The (No) News of the World.

This seems like one of those times when there is lots of news -- but none of it is NEWS, you know?

San Diego Con has wrapped up. This event has become overwhelmingly Hollywood, a pop culture extravaganza, more than a comic show. Which fits into my postings a couple of days ago about positioning my store as a "pop culture" store.

Ironically, had a discussion with another dealer over on retailer's comic bulletin board, who responded to a post I made about "ignoring" digital, by saying, "How can you ignore the 800 pound gorilla in the room?" Ironically, the name of his store is Pop Culture, but he sells "100% comic merchandise", while my store is called Pegasus Books, and I sell about half books (comics and otherwise) and half pop culture.

Some comic dealers are totally joining the DC effort to get them to sign up for a third site and turning over their customers for a .30 payoff. Seems nuts to me. What do they need ME for? Especially when Marvel and the others aren't making any such arrangements; they're skipping the middle man.

Seems to me that DC is just saying, "Yes, we are going to screw you. But at least we're providing a condom!"



Other non-news. Apparently, no one really believes that the government won't raise the debt ceiling. I don't believe it either -- but like I said, I worry that one of the drivers will get their coat caught on the door of the speeding car and they'll sail over the cliff.

There seems to be a part of us that wants it all to blow up. But I know from wishing such things on product lines in my store that it NEVER pans out. (Like wishing that the sports card collapse would clear away the riff raff; never happened.) It's not even all that satisfying when something self-destructs. It just seems stupid and painful afterwards.


Made my annual contribution to the biking classic (that is, I lost the usual amount of money...)
Sales were about half on Sat. from the previous three day average. But everyone seemed to be having fun, so what are you gonna do?


My DC orders came in at basically two and half times to normal numbers. The normal numbers were pretty depressed, and I seem to have more than half of the increase covered by advanced requests -- and if worse comes to worse, I can return most of the product for credit.

Still it's enough to make me nervous.

It all depends on how the news breaks when the product is actually available. Maddening sometimes how much publicity we get when the product isn't available, and then how little when it is -- but timing the media must be extraordinarily difficult.

As they say, we can always hope for a slow news day....