Breathtaking business naivete.

Business naivete is more common than not, especially amongst consumers. There are so many misconceptions about small business that all you can do is shrug. You have to keep on doing what you know. 

But it's even more breathtaking to me how naive some of the comic store owners who make comments on the comic biz sites are. They somehow see something that has almost no benefit for their businesses as a good thing. They dismiss the dangers as people being hyperbolic. 

Basically, you can divide the owners into two camps--those who fully experienced the collapse of the comic market in the 90s and those that didn't. Far be it for the newcomers--and they may have been in business for twenty years by now--to listen to the old farts. Worse, the newcomers take a moral high ground, lecturing us about how we're too negative.

Some of the things they say are ludicrous. 

The best example is how some of these business owners somehow believe that Penguin Random House--the biggest publisher in America--is somehow going to be good for small comic publishers. As if PRH is going to expend a bunch of money and time promoting publishers who barely make a blip on their bottom line. (They might want to talk to indie book publishers about that.)

One of the things I've always been amazed by is how Diamond Comics has been willing to deal with extremely small quantities of orders. One comic per five hundred stores--things like that. I'm betting it takes almost as much time for an employee to go to the bin to grab a single issue as it does to pick out ten or twenty or a hundred. 

I'm imagining PRH's first conversations with a comic shop owner: "Hi. This is Comic Book Guy Comics. I want to report that two of my five Incredible Hulk comics have dings in the corner.... Hello? Hello?"

Most importantly, our industry is extremely small relative to everyone else. I suspect that even PRH was seduced by the idea of comics because of their prevalence online, in the theaters, and on the streaming services.

Let me just say: what you see is not what you get. Comics don't sell huge numbers because everyone knows who Spider-man is. The clearest way to make this clear is to as you--dear reader--a simple question. 

"When was the last time you went into a comic store and purchased a monthly comic?"

I can guarantee that the vast majority of people who read this blog haven't done so in a long time. And these are people who are interested enough to read this blog!

As I said above, all I can do is take care of business as clear-eyed as I can.