Like many my age, I have forgotten an extraordinary volume of minutia. I have missed appointments, failed to recall anniversaries, and frequently find myself walking in a direction to do a thing. I can usually count on getting to where I’m going, only to find that I can’t be sure why I went anywhere in the first place. It’s clear that a certain percentage of my existence has just been lost, as in vanished without a trace, like video rental chains.
However, I do very specifically recall walking into a convenience store sometime in the early seventies and seeing a copy of Swamp Thing with a Bernie Wrightson cover. An exciting event at the time that would have been far more nifty if the entire top third of the cover hadn’t been torn off. It was sad then, and the letters c,c, and g had as yet to be seen in that order. If mint were the monitor, this book was the Anti-Mint. I bought it for half of the cover price and read it, because comics are often more than just the cover.
None of this may matter to you unless you are a fan of browsing the independent racks and/or are particularly interested in seeing how Covid-19 is affecting the comics industry.
The vast majority of comics these days are ordered on an non-returnable basis. Graham Crackers buys all of the stuff on our racks. If we don’t sell these things, we keep them. Some first issues by Boom! and Image actually are frequently ordered on a returnable basis, but that’s about it. There is greater risk in this returns-free system, but there are greater rewards if you make the right guess…hundreds of times in any given month. Until recently, all returnable comics were stripped of their covers and returned to the distributor, the covers being the proof of destruction, which is also the name of my new Deathcore project. Most returns during this time were for products that had been damaged in shipping, therefore were fairly rare considering them as a percentage of the volume of items the stores receive in a week.
However, because of the retailing difficulties associated with the pandemic, most major publishers offered partial, or in some cases total, returnability. For varying periods of time, DC, Boom, Dark Horse, and Image made their entire lines returnable recently. Robrt Kirkman even did something so spectacular that he could draw a comic on a cocktail napkin in crayon and I’d order a few.
Of course, this is an excellent opportunity here to poke a little fun at Marvel , but they recently announced that their big summer event is Heroes Reborn, so I don’t want to kick them when they’re down. The point being, there has been a larger volume of copies on the racks for months now.
With the Spring come two things, longer days and the point of this missive. If you’re an independent publisher fan, and you like to browse the rack, you’ll still see pretty much the same volume of copies…of first issues. However, keep in mind that we’ve been trying a much larger variety of books because there was no risk, as #13’s were just as returnable as #1’s. This is unfortunately no longer the case.
Ordering comics for the rack is risk. Occasionally factors make it more risky, sometimes things make it easier to pull a trigger. For instance, a Batman Fortnite comic seems like a risky bet on the surface, as it didn’t seem to matter much when Marvel did a crossover with the game. Of course, DC will be doing it better, as each issue will be coming with codes for skins and other items. It’s already way less risky, and that was before we found out that Batman fights Snake Eyes in #3. You’ll probably see that issue on the rack, at least until Thursday.
If you’d like to unstrap that gopro from your head, and have less risk in your life, join the absolutely free subscription club. If you’ve already made your life easier by doing this thing, then make sure you tell us about that book you’ve “just been picking up off of the shelf”. You’ll be glad you did, for the time of stripped covers has once again ended, and with it go many of the extra rack copies you’ve gotten used to seeing.
Help us help you see the cover as half full, as opposed to seeing the rack as half empty.