DC Comics has Jumped the Shark.

I usually don't talk about industry complications on my blog because it's not my customers' problem how many hurdles I have to jump to get their product so why burden them?

I had a big pile of poo land in my lap this morning. My response was to laugh--that slightly hysterical laugh when things become too much. DC has decided to leave Diamond Distribution and force comic shops to order from our biggest online discounter competitor.

So what? Just a different distributor. In the case of comics, it's huge. It's a very fragile business at the best of times. This is a potentially disastrous turn in the road.

At the same time, all my business decisions in the last few years have been in preparation for just this sort of event, so --while it's very, very inconvenient--we'll probably be able to negotiate the situation without too much damage. I'm not so sure about most comic shops.

A little background.

Comics are a very marginal business. Not a whole lot of money is generated, despite the popularity of the movies and TV shows. Spider-man is huge--Spider-man comics, not so much. In some ways this has protected us comic shops. The big chain stores haven't been able to take our business away because it's too much work and too risky for such a small reward.

But outsiders rarely understand this. They wonder why we aren't selling more comics (even if you ask them, "Have YOU bought a comic lately?") So every time a Disney buys up a Marvel or a Warner Entertainment buys up DC and then are themselves gobbled up by an A.T.&T, the new overlords almost always try to ween the market away from comic shops. It simply makes no sense to them that Batman can make billions of dollars in the movies, but they can barely generate a small uptick in the source material.

Usually they try to put their product in the mass market. There's a pretty common misapprehension, even among comic readers, that comics abandoned the grocery stores or newstands or whatever. (Ancillary postulate, that they abandoned the "kids.") The truth is the opposite. The mass market abandoned comics, and the direct market stepped into the breach.

So the new overlords make a deal with Barnes & Noble or Walmart, sometimes even giving them "exclusives" (oh, how I hate exclusives.) But here's what happens:

Barnes & Noble or Fred Meyer or whoever will order a block of comics. So maybe 20 Green Lanterns and 20 Batmans and 20 Supermans. What they don't understand is that currently (and these numbers are always changing based on writers, artists, storylines, etc.) they'll sell 3 Green Lanterns and 15 Batmans and 3 Supermans.  There is no way for them to know this except--well, by being a comic shop whose job it is to know.

Huge wastage follows, and either the comic companies or the retailers give up.

It's happened over and over and over again. Because, frankly, it can't happen any other way. Comics are hugely dependent on very specialized knowledge.

In the last 3 years I've tripled my new books sales simply by giving them a little more room and attention. Simply be increasing my inventory. For years I heard how bookstores were a tough business, and so I stayed away.

But I could give my comics double the attention and space and inventory and it would barely move the needle. Books, in contrast, reward me for my efforts.

Still, I love comics, and they are still the most significant part of my business, and I certainly have no motivation to move away from them. However, over the last few years comics haven't been doing all that well. We've adjusted to this downturn and our overall sales have been increasing despite it.

Still, neither Marvel or DC have been happy. And they are looking for someone to blame--and that is usually the "direct market" of comic shops.

As I said, the response of the overlords is to try the mass market first. There second, and much more disastrous response, it to try to control the market by having their own distributor. Unfortunately, this splits up an already small market. 

DC has just left their longtime distributor to go with our largest online discount competitor. This is pretty shocking, obviously, especially when the whole market has been weakened by the pandemic.

So what do I do? Do I sign up with the new distributor (who is my biggest online competitor?)

I'm going to go ahead and try to set up an account, but I'm going to be very careful.

Meanwhile, I worry about what Marvel is going to do, and whether my longterm distributor, who is the distributor of every other comic published, is going to fare without the second biggest publisher to sell.

As I said, I've been emphasizing books and games for the last decade or so--without de-emphasizing comics, I should point out, so we are diversified enough to handle it. Unless, of course, everything falls apart.

And that never happens, does it?