I presume it’ll be harder to do after I die.
Running a little behind (and have an early morning doctor’s appointment tomorrow) so I’m going to keep it short today and take on a couple of your questions.
Chris wants to know
“How much do you need to keep track of storylines for ordering purposes? Is it mostly character appearances and event tie-ins, or does it go deeper than that?”
I need to have at least some awareness, of course, even if I don’t read every single comic book and am not completely familiar with every single character. However, of late it doesn’t seem to make as much difference as it used to, as comic sales tend to be relatively consistent per title once things get going past the initial first issue bump (if that happens at all).
Like, for example, Marvel’s recent “Blood Hunt” event didn’t seem to do anything for tie-in issues of ongoing series. Fantastic Four didn’t see a bump upwards in people picking up its “Blood Hunt” story. (Shame, because it was a pretty good one!)
Now, this may just be me. I’m a small store, selling not huge amounts of some of these books in the first place so any sales alterations caused by storylines or guest-appearances (gosh, remember when Wolverine popping into a book would goose a comic’s numbers?) may be negligible or within standard fluctuations. For shop selling hundreds of copies of some of these books each month, an event-based fluctuation may be more significantly noticeable.
To be frank, I have to pay more attention to ordering the right numbers of the variant covers versus what’s actually going on inside the book, which is certainly a statement about something.
Patrick Gaffney wonders
“Have your started your Cerebus read through yet? I have almost made it thought the first collection and it truly amazes me how the art progresses over that first year or two.”
I think I’ve said at least three times on this site, since Cerebus ended in 2004, that I was going to reread the entire series. And each time I’ve not got around to it. In more recent years, the problem is that the fine linework/small lettering/newsprint printing combination did not play well with my vision issues. But now, I own digital copies of the entire run, acquired on the cheap from a Humble Bundle offer, so I really don’t have any excuse. I promise you, someday, before I die, I will reread all of Cerebus. Well, maybe not all the text bits.
But yes, Dave Sim’s art improved by leaps and bounds in those early issues in an alarmingly short period of time. Without looking to double-check, I’m going to say…the first couple of issues are relatively crude, things get better pretty quickly after that, and then by the time you’re at the end of the first volume the dude’s like a master. It’s astounding.
Thom H. hits me with
“I’m always curious why people have the jobs they have, so: what drew you to comics, both as a hobby and as a profession?”
Simply said, I was a reader of pretty much anything I could get my hands on from a very young age, coming from a household filled with books and parents who used to read (and still do read!) constantly. Even my sister, who is mentally disabled, has a collection of books and magazines that she regularly flips through, so it’s just in the family DNA I suppose.
What specifically drew me to comics, I don’t know, other than they were colorful and interesting-looking and relatively inexpensive and easy to talk my parents into buying one or two for me. (My parents were also comic book readers as young’uns, so that probably didn’t take much convincing.) So, comics were part of my reading mix from early on.
As to what made me a comic book collector, versus a sporadic dabbler, was Star Wars. I know I’ve talked about this here before, but in short, when I saw the Star Wars comic had stories that took place after that initial movie, well, there we go, I was hooked. And that eventually spread to reading more and more comics, and now, today, here I am with three full short boxes of nothing but Hellboy-related comics.
How I got into comics retail…well, I’d been shopping at my Local Comic Shop for about five years, and one day in 1988 employee Buzz mentioned to me “oh, I’m going to be leaving.” I said, half-facetiously, “can I have your job, ha ha” and then next thing I knew, I was hired.
Now, as to what kept me in the comics biz…well, nothing else really appealed to me. I had tried a small handful of other jobs, but comics retail satisfied me in a way that other employment didn’t. And I don’t just mean “first pick of the new comics,” but I enjoyed the sorting and the pricing and talking to customers about them and breaking down new shipments (despite my complaining about distributors you might see me doing on social media) and it all just scratches an itch. I like looking at collections of old comics that are brought to me, and seeing things I haven’t come across in a while.
I just plain like handling comics. Which is a good thing, since I’ve been doing it for 36 years now!
Egads, that was longer than I intended. Okay, off to bed…thanks for reading, pals, and I’ll get to more of your questions shortly!
In re careers: weren’t you a librarian for a time as well? Seems pretty compatible.
Walaka – yes, I worked in a library prior to (and briefly overlapping with) my working in comics retail. I did enjoy that job, but I think I prefer comic bookin’!
Thanks for the answer, Mike! I like how sometimes people just slip into the exact job that’s right for them. That’s awesome.
“As to what made me a comic book collector, versus a sporadic dabbler, was Star Wars”
“Star Wars! Nothing but STAR WARS!” I think that pushed my collecting, too. And Spanner’s Galaxy. I remember getting 2 issues of that and knowing I wanted to keep them and buy the rest of the series.
“here I am with three full short boxes of nothing but Hellboy-related comics.”
I didn’t know there was that much Hellboy!
“Relatively inexpensive”
*nostalgic sigh*
It’s too bad that event tie-ins don’t move the needle much, if at all. If they don’t have a significant effect on the sales, creative teams shouldn’t be required to disrupt their own storylines with tie-ins.
It’s also unfortunate that Blood Hunt didn’t lead to higher sales on Fantastic Four. The current volume has the best FF stories published in decades. Ryan North’s plots are impressively creative, and the character beats range from hilarious to heart-warming. I think the first issue was a little shaky, but showed potential. Since then, it’s been almost all hits.
Mike L. – just so there’s no confusion, Fantastic Four actually sells pretty well for me. Just didn’t see a Blood Hunt sales bump.