So, since I was directly asked to address these concerns by my Editor, let’s try and tackle things head on, starting with the Twitter bit. (I do have to note that Ryan didn’t me on Twitter, so I didn’t even see it until David Harper flagged it weeks later – not that I would have done much there since I find the 280 character limit at Twitter to be nearly useless in discussing things with any level of nuance – though I did answer him in a private retailer’s group on Facebook and for whatever reason my Google alerts for my name and the name of the store didn’t tell me about Harper’s piece, and I would never have seen it without Heidi telling me) What we do have, flagged to me by Heidi, is this piece by David Harper, as well as a twitter thread by Ryan Higgins who owns Comics Conspiracy in Sunnyvale, Ca. I bring this up primarily as a prelude to this outing’s column because Beat Editrix Heidi MacDonald wrote me saying “I have to be honest, I have NEVER had as many emails and DMs about one of your columns as after the discount one! I have had a LOT of calls to run a rebuttal to your piece” – though no one writing her actually appeared to be interested in writing said rebuttal, go figure. It made the very act of restocking your store to be a very complex and ever-changing process each time, that did nothing to actually sell more comics for those extra costs in time and effort. One week Capital City would have it, the next they wouldn’t, a different week Diamond would have it, and the third they wouldn’t, and so on. As a good “for example”, I vividly remember that when we started while we had at least a dozen wholesalers we could buy graphic novels from (though really only four properly viable choices in the San Francisco Bay Area), actually finding which one had something as core as, say, “Watchmen” in stock any given week was always a giant crap shoot.
Last month my store Comix Experience celebrated it’s 33 & 1/3rd anniversary (“we’re still spinning” was our tagline for those who remember phonographs, ha), which means I’ve been selling comics in my own store for a third of a century, yikes.īesides the fact that makes my store more tenured than anyone in senior management at Marvel or DC – and older in total than publishers like Image comics or Boom! – that also makes me in this business long enough to remember just how horrible things could be.
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