retailing

1. Call me at the shop on Wednesday.

2. Tell me you have a bunch of comics for sale in “really good shape.”

3. I ask how old they are, you say they’re “pretty old.”

4. I ask you for some titles, you tell me X-Force, Groo, Elric, X-Factor and so on.

5. I say “bring ’em in, let me take a look at them,” warning you that I’ll probably only be interested in the Groo books (and maybe the Elric).

6. You say you’ll be in Thursday.

7. Thursday. You don’t come in.

8. Friday. You do come in, with a filthy plastic crate filled with even filthier comics. Waterlogged, beat to hell, and just plain dirty comics. Even the comics that are in plastic bags (about half of them) are ratty and filthy.

9. I take a brief look through the comics, not even wanting to touch them, in the off-chance there might be something salvageable.

10. I decide it’s not really worth the effort, and tell you I’m not interested in any of these.

11. You take your crate of comics and depart.

12. I go home at the end of my shift Friday evening.

13. I come into the store Saturday morning. Sitting on the floor by the front counter – that same filthy plastic crate of the even filthier comics.

14. Employee who worked the closing shift the night before tells me that, after I left, an employee at a neighboring business brought the crate of comics to us, having found it dumped in the bed of his pickup truck.

15. So I end up having to deal with this box of crap comics anyway. I pull the plastic bags off the ones that are bagged so that I can dump them in the recycle bin, while going through the comics and seeing if anything actually is salvageable.

16. End result: about 200 or so unsellable comics dumped into the recylcer; about two dozen comics just about good enough for the bargain bin; two comics actually worth keeping and pricing for the regular back issue stock (that one issue of the original What If series with “What If Elektra Had Lived”) and Sub-Mariner #42); and one copy of Zot! #10 1/2 with rusty staples that I ended up giving to Employee Aaron.

17. Just to be clear, had I actually gone through the collection and paid him for the two comics I actually wanted, I may have paid two dollars, tops, for them. And maybe another buck or so for the Zot! just because you don’t see those too much any more. Ultimately, not really worth the time and effort involved here, and only really bothered with them once they were dumped on us just because I was averse to simply throwing away the comics without checking for anything usable.

18. As for the plastic crate: put outside by the back door, where hopefully someone will take it away. And not, say, dump it into the bed of any neighbor’s pickup truck. Or my pickup truck.

19. So in the future, should you happen to call and tell me you have comics for sale, and they’re all in mint condition…I’ll try to suppress the sigh, but no promises.

So you may remember about a week ago, when I was talking about Flashpoint tie-in sales. In short, the debut issues of the various mini-series that were released in the first week sold well, but the first issues from the second week did not. In the time since I posted that report, those second week series still haven’t sold nearly as well as the previous week’s. In fact, I’ve had to reorder more copies of three of the four series from the first week, while still working on initial orders of the second week.

Since then, we’ve had a third wave of Flashpoint tie-in #1s, and…now, these are selling quite well. Not as well as the first week releases, but better than the second week’s.

This somewhat, but not totally, alleviates my worry that this sales trend is a precursor to the September Month of #1s from DC and the buyer’s fatigue that could set in. It appears to be more a case of “what’s being offered” than “oh man, more #1s.” The first week’s worth of books sold well, of course, being the first out of the gate and the object of reader curiosity about the event. And the best seller of the bunch, Abin Sur, which I’ve reordered multiple times, may have the additional benefit of currently-peaking Green Lantern interest (not just due to the movie, but because of the general recent popularity of the various GL comics series). And then there’s the Batman tie-in, which, well, it’s Batman, people like that dude. World of Flashpoint probably sold well because the title made it sound like it would provide more background on the series setting. The poorest seller from that first batch was Secret Seven, despite the George Perez art. Maybe it’s been too long for Shade the Changing Man to be a sales draw again?

Second week, we had Citizen Cold, which surprised me that it didn’t sell better than it did, given the Flash tie-in. Emperor Aquaman…well, Aquaman was bit of a hardsell the last time he was on the stands, so the slow movement on this series wasn’t too much of a surprise. Deathstroke: The Curse of Ravager may be suffering from the fact that the comic reading public, I think, may have a bit of Deathstroke burn-out at the moment. Frankenstein is awesome, but may appear to be a bit too much of an oddball non-traditional superhero book to sell comparatively to its spandex-clad cousins. (Which may give us a clue as to the relative sales levels of DC’s forthcoming “dark” DCU books.)

Like I said, sales are up on the third week of #1s, and, boy, it’s hard to resist this great cover:

It’s hard to say how this week’s batch of debut issues will perform. It’s easy to speculate in hindsight why certain comics sold or didn’t sell, since once you have the actual sales in hand, you can apply whatever reasons you’d like to why things went the way they did. Plus, I really thought Citizen Cold would sell great, so my precognitive abilities may not be the best. And who the hell thought Abin Sur would have a hot comic, even with other Green Lantern books selling like crazy right now?

Just as a guess, The Outsider may move the slowest, even despite the tenuous Batman connection, as it’s the most unrecognizable name of the bunch. Lois Lane and the Resistance I would like to sell well, since maybe that would encourage more Lois Lane comics, which I’m all for. (But I’d eat my hat if DC would anything as cool as the comics I linked to there.)

The other two books, Kid Flash Lost and Reverse Flash…the other Flashpoint Flash tie-in didn’t sell that quickly, but maybe these will do better since the featured characters actually have “Flash” in their names. We’ll see.

Of course, the real question about all these titles is this: how will the number 2s sell?

And those above titles will all be competing with this week’s release of the Brightest Day Swamp Thing spin-off, which will be getting all the sales, so pretty much everything else on the rack is going to suffer anyway.

The other is the first issue of the three-part Flashpoint tie-in, one of the first four tie-in series that launched a couple of weeks ago. And of the bunch, this has been the fastest seller for us, necessitating a second reorder just this week for more copies. As much as I’d like to credit this to a strong but previously-unexpressed demand among fans for poor ‘ol Abin Sur to finally get his due, I’m guessing the impending release of the Green Lantern movie might have more to do with it.

But then again…while all the Green Lantern comics have been selling exceedingly well at our shop (and we’ll see if they take the usual post-movie sales drastic decline nearly all comics have once the film is released), the two movie prequel books released so far (Tomar-Re and Kilowog) haven’t really sold to expectations for us. I didn’t expect them to sell like the regular GL books, since they’re (gasp) outside of continuity, but the covers are appealing, and I was expecting some pre-movie interest in GL titles and I figured we’d move a few at least a few that way. But so far…eh, not exactly flying off the shelves here.

Now, the Flashpoint: Abin Sur book…nearly all of the first week’s batch of Flashpoint tie-ins either sold through completely or very nearly, with Secret Seven being the one that moved the slowest. The two that moved the fastest, requiring me to place immediate reorders, where the Batman tie-in and, as I said, the Abin Sur book. It could simply be that the two tie-ins focused on and titled after specific characters attracted the most reader interest, while Secret Seven and World of Flashpoint just didn’t grab the reader as readily.

The second week’s batch of tie-ins, with Citizen Cold, Deathstroke-whatever, and the other two…are selling, but not nearly as quickly. It could just be this next batch of series wasn’t as attractive…or that having four new #1s of mini-series tie-ins on top of the four #1s that came out the previous week scared folks off. And when four more new #1s come out this week…well, I’ll be interested to see how it goes.

Flashpoint itself has been selling quite well and certainly has been grabbing customer interest, and I noticed an upward bump in demand when word started getting around that this was leading into DC’s September renumbering hoohar. But…and this is probably too soon to be worrying about this sort of thing, maybe, as I’m only going off a couple weeks’ worth of observations…watching the sudden dip in hesitance about buying a bunch of first issues in subsequent weeks has me wondering if we’ll get great sales on the first week or two of DC’s #1 releases in September, with First Issue Fatigue setting in once the fourth or fifth week rolls around.

The situations are not entirely analogous, I realize. The Flashpoint tie-ins are in addition to DC’s regular monthly output, and they are “parallel universe” stories that don’t impact the “real” (ahem) stories (except in this case they sorta do, since everything’s restarting as a result of Flashpoint, but let’s not confuse the issue). The new #1s are, at least in part, carrying over from currently published series. Chances are…well, mostly good that the folks who buy Action #904 will continue buying when the numbering rotates back to numero uno. It’s the new series we’ll have to watch…not that we weren’t going to be watching the sales closely anyway. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that I suspect a Mister Terrific #1 coming out in the first week may have more of a chance than, say, a Blackhawks #1 coming out at the end of the cycle, when folks reach the end of their willingness to try out new titles after keeping up with their regular series and sampling other new #1s in the previous weeks.

And there are other considerations, of course. A new tights-and-capes superhero #1 coming out in week 5 will still likely get more sales than a comic that is less obviously a superhero comic (i.e. Blackhawks #1) coming out in the first week.

So anyway, near the end of July, if you see me tearing what’s left of my hair out as I’m hunched over the retailer order form, you’ll know I’m trying to nail down numbers for these books. I can feel the migraine already.

So we had a fella donate some boxes of comics to the shop the other day, because if it’s one thing we need, it’s more comics. Mostly it was ’80s superhero and girly comics, but there were some trading cards (in case you were wondering where that Jimmy Olsen card came from yesterday), and a handful of Marvel-produced retail bags, like this one from 1989:

And there he is again on the back of the bag:

Actually, I did sell a run of those mags to a customer over the last weekend. That works about to, oh, about one set a decade. So if you want any for yourself, you better move fast!