SNAFU. DC Villains.

When you have an industry dominated by two players, you're going to be at the mercy of their decision making.

In comics, Marvel and DC are by far the biggest players.  I think of Marvel as General Motors and DC as Ford.

So Ford -- I mean DC -- decided to take an entire month of comics and completely change what they offered.  Instead of the regular New 52 titles, Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Justice League, Flash, Green Arrow, etc. etc., they would offer us 52 different villains.

Now, I didn't recognize all 52 villains frankly.  I thought it was a dubious idea.

Mistake number two was that instead of a villain for each of the New 52, which I could put in one on one ratio on the shelves, they broke up the 52 villains and connected them to about 10 titles.  So there are 5 Batman villains, and 5 Justice League villains and so on.

So if you were signed up for Batman, for instance, instead (1) 3.99 comic that month, you might get 24.00 worth of comics (including the overall crossover comic that ties them altogether.)

So now what do I do?

I suppose I should point out that most of my comic sales are on prearranged shelves with customers who ask for the same titles every month.  I'm obligated to do my very best to make sure these people get what they want.

The kicker is, the covers to these new villain covers are going to be Lenticular, which is a 3D motion effect, and were going to cost 1.00 more per comic. 

There was going to be no way to order these correctly.  Either I was going to order too many, or I was going to order too few.

Since the store is in good shape, I decided I could risk ordering a few more than normal.  I chose 1 villain for each of the major titles to put on my shelves, with the offer that they could exchange it for one of the other covers.

So a couple of days ago, DC announced they were going to allocate the comics.  That we would get between 50 to 100% of what we ordered, based on past history.  (They had to submit production numbers before they got the retailer numbers.)

Of course, this is going to have the opposite effect -- there will probably be a huge demand for these comics now that I might be only getting 50% of what I ordered.

ARRRGGHH!!!!

Now my main focus is in getting through this month without too many customers mad at me.  I'll point out to them that the news was out there of what was coming (though not the numbers) and that I'd have been glad to take their preorders.  But nobody did that.  I solicited for a few regulars for a few days before the news came out and I stopped.   No sense promising people something I may not be able to deliver.

They're offering us a 2D version to make up the shortfall, which really only compounds the uncertainty.  Unless these are made returnable, I may order none of these poor cousins.

The biggest problem is that the difference for some of the villains on some of the bigger titles -- such as Batman, where I can sell 50 copies -- aren't any more attractive than the villains of my lessor titles -- such as Green Lantern, where I sell 3 copies.  So I'm going to have a lot of some villains for some titles and extremely few of other titles -- not based on the actual villains but based on the popularity of the title that is only tangentially connected.

Another problem is that most of us retailers use the FOC -- the Final Order Cutoff -- for our real numbers.  It turns out, it doesn't matter what our FOC is, we're getting our allocation based on the initial orders -- which makes nonsense of the entire purpose of the FOC.

There are tons more problems here, but I'll stop.

I'm going to be getting my real numbers tomorrow.

I'm going to have to figure out a way to be fair to my regulars -- make sure that they are all happy without them getting more than their fair share.  But no matter what I do, some of them won't be happy.

I'm not sure how many I'll have to sell the the regular public, so any publicity from now one may only serve to make me look like I don't know what I'm doing.  So even by risking 40% more orders, I'm still going to look like I was a pipsqueak that didn't order enough to satisfy demand.

I'm thinking my overall orders ended up being about 40% higher than usual, so a 40% cut leaves me at the same place -- but with much higher demand.  I won't profit from this SNAFU because I can't profit from what I can't sell.

Way to go DC.