confuse table tents with napkin holders; there needs to be a marketing/sales angle here.) Those cardboard cut-outs of characters you sometimes see on comic convention tables with the speech balloon hawking the latest book? Those are table tents.
Another simple, and common, POP for comics are "header cards." These are basically a flat piece of card stock that's as wide as, but an inch or two taller than, a comic book. They're designed to be placed behind a stack of comics on the rack, and the portion that sticks up above the actual comic has some type of promotional message. I've seen store-specific ones frequently that highlight staff picks, while publisher ones use them to tie together storylines that cross over multiple titles.
Also used right next to the comics are "shelf talkers." These are also generally simple card stock pieces, but they rest underneath a stack of comics and stick out slightly beyond the shelf. Publishers again can create title-specific shelf talkers, but many stores also use them to highlight "New Comics This Week" or "Featured" books as seen in this photo.
Less used, because they're a tad more expensive in large quantities, are "window clings." These are thin plastic, usually translucent, promotional pieces that adhere to smooth surfaces like windows via static electricity. I have to admit that I haven't seen these used much in comicdom; the only instance I can think of offhand are the Visa/Mastercard pieces often stuck on the front door.
From time to time, "standees" are available. These basically large cardboard cutouts that are free-standing. You tend not to see too many of them in comic shops since they take up a fair amount of precious floor space. They also are fairly expensive for as quickly as they begin to look worn. Some of the more popular characters have commercially available versions for fans. I recall there was an Arthur Adams drawn Wolverine that was rather prolific in the 1980s.
That's certainly not all of the POP items that are available, but that covers some of the more common ones that use terms you might not be familiar with. Check out the promotional kit below and see how many different POP pieces you can identify!
I logged into Kickstarter, as I do from time to time to check on the status of undelivered projects, and happened to catch that I have so far back 178 successful projects since 2011! I was surprised the number was that high, so I thought I'd dig into my numbers a little deeper to see what's what.
In addition to those 178 successful projects, I've also backed 20 that were not successful (either they didn't meet their goal, or they were cancelled by the originator), and there's one project actively underway that I'm a backer of. The vast majority of all 199 of these projects were comics related. Mostly the production of actual comics, but a few went to comics documentaries and such. I think there have been two that weren't comics related at all, and one of those was for my father.
Of the 178 projects, 142 of them are what I would consider complete. They've delivered whatever they were supposed to have delivered. Or at least something very nearly. That's an 80% hit rate. However, 18 of the projects that haven't come through have an "estimated delivery" that hasn't passed yet. If you factor those out, that bumps the successfully delivered project rate up to 89%.
I also have two projects that were partially delivered (one partial due to a unique item being lost in the mail) and two projects that weren't completed at all but the creator refunded my money. And, unfortunately, there is one confirmed case of deliberate fraud.
So out of those 178 successful projects, there are currently 13 that have passed their expected delivery date with nothing to show for it. Five of them have at least posted status updates within the past couple months, but the rest of them have gone for a year or longer with no communications at all. I've pretty much given up any hope of seeing those.
All of that brings us to the real point of concern. Of the 199 projects I have backed so far, I feel like I've been totally burned (where I don't think I'm ever getting anything) on 5% of them and singed (where I've only gotten partial delivery or the project is recklessly late and I'm pretty skeptical about it) on another 4%. That's... not terrible, but not all that great either.
Obviously, Kickstarter is not at fault here; delivery is dependent on the individual project owners. I've definitely become more careful of which projects I back (most of the projects I feel burned on had delivery dates from 2017) and I tend to focus on ones that are people with a proven track record in their field. I'm not going to back video game or animation projects from comics folks and vice-versa. If you don't have a history of delivered Kickstarters, do you have a history of doing professional work over time? I don't think most of these people are intending fraud, but I don't want to back projects where I think the creator might be in over their head. I want to support comics creators, particularly the independent folks who aren't going through a major publisher. But I also don't want to just throw my money away either; I've done too much of that already.
What do you think of when you hear the word "comic publisher"? Odds are that you think of a company like Scholastic or Marvel or any of a number of other companies that put out books that you regularly see in comic shops and book stores. And while they certainly are publishers, they're hardly the only ones. And if you're prompted, you might think to name smaller companies like Oni and Lion Forge. These are also certainly publishers. But do you know who else qualifies as a publisher?
Me.
And not just, "Hey, I wrote and self-published a book as some kind of vanity press project" but a genuine, sold-in-bookstores, has-important-names-on-it book. Here's the copyright page of The Lost Work of Will Eisner...
You'll notice that I'm listed as one of the Associate Publishers. You might ask, "How did Sean get to be one of the publishers of this book? What was his role as one of the publishers?"
The answer is simple: I gave them money.
This was a Kickstarter project, and I just backed it at one of the higher levels. High enough that Locust Moon Press -- the people who actually published it -- were willing to put my name among a handful of others creditted as Associate Publishers. That's literally all I did. I gave them money.
And, at their root, that's essentially all publishers are. They're the people who front the cash to have a book published. Now, they can (and often do) do other things like dealing with the printers and distributors, and deal with marketing and all that, but the primary role of a publisher is just to pay for stuff.
As you may recall, a few years back when Kickstarter began gaining attention and popularity, some known publishers tried running Kickstarter projects for their books. I seem to recall there was an Archie project at one point and a number of people (understandably) complained when they saw name publishers running crowd-funding projects. What is the point of a publisher, after all, if they're not the ones fronting the money to begin with? Why not just hire a reasonably compotent college student to monitor and manage your own Kickstarter?
I've heard several stories over the past week or two where creators have run into significant issues with their publishers. Money isn't being paid on time, promised marketing efforts don't materialize, abrupt changes in contracts... And you might think, "Well, yeah, there's always going to be shady people calling themselves a publisher" but I'm talking about companies you've probably heard of. Not ones the size of DC or Dark Horse, but names you probably recognize. I won't name them here because I don't have anything close to full details on any of them, but I've heard enough that I'm looking sideways at them now; and if I knew of someone who was looking at a contract with them, I'd tell them to wait a bit and go talk to some other folks who've dealt with them before.
I don't know that these stories are indicative of all small press publishers, obviously, and I don't know that these folks are doing anything out of malice or greed necessarily, but go back to my earlier thought. Anyone can be a publisher; you just to have to throw money at a book. There's nothing there that says you know the first thing about printing processes or intellectual property contracts or even basic money management, for that matter! All you need is enough cash on hand to give to the printer.
So I'm wondering, if that's the only criteria for becoming a publisher, and crowd-funding options like Kickstater and IndieGoGo have repeatedly proven themselves viable... why are you using them?
I don't mean that to be completely dismissive of all publishers, but if you're looking to take your comic to a publisher, ask yourself what you're going to get out of the deal. What are they providing above and beyond just fronting the money to the printer? That's a judgement call you have to make for yourself, of course, but if they're not doing much more than putting up some cash, you might want to look at other options.
Let me start with a little personal background, in case you don't know me. I started reading Fantastic Four back in 1983, and I was quickly hooked. I read the book continuously until shortly after the Civil War storyline in 2007; I found that approach Marvel was taking with its characters generally and with the FF in particular no longer to my liking. The book had been canceled in 2015 and I later started digging through discount bins to pick up all of the back issues I'd missed (I ended up paying only about a third of what all those issues would have cost me if I had been buying them new!) and got myself caught up just about in time for the current series to start.
As a long-time FF fan, I also quite liked the Skrulls as villains. Back when I was running my FF fan site -- before Wikipedia was a thing -- I wrote a pretty comprehensive, heavily researched article about them. (That link goes to an Internet Archives page. I think it's still a good article, but it's over a decade out of date now.)
So while I have been getting Fantastic Four regularly, that's been pretty much the only Marvel title in my pull list. Until I heard about Empyre and I thought, "Well, the FF are heavily involved anyway and I still kind of dig the Skrulls..." So I opted to start picking that series up. Just the main one, though, not all the secondary and tertiary titles. However, given that I use a subscription service and don't get my comics from an in-person store for the most part, I only just this week got any of the Empyre issues.
In case you're not reading it, the basic gist of the story is that the Skrull and Kree races, who have been at each others' throats for eons, have made peace to team up against a third alien race, the Cotati. The Cotati have targeted Earth because of the Vibranium deposits in Wakanda, and both the Skrulls and Kree are completely open to nuking the entire solar system by blowing up the sun in order to stop the Cotati. Needless to say, none of Earth's heroes are happy about this.
Conceptually, I like the story. I think that, if you're going to do a mega-crossover event, the general structure here makes sense. You've got one overarching plot (the Kree/Skrull/Cotati war) but you can still farm out smaller stories to separate heroes that provide depth in different venues. That is, you don't have to have ALL the heroes together for one giant, confusing Avengers: End Game style climax, but you can split up the groups to fight individul battles on different fronts. In Empyre for example, you've got some heroes defending Wakanda, you've got another contingent trying to stop address the squadron of alien starships orbiting the planet, and you've got a smaller crew tending to the wounded on their home turf. There are a variety of stories that can be told within the overall plot structure.
I started by cracking open Fantastic Four #21, the first crossover issue of that title. I had no idea how/where this might fall into place with the broader story and so I scanned the issue initially to see if they had listed some kind of reading order. Sure enough, at the end of the book, there's a two-page spread listing out all of the separate issues the story crosses over into and an order of how they should be read. So I put my books in order and started reading. But then I noticed something when I got to Empyre #1 (actually the second issue of the title).
The issue opens with a kind of roster page. Just a simple listing of all the main characters and what group they're affiliated with. Next is a two-page title spread; it includes a three paragraph summary of "the story so far" and all the creative credits for the issue. Then there's the story itself (occasionally interupted with some house ads) followed by two pages of character/design sketches by series artist Valerio Schiti. Then there's the two-page checklist again, and the final page is a full-page promotion for the next issue. The remaining issues all follow the same format.
What I find striking about this is that they've devoted five whole pages to just explaining the series (the roster, the title page summary, and the checklist). My first thought is that, if you need to take five pages every issue just to explain what's going on, maybe the periodical format isn't the best venue for this story. I mean, I get why the checklist would be necessary and maybe the summary, but two pages each? I mean, I get that they're clearly not shooting for a casual audience here -- Marvel seems to have given that up years ago in order to focus on existing die-hard Marvelites -- but if you have to include that much for heavy-duty fans, maybe you're making it way too complex. I seem to recall that was one of the huge drawbacks to the "Inferno" story back in the '80s; it was just too hard for most people to figure out what the hell they even needed to read to follow along!
But this other thought occurs to me about this, too. If you combined the summary and checklist to one page -- it would be tight, but doable, I think -- you could remove an entire signature from the book! And if a single page would've been too tight, you could still repurpose one or both of the character/design sketch pages. A single signature might not seem like much, but over, say, 100,000 copies time six issues (possibly more, if they do something similar in the various "epilogue" type one-shots) that's a good chunk of change!
The story isn't bad, I don't think (it's not great either, but it's not bad) but I don't know that it's being served well by the periodical format. I know writer Dan Slott is more than capable of telling good stories in the periodical format, so I don't think we're looking at a talent issue here. I really think it boils down to just not having the whole thing as a single volume. I've seen plenty of comics before where it was clear the creators were wrestling between writing to the periodical and trade paperback formats simultaneously. Although the issue endings end on decent enough story beats, the overall tale seems like it's being written more for the book market.
Whether or not that was a directive given to the creative team, I don't know, but I have to wonder if that points to plans in Marvel's future that might mimic DC's apparent weighting themselves more towards the bookstore market.
On Monday evening, we heard about some massive layoffs at DC Comics. Parent company Warner Brothers laid off as many as 600 and, whil I haven't seen numbers at DC specifically, some of the names of those laid off include Bob Harras, Bobbie Chase, and Andy Khouri among many other senior level officials. Jim Lee remains at the company but has been removed as publisher.
These layoffs seem to largely be attributed to COVID-related issues. Obviously, we've seen some major disruptions in the entertainment industry with comic shops and movie theaters shutting down for an extended period. Movies, in particular, would seem to be a massive set of losses for WB, as even opening theaters back up with social distancing rules in effect, I'm sure a large number of people will continue avoiding enclosed spaces like that for some time. (I know I don't intend on going anywhere like that until well into 2021 at the earliest!) So not only has taken a big hit, but they'll likely continue to be hit for the rest of the year and probably a fair chunk of next year.
(That said, I can't help but wonder how much of this is tied to their announcment earlier this year to drop Diamond as their primary distributor. I wonder if these layoffs are part of a larger shake-up to switch from a monthly periodical format to almost exlusively trade paperbacks and hardcovers. Something closer to what, say, Scholastic has been having great success with. Those types of books need editing too, of course, but book publishing is a different setup and rhythm than periodical publishing. Obviously, it's speculation on my part, and it's very early days, so we'll have to wait and see.)
Now, with a major publisher suddenly announcing some major restructuring, particularly against a backdrop of general chaos that's largely defined 2020, I have to imagine other publishers are a bit spooked. "What do they know that we don't?" I mean, we're talking about DC here. They've been in the comics game for a century and hold many of the most well-known intellectual properities on the planet. They're not going to just lay off a bunch of people one day on a whim -- this is the result of some big calculations going on that probably started back in March or April. If a major company like DC is making those kinds of changes, you have to assume it's done with a great deal of thought and consideration for what they're seeing in the market. Smaller publishers typically don't have the types of resources to keep an eye out for the things DC might, so they're often going to look to them as a bellweather and wonder what market signals are DC seeing?
This is where the possible opportunity I mentioned in the post's title comes in. If other publishers are now skittish because of DC's changes, they could well be looking to shore up their own finances right now. The more cash you have on hand, the more you'll be able to weather financial storms. What's the quickest way to raise cash? Sell some of your assets. And what do many of these publishers have as assets? Intellecutal property. Copyrights and trademarks. So the thought is that, if a publisher is looking to raise money quickly, in a state of mild panic, they could well be entertain options to sell some of their IPs back to the creators that made them!
If you, as a creator, developed a comic for a publisher that they own -- but perhaps aren't making as much money as they thought they would -- it might well be worth seeing if they would be willing to sell it back to you now! (At a signficantly discounted rate to you, naturally!) As a creator, you'd then be able to do whatever you like with the property once again!
Not every publisher owns IPs in this manner, of course, and many creators now are savvy enough to rigorously hold on to their creations legally from the start. But there are many other creators who were not thinking like that. Maybe they gave up the characters entirely, maybe they gave up movie rights, maybe they gave away 50% of the profits... Regardless of the specifics, it might be a good time to re-examine your contracts and see if you might be able to strike a deal to get back something that you may have inadvertantly lost in the fine print!
Just an idea!
Back in April, I made note of some concerns regarding the US Postal Service and how the coronavirus was having an impact on things. Mainly in that they were in some financial trouble because Republicans under G.W. Bush basically hamstrung them, forcing them virtually overnight to completely pre-fund their entire pension plan for every employee for the next 75 years!
Things are actually much worse now. Trump appointed Louis DeJoy as the postmaster general in June. Last month, he began implementing policies to deliberately slow -- and in some cases halt -- mail delivery. DeJoy has no postal experience himself and has upwards of $75 million in holdings in USPS's own competitors! Trump has actively campaigned on limiting mail-in ballots for the upcoming election, and with DeJoy as a large Trump donor (the primary reason he got the job), DeJoy has a very vested interest in seeing the post office fail.
The concerns I had back in April about the USPS basically allowing the economy to continue moving because so many indivdiuals and businesses were conducting transactions via the mail has been magnified a thousand-fold. And that's on top of the active effort to disenfranchise voters who might be (justifiably!) too scared of contracting COVID to actually go to the polls in person! I've heard a few people say these changes are actually treasonous, and I frankly have trouble arguing otherwise. Everything they are forcing the post office to do right now undermines both the fairness of our elections and the basic economy itself.
(Not to mention that it's got racism built into it, since postal workers are over twice as likely to be Black as in anywhere in the private sector.)
There is nothing about this situation the post office is being forced into that isn't downright evil.
Contact your state and local representatives, particularly if they're Republicans,
and get them to do anything they can to oust DeJoy (who is in direct violation of 18 U.S. Code § 1703) as soon as possible.
RESOURCES
Seattle Times: "New cuts threaten the Postal Service when it’s most needed"
Seattle Times: "Mail delays likely as new postal boss pushes cost-cutting"
Washington Post: "Postal Service overhauls leadership as Democrats press for investigation of mail delays"
CNN: "Warren and other top Democrats ask USPS watchdog to investigate practices"
New York Times: "Mail Delays Fuel Concern Trump Is Undercutting Postal System Ahead of Voting"
When I was growing up, I got the same basic education most American kids got when it came to slavery, emancipation, the Civil Rights movement, etc. -- we were taught slavery was an ancillary issue at most when it came to the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was a pillar of moral fortitude and would have done much more for Blacks if he hadn't been assassinated, and then everything was fine until 1955 when a tired, old woman named Rosa Parks was too exhausted to get up from her seat on a bus. That was the conversation others had when it came to those topics and, since that was all I heard, I didn't know to believe any different.
But I got lucky. I happened to get a copy of a comic book biography of Frederick Douglass that contradicted was we were taught. I've told this story before. But, in effect, I stumbled onto the same conversation, but one being held by a different group of people. These weren't older white men dictating what should/shouldn't be taught in public schools, these were Black people who had heard the same stories but had a very different lived experience. It was only in stumbling into that conversation, almost accidentally, that I started to think about what was considered "normal.
Now, I was stupid kid at the time, and it would take several years before I started to really understand the entirety of the context there, and how/why there were different conversations happening in the first place. And one the elements that took me longer to start to internalize is that everything is subject to our perception of normal, based on the conversations we've been a part of.
tw: rape
When I was in college, maybe 19 or 20 years old, there were a group of about eight or ten of us hanging out. General laughter and nonsense you might expect from a group of college kids. At some point, I made a rape "joke." It was largely received as I had expected, and most of the others laughed or chuckled along. But one woman immediately shot me a death glare like I'd never seen. She didn't say anything and the group conversation continued on with the general laughter and nonsense from before, but her stare stuck with me. A few weeks, maybe a month later, I learned that she had in fact been date raped about a year earlier. That death glare made complete sense, and I'm sure the only reason she let me off that lightly was because we were friends.
We were actually close enough that she told me about the rape herself, without any incentive or prodding from me. I immediately apologized for my comment weeks earlier, of course, and she dismissed it with a "you couldn't have known" remark. True enough that I couldn't have known she had been raped, but I could have known -- should have known better than to try to make light of something so awful and traumatic.
But that's the problem. I was never a part of that conversation before. Up until that point for me, rape was only something that only existed in a kind of vague theory. While I was part of the conversations that said "rape is bad" that was about the extent of them. There was nothing about how bad it was, or what kind of trauma that inflicts, or how police and judges and the system in general dismisses women's rape claims as a rule and assigns a stigma to rape victims. The very concept of date rape didn't really even show up in public discourse until I was in college.
We're hearing more and more about the harassment and assault women are subjected to in the comics industry. That these events happen, sadly, isn't new. People have rightly been complaining that, "We've been telling you about this for years and you haven't been listening!" That's in part because many of the people who have the largest say in the overall conversation decide that they don't want any of this to be part of the conversation. They'll dismiss the accusations or maybe smooth things over with a pat apology and a promise it won't happen again. But they don't change the conversation at all. So the next person who walks in doesn't hear the message that "we won't tolerate that kind of behavior." In fact, they often witness first-hand that that kind of behavior is acceptable. Normal.
Which means the conversation needs to change. And we -- all of us -- need to change it. I didn't get that message in college -- I didn't have that conversation -- until I hurt somebody I cared about. Odds are that you already know someone who's been hurt. One in four women in the US have been raped or had someone try to rape them. That's just rape! Sexual harassment and assault is even more common. How many women do you know in comics? I know more than four, certainly! I've had dinners where, statistically, two of the comic creators at the table I was eating at had been raped. I've had dinners where I know conclusively that multiple people at the table were rape victims.
Start having that conversation now, if you haven't already! Anyone tries making jokes about that, cut them off! You see someone harassing a woman at the after party, cut them off! Tell them that isn't alright. Tell them that isn't how we're doing things any more. Tell them you're changing the conversation.
I just ran across "The Diversity Baseline Survey" results from back in January. It's a follow-up to a 2015 study looking at how much diversity there was in the publishing industry. They looked at not just who was in publishing, but in what capacity. Now, with the 2015 and 2019 studies complete, you can start seeing how much measurable progress has been made. Now, admittedly, these studies look across ALL publishing and the specifics that comics folks might be most concerned with are not necessarily in direct correlation with everyone else, but I expect the results would be not dissimilar.
Overall, it seems to be something of a mixed bag. In general, the industry hasn't changed appreciably as far as racial equity goes. There have been some minor improvements in getting getting more women, non-straight people (gay and lesbian representation went down, but bi and pansexual representation increased markedly), and people with disabilities in general.
What's more interesting, though, is where these changes took place. While there was noticeable improvements on several fronts at the executive levels, there was a significant decrease in diversity among editorial. Also noteworthy is that much of the diversity they've found is at the intern level. While this does suggest that there's a greater diversity of people who will soon be coming up through publishing and that they can be encouraged more than previously by upper management, the fact that the middle layer of editorial has backslid could prove problematic. Not only does that mean that more books are being driven (consciously or subconsciously) through a white lens, but it also means there's an additional layer of interference that might (intentionally or unintentionally) drive out those interns as they progress through the industry.
As something of an anecdotal aside, Joseph P. Illidge and Kwanza Osajyefo came up with a list of all of the Black full editors at DC in the past: Joseph P. Illidge and Kwanza Osajyefo. Yup, as far as they could tell, just the two of them. Marvel fares a little better with Christopher Priest, Dwayne McDuffie, Marcus McLaurin, Chris Robinson, and Christian Cooper. Yes, the same Christian Cooper who was in the news last week for a white woman calling the police on him for telling her to leash her dog. However, neither company, I believe, has ever had a Black woman or anyone who might fall under the LGBTQ umbrella as a full editor.
I'll end today with the survey authors' closing statement...The world has changed a great deal from just four years ago. With so many diverse causes that run parallel to one another that sometimes it can be hard to keep in mind common goals. But until we all start to care about equity, we will not make progress, and any gains the industry makes will continue to be not statistically significant. So, the same questions that we asked four years ago bear repeating: How can company cultures be more welcoming for diverse staff? Do diverse staff members feel comfortable voicing their opinions? Are systems in place to make sure all staff are trained and well versed in diversity issues? And some newer questions to ponder: Have recent conversations on bias and privilege changed your perspective on the systemic problems that exist in society today? Has your empathy grown or receded toward diverse causes in the last four years?
The world is a diverse one. Publishing needs to accurately reflect the world as it is, from the books we publish to the people working in every facet of this business. A lot has happened in four years, and not all of it for the better. Four years from now, what will the next baseline survey show us? And what will those numbers tell us about ourselves?
Marvel just announced that it's making a decent number of mostly recent comics available for free digitally via their Marvel Unlimited program as well as comiXology. I can't find any explicit marketing messages from them that are tied to this, but it seems as if Marvel is doing it as a means to keep readers interested in their comics until their printed comics make it back into stores. (Their current schedule has books beginning to roll out on May 27.)
What they're releasing digitally for free -- temporarily, it seems -- is actually a good chunk of stories, many of which are the entire run of limited series like Secret Invasion, Secret Wars (2015), Captain America: Winter in America, Straight Out of Brooklyn, Captain America: Sam Wilson, and Dr. Strange: The Way of the Weird as well as some older material like Marvel Masterworks: Amazing Spider-Man vol. 1 and Fantastic Four Visionaries: John Byrne vol. 1. Plus some collected runs of ongoing titles like Black Panther, Ms. Marvel, Venom, and Incredible Hulk. There's a not insignificant number of comics in there!
I don't know how/why Marvel selected those particular ones to make available. There's clearly some intent on getting a variety of characters (with the notable exception of the X-Men) but whether or not these tie into any upcoming new stories, I can't say. And while it's mostly newer material, the inclusion of some 1960s Spider-Man and 1980s Fantastic Four might be of interest to older fans. So the intent seems to be to appeal to a reasonably wide variety of fans.
This does two things for Marvel. First, it keeps their characters more towards the forefront of readers' minds. There's enough material there to keep readers busy for at least a little while, and it's hopefully enough to tide them over until the end of the month. Second, it makes Marvel look pretty benevolent. "Hey, fans, we know you want to read more of our comic stories, so here's a bunch for free!" But the thing that I feel compelled to point out here is: this costs them nothing. Literally nothing.
These aren't new stories, obviously, but they're not even newly scanned or anything. These are all comics that were already in their system; it took a developer all of ten seconds to switch the prices on them to zero. There was more cost involved in whatever meeting Marvel had to decide which comics to make available.
There's not even an opportunity cost here! The most recent comics here date from 2018; pretty much anyone who was going to buy either the single issues or the trade paperbacks has already done so. The handful of people who might buy one of those trades now will likely do so because a retailer already has it in stock -- meaning the retailer already purchased it and Marvel made it's money a long time ago. Plus it's not like people aren't going to buy the Secret Invasion TPB because it was available for free digitally for a month (or however long they opt to leave these free). We've known for a while now that, generally speaking, digital comics readers have almost no overlap with print comics readers.
I say none of this as any sort of condemnation of Marvel. It's a pretty obvious business move, honestly, and I'm more surprised they didn't do this earlier. (Didn't they have a promotion several years back where they released, like, 1000 issues for free for a limited time?) Less surprising, but more revealing, is that DC isn't doing anything comparable. DC's digital policies seem unchanged, and they continue to hold a very tight leash on what they make freely available. How/why in 2020 they continue to have such a Luddite approach to marketing/selling comics digitally, I have no clue.
Seriously, this is an easy win for Marvel. Like I said, zero cost for a huge amount of goodwill and promotion. And especially next to DC's archaic position, Marvel looks golden. It really is mind-boggling to me that DC can't seem to get their act together on digital. This decision is a no-brainer that any first-year business undergrad could make. Sure, they still make the majority of their sales in print, so I wouldn't expect them to be super adept at digital marketing and sales, but to be so obtuse when it comes to digital requires a LOT of effort!
I originally ran this piece about the Yellow Kid music almost a decade ago. Since that time, Christina Meyer has come out with an excellent book examining at the mass market appeal, including the commercialization, of the Yellow Kid: Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid. I'm no Yellow Kid expert, by any means, but it was seriously the most enlightening work I've read about the Yellow Kid. It puts this music into a much better context than when I first wrote this post and really speaks to the speed with which people were trying to capitalize on the comic strip's success!
So you're familiar with Richard Outcault's Yellow Kid as one of the original newspaper comic strip characters, right? He debuted in Truth magazine #372 in 1894 and quickly moved over to Hogan's Alley strip, published in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Outcault was hired away by William Randolph Hearst a year later, but Pulitzer retained the rights to Hogan's Alley. Outcault continued drawing the Yellow Kid, though, in comics of various names for Heart's New York Journal American.
The Yellow Kid became immensely popular very quickly, and many people tried to capitalize on that with their own marketing efforts. Mary Wood cites the character appearing on "pins, cigar boxes, sheet music, dolls, cap bombs, postcards, and a number of spin-off variety skits and theater productions." Some of these were officially licensed, some not.
One of those pieces I stumbled upon recently was a scan of sheet music. A piece called "The Yellow Kid: The Latest and the Greatest." It's adorned with Outcault drawings of the Yellow Kid, evidently done expressly for sheet music, if not this sheet music specifically. The Kid is dancing and singing around the margins, very visibly holding sheet music himself.
It strikes me as kind of an odd concept, since the Yellow Kid famously never actually spoke. Anything the character "said" was displayed on his dressing gown. So to provide music to a deliberately mute comic strip comes across as a curious pairing. But I supposed that people have always liked music, and since recordings were unavailable in the 1890s, sheet music was the way to go. Paper was relatively cheap, too, so if you already had a printing press, throwing together something like this would have been an easy way to make a buck, I suppose.
The music was written (and published) by Homer Tourjee with words by William Friday, Jr. There's a 1895 copyright on the page, but the lyrical reference to The Journal suggests it was actually 1896. Interestingly, I found another piece of sheet music dated 1896 called "The Dugan Kid Who Lives in Hogan's Alley." It's the exact same music, with slightly altered lyrics.
But what does it sound like?
So what I've done is taken the sheet music and transcribed it, note for note, into Garage Band. As I was going through, there were several things that struck me about the piece. It's written pretty simply; almost the entire song is in quarter notes and it's got what I would consider a slow pace. With that, though, there's a time change for the chorus, going from 4/4 to 3/4 and the transition between the two might be described, at best, as awkward. There were also several instances where the notation doesn't make sense -- notes that don't really make chords, rhythms that don't really fit in place, lyrics that don't line up with the music. If you take the piece as it's written, it's not all that good. I eventually found a version of this online where someone had actually arranged it so it sounds half-decent, but that's not what was written. The link below is what I put together, picking up a strictly literal interpretation of what was on the sheet music.
Play The Yellow Kid: The Latest & The Greatest
Let me reiterate: this is NOT somebody playing the music badly; this is how it was written! The chorus is meant to be played twice through each time, but it was honestly getting hard for me to keep listening to it, so I opted for just once each. The full lyrics are at the end of the post if you want to try follow along. (Like I said, though, they don't always line up with the music, so it can be a bit difficult in places.)
I would chalk the poor quality of this song up to the commercialism that allegedly drove Outcault from continuing with the character a couple years later. Recall that this was licensed, composed, written and published within a year of Yellow Kid's debut. It was most likely scribbled down hastily by Tourjee, typeset by someone else who probably had no real musical knowledge and edited quickly, if at all. Any "quirks" you might hear from someone playing would probably be attributed to the pianist and dismissed.
The song sounds very much in the style of the late 1800s, but it's almost refreshing to know that the crass commercialism we see in America today isn't entirely new.
LYRICS
Who doesn't know the "Dugan Kid"
He is the very latest
You'll find his pictures in the Journal every Sunday morn
He wears a mellow yellow dress
Of kids he is the greatest
Because he is the "slickest kid" that ever yet was born
Although but three or four years old
He's quite well known to fame
E'en though he has a homely face
Likewise a homely name
But he takes in all the picnics
Doesn't miss a baseball game
The "Dugan Kid" the latest up-to-datest
CHORUS
He's a plain little chap
From the heart of New York
Is the gay little Dugan boy
With smiles so sunny and ears so funny
He's New York's joy
When the band starts to play, is he in it?
"Well Say," Dugan's out of sight
For he's a corker a born New Yorker
And he's all right.
Some of his slang expressions
Have completely caught the city
You can hear them if you listen on the street most ev'ry day
Now though young Dugan's but a kid
His talk is often witty
And no matter where this urchin goes he's sure to have his say
When ever he gets rattled
He will holler "Hully Gee
Dere isn't any duck in town can get away wid me
For I'm a holy terror
When my fur is ruffled, see"
Says the "Dugan Kid" the latest up-to-datest
CHORUS
He's a plain little chap
From the heart of New York
Is the gay little Dugan boy
With smiles so sunny and easy so funny
He's New York's joy
When the band starts to play, is he in it?
"Well Say," Dugan's out of sight
For he's a corker a born New Yorker
And he's all right.
There's been a lot of discussion in recent weeks about traditional publishers moving to digital distribution until physical distribution is possible once again. Reactions have been mixed, but one of the primary counter-arguments has been that if readers start reading their books digitally, they'll never go back to reading physical copies and thus will absolutely kill comic shops. The most prevailing counter-counter-argument has been that won't happen because comic fans like the physicality and tactile nature of paper books; it's that inherent physicality that's valued almost as much as the story contents themselves.
While I don't disagree with that last statement, it occurs to me that's missing an even more significant rationale, which I discussed here on this blog in the past. Namely, that comic shop purchasing is often as much about the community aspect of the store location itself as it is about picking up your weekly stack of new comics. The comic shop -- at least any comic shop worth its salt these days -- is a destination in and of itself. The best comic shops don't sell comics -- they sell friendship and community; you can still buy comics there, but that's just an ancillary activity. Comic shops are selling a location where people of a certain mindset (that vaguely defined class of superhero/fantasy/sci-fi/gaming geeks) hang out.
You've been able to order new comics online for years now. With the pandemic, many shops have instituted some version of curb-side pick-ups. You, as a comic fan in the 21st century, don't have to deal directly with other humans if you just want to get new comics. But people (stay-at-home orders aside) generally don't do that. They make a special trip to their local comic shop every week; they pick up their books, but also spend the rest of their lunch talking with the other folks there. Norm didn't go to the Cheers! bar to drink; he went to the Cheers! bar to hang out with Cliff and Sam and Carla and everyone. Comics is much the same.
Whether comic shops survive their current shut-down status is another issue, but once people are able to go to comic shops again, they will. Not because they're able to get comics again, but because they'll be able to see their community again.
In the ongoing onslaught of publishing news that is largely being dictated by the coronavirus pandemic, Alterna Comics has mostly slid under the radar with their updates. They're not one of the larger publishers, so their news is often subsumed by whatever is going on with Marvel, DC, Scholastic, and the other top dollar publishers and/or their primary distributor, Diamond. As it turns out, though, Alterna has been charging ahead with a plan to keep their books going despite various shutdowns throughout much of North America.
(That their own website doesn't have a news or updates section might have something to do with their announcements getting missed as well. You have to either subscribe to their newsletter or check their updates on Facebook. Why there's nothing available on their own site, I don't know; that's generally been considered a best practice for decades. But I digress...)
In late March, they announced that they will continue to have their comics printed. Their printer was declared an "essential business" and they can continue on with only a slight delay. I suspect this is part due to Alterna's greater flexibility in the paper stock -- their books are printed on newsprint; while originally done as a cost-saving measure, it would seem this also gives them an edge with regards to using a printer that works on other newsprint items. Like, presumably, newspapers.
They also seemed to bust their humps to get direct ordering capabilities up and running on their site. While they were selling direct to consumers previously, it was primarily through subscriptions. They were able to scramble quickly enough to add in an ordering system for individual issues, and had that up and running the first week of April.
Part of how they were able to do that is because they've spent the past couple years developing a direct sales infrastructure. This was primarily aimed at retailers, who could order books through them and bypass Diamond. (Publisher Peter Simeti noted that over the past 18 months, their month over month direct sales to retailers were greater than their whatever they sold through Diamond.) But having this in place allowed them to open it directly to readers as well, and it gave them an additional outlet to sell their comics digitally.
What this also means -- both having that infrastructure and having spent years cultivating retailer relationships -- they're able to halt their relationship with Diamond entirely. They've cancelled all future solicitations with Diamond, and are handling that all internally now. While they'll certainly take a financial hit of some kind from retailers who refuse to order through more than one partner (i.e. Diamond) that they're able to continue selling while Diamond is not distributing anything will put them ahead of virtually every other comics publisher.
While they certainly could not have known a pandemic was going to grind the economy to a halt, and they don't seem to have yet figured out how to handle distribution outside the US, they were savvy enough to not only recognize the limitations of going through Diamond exclusively, but had set themselves up to shift over to other venues. Their agile approach to selling comics means that they are much farther ahead of the game than virtually, if not literally, every other comics publisher out there.
This pandemic has been a massive disruptor for the comics industry. (As well as almost every other industry, but let's focus on comics here!) Virtually every business has had to modify their business models very quickly to adapt to the current climate. But in comics, Alterna is acting as a disruptor as well. They're shaking up how comics business has been done for decades. It's not really something they set out to do, I don't think, but they've been nimble enough as a company to not only ride one disruption but cause another in the process. I think other publishers are going to seriously start looking at what Alterna is doing now, and do their best to copy those ideas as quickly as they can. Their problem, though, is going to be trying to do the two years' worth of work that Alterna already put in in a matter of months.
Keep an eye on Alterna. Will they become the end-all, be-all model of comics publishers going forward? Probably not, but they're now out here driving the whole industry forward while everyone else has been waiting at the stop light.
Right now, a good chunk of the planet is on some version of lockdown. The coronavirus pandemic has been a major disrupter throughout the world -- the only continent so far that has not had a confirmed case of COVID-19 is Antarctica. With so many people staying in place -- whether that's via a police-enforced quarantine, or generally following WHO guidelines, or because a person has been furloughed can't afford to go anywhere -- that means delivery services are being extensively used. You might not be able to go out to get groceries, but you can have them delivered.
Here in the United States, deliveries of all sorts are primarily handled by the United States Postal Service (USPS). And there are two issues worth discussing here.
First (and probably less well-known) is that the USPS is no longer accepting deliveries for -- as of this writing -- 66 countries. If you need to get something to one of the countries on this list your primary (and probably most affordable) option is simply gone. Now, in some cases, that's because some countries are not accepting incoming mails from other countries. Countries like Libya, Panama, Saudi Arabia, and the Cayman Islands won't accept anything from the US anyway. But in many cases, places like Cuba, Zimbabwe, Moldova, and Venezuela, the USPS isn't going there. With a few exceptions (notably India and the Congo), these aren't the most populated countries, so there's certainly less of an impact than if, say, Brazil, Mexico, and Japan were on the list, but that could obviously change.
And where this can be problematic is with creators -- whose revenue streams have had the convention circuit denied to them, and are forced to make all their income online -- who need to ship purchases internationally. What's a creator supposed to do when they get an order from Costa Rica? Or Kenya? Or South Africa?
I don't know how many more countries will be added to this list and when, but it's probably worth keeping an eye on if you do have any merchandise that might require international shipping.
The second issue is that the main source of the Postal Service's income -- first-class and marketing mail -- has largely dried up because of pandemic concerns. So estimates currently say that the USPS will be “financially illiquid” by the end of September, and the most recent bill to get more money to the post office was rejected out of hand by Trump. Letting the USPS run out of money would be disastrous for the post office itself, of course, but for creators relying on them as a means to deliver merchandise when their sole revenue stream is now remote ordering.
While some might claim that private companies like UPS and FedEx do the same thing, and could fill a void left by the USPS, that's currently not possible. In the first place, neither UPS or FedEx are designed to handle smaller items like letters. The cheapest option available for either of those services is over $10 for a single letter! That gets prohibitively expensive really quickly, as you can see!
But perhaps more significantly, both UPS and FedEx actually use USPS as part of their delivery system! Some areas are, logistically, too remote for either company to actually deliver to themselves, so they will basically only go so far as the nearest post office and let the mail carrier finish the shipment to the customer's front door. It's financially impractical for those two private companies to actually deliver to each and every house in the United States, and in the absence of the USPS, many people (particularly in rural areas) would lose access to any delivery services.
Not to mention that UPS and FedEx would need to radically upscale their entire operation to make up for the 600,000 employees currently working for the USPS. Those 600,000 people handle a LOT of mail, and shifting that workload onto their current private staff would be virtually impossible. Both UPS and FedEx would need to add 50% more workers than they have right now to make up the difference!
So even if the increased price of postage would not be a concern, and even if these "mail deserts" would be considered acceptable, there would still be huge delays as the companies ramped themselves up to handle the additional capacity. How fast do you think either company could hire and train 300,000 people? UPS touts itself as being great at logistics, but I can guarantee they'd still have trouble getting this sorted!
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, posted an announcement late last week in response to so many people being stuck at home because of the pandemic. It reads, in part: "Today, the Internet Archive is working with hundreds of public, school and university libraries to digitize their core collections and make them freely available over the Internet... This week, the Internet Archive created a National Emergency Library of 1.4 million digitized books to serve the needs of students, educators and learners who can now access them from home." Clicking over to this so-called National Emergency Library, the only real explanation reads, in total: "Announcing the National Emergency Library, a collection of books that supports emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation while universities, schools, training centers, and libraries are closed."
All of this sounds very good and altruistic. Except maybe it isn't. Not exactly anyway. I'll let Hugo and Nebula award winner and writer of things like Marvel's Ghost-Spider, Seanan McGuire, explain...
I seem to be running out of steam towards the end of the week lately, so I'm re-running a post from 2014...
Let's say you've got this cool new comic you've done. Maybe it's a webcomic, maybe it's a series of floppies, maybe it's gone straight to the graphic novel treatment. Doesn't matter. You might describe it in a shorthand that sounds like...
"It's a cross between Superman and Liberty Meadows."
Or...
"It's kind of like Death Note meets Spy vs Spy."
And you're thinking to yourself that part of your goal is woo in readers who already interested in those comics. That makes sense, right? If they've expressed an interest in one comic, they might express an interest in your comic that has some of the same elements. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but you've at least got a frame of reference to start with.
Another way you might describe your comic might be...
"It's just like Deadpool, but funnier."
Or...
"It's the next Pearls Before Swine."
That's a harder sell, because people know that it's almost certainly hyperbolic. Plus, you're making a direct comparison to a single, well-done comic (you wouldn't be comparing yourself to a piece of crap that nobody liked, right?) and you're expressly saying that yours is better. At least with the mashup version, you're acknowledging multiple sources of inspiration and the comparisons are more oblique.
Regardless of how you're approaching selling your as-yet-unknown comic to someone, here's something to keep in mind: you are not, I repeat, not in competition with whatever you're comparing it to.
If you like Superman, there is no substitution for Superman. You can get kind of close with Supergirl or Captain America or Superduperman or your Superman/Liberty Meadows mashup, but those are not Superman. They would only serve as possible substitute for Superman if Superman were not available.
Comics are not commodities. They aren't interchangeable. You can't simply swap Superman with Moon Knight and expect readers to be happy. That should be fairly obvious, right?
(By the way, I'm talking primarily about characters and titles here, but the same applies to creators. People might read Superman because of the writer on the book, and will happily switch over to Captain America if the author starts writing that title. But if that's the case, they're not going to be swayed by your character analogy/reference in the first place; you'd have to say something more along the lines of "I write kind of like a cross between Scott Snyder and Gail Simone." In any event, the basic concept I'm talking about here will still remain the same.)
Your competition is not against those other titles that you compare yourself to. Your competition is actually whatever title(s) the reader likes about equally to yours.
Think about it this way... what if you ranked all the comics you currently read in the order that you enjoy them? One being the title you like most of all, two being your second favorite, and so on. If this new comic is #12 on the list, your competition is #11 and #13. Because if the reader has to start cutting back on their reading for time or budget reasons, they're going to start by trimming off what they like the least. They're not going to drop their #1 favorite book unless they absolutely have to. But their #12 book? That's not going to be as painful a decision.
So if your Superman/Liberty Meadows mashup ranks at #12 for somebody, you are competing not against Superman but against whatever is in spot #11. Maybe that's Archie. Or maybe Rat Queens. Or maybe Walking Dead. Whatever it is, that's what your comic has to become better than if the reader decides they can only afford eleven comics now.
Similarly, you also have to remain better than whatever is at spot #13. Because they're trying to become better than #12 -- your Superman/Liberty Meadows mashup! If you start going farther down the list, you risk greater and greater danger of being dropped.
You, as a creator, can't know what every reader's list looks like, and you can't know how your comic rates in the minds of the readers relative to everything else they read. So all you can do, really, is put out the best comic you possibly can.
And not worry about whether you have to be better than Superman.
I've been writing for The Jack Kirby Collector for over fifteen years, and I've also made some (decidedly minor) contributions to Alter Ego and Back Issue. The TwoMorrows magazines are very much in line with what I like in comics history/archaeology, and I was supporting them for years even before I first became a contributor. With Diamond stopping the shipment of new products for the foreseeable future, this puts a dent in many publishers' coffers, including TwoMorrows. I want to see all of the TwoMorrows mags continue, so I'm replicating below an announcement from publisher John Morrow...
TwoMorrows Publishing needs your help
Things are topsy-turvy at TwoMorrows right now in light of Diamond Comic Distributors temporarily shutting down, but here’s where things stand for us.
Basically, for the short term at least, our survival will rely on mail order and digital sales. That’s why I’ve just launched a 40% Off Magazine Sale, to boost mail orders and get us through the difficult next few weeks. We’re fully operational, and any in-stock items listed on our website will be shipped immediately. So if you’re able, please place an order online to help us weather the crazy days ahead. For easier ordering, download our new 2020 Digital Catalog at this link: http://www.twomorrows.com/media/2020InterativeCatalog.pdf
Copies of our World of TwoMorrows 25th Anniversary book are scheduled to arrive here within a week, at which point we’ll immediately start shipping them to everyone who directly ordered from us and through Kickstarter. The Limited Hardcover Edition of WOT is only available from us, not through comics shops, but we’ll also have plenty of softcover copies available.
Like other publishers, we rely on Diamond and comics shops for the majority of sales of our new releases, so the shutdown is really going to hurt us (as it will comic shops). Diamond’s copies of World of TwoMorrows, Alter Ego #164, Back Issue #120, BrickJournal #62, and RetroFan #9, won’t get to stores until the shutdown is over. But just like the WOT book, our mail order customers won’t miss out on those—we will fill webstore orders as soon as our copies arrive in the next three weeks, and subscribers will also get their copies on schedule, as long as the post office stays open.
A word of warning: For anyone planning to buy BrickJournal #62 or RetroFan #9 at Barnes & Noble, it now appears none of the copies we are sending them will make it to B&N store shelves, and will be destroyed. So the only way to get those issues is through your local comics shop once they reopen, or directly from TwoMorrows. Because of this, we expect these two issues will sell out quickly after release, so don’t delay pre-ordering them.
Lastly, we have several publications ready to go to press as soon as Diamond is ready to receive new shipments. We will adjust our upcoming release dates then, but know that work continues here on all your favorite books and magazines, thanks to our dedicated editors and contributors.
For 25 years, we’ve had the most loyal, supportive fans in the industry, and when this storm passes (and it will soon), with your help, we’ll still be here producing the industry’s best publications about comics, Lego, and pop culture.
Best regards,
John Morrow, publisher
TwoMorrows Publishing