Ultimate Invasion #1 had 56 pages. wrap around cover so you’re getting almost twice as much comic as ASM 30 for $3.99 and if you consider the wrap around cover as equal to two normal comics covers which would normally have ads on the back your getting twice the cover art. I wasn’t happy with the price on that one either but at least it wasn’t $9.99. Maybe they thought the exclusive behind the scenes stuff was worth the extra buck. Either way they put that info in the solicitation so you would know before you ordered.
Bryan’s work on THE ULTIMATES helped redefine super hero comics for the 2000s - wait until you see what he and Jonathan have in store for this decade! Including new data pages by Jonathan Hickman - plus exclusive behind-the-scenes material on the world-building that has gone into this project!
I’ll now slip quietly back into the shadows to just read along. Way too much work to do to be trying to type with two fingers in drawn out conversations when I just got a DC Comics Presents #47 and others in that need processing.
Do you typically skip over the larger cover priced books @BJ? Wondering if that is a fairly common store practice. I believe it to be. Which I don’t blame stores for doing
If I ran a store, I would only order what my customers are pre-ordering and probably a handful of shelf copies. I would not want to get stuck with any copies of books that sit for weeks, months or even years. As a retailer, I would be in the business of moving inventory, not sitting on it. Square footage for storage costs more than the books themselves…
This is actually what one of my local shops does. He will pre-order anything you want but only orders a very small number of stuff for the shelf. Sometimes debut issues of things, series that people seem to pick up a lot, etc. He goes very light on stuff that’s not pre-ordered. That said, they do a lot with trading cards and miniatures and stuff like that so comics are not the focus.
It’s called smart business if you ask me. Only buy what you know you’ll sell without breaking the bank… Retailers who chase ratio variants in hopes to sell them at inflated costs without actual pre-orders for such things seem to lose more than they win… Frankies comes to mind, they went bonkers on exclusives and such, all it did was get them in trouble.
This is what my lcs does now. And I don’t blame them for it. If I don’t ask for a book pre FOC I don’t get it. Unfortunately even when I do they only order 1 copy and it’s a good chance it is damaged in some way, especially marvel.
So if condition is important, I order online from bigger retailers as the odds are better they won’t try to push a bad copy on me.
Typically, Image, IDW, Dark Horse, Marvel, DC and Dynamite which are the 6 largest publishers prepandemic would get at least 2 A covers of everything ordered. Dynamite’s now gone from store stocking until Diamond offers order consolidation like Lunar does so they delay shipping until $125 of product comes in and they are starting trials on Priority Mail for replenishment shipments in January so there’s a chance Dynamite may be back if they expand it to regular weekly orders so we aren’t getting raped for high UPS small order freight charges weekly which would frequently add up to less cover price than the UPS charge with the big 5 publishers coming from Lunar and PRH now.
Certain thicker high dollar books haven’t sold over the years so we started dropping those. DC’s Holiday stuff, all that Marvel Voices stuff, etc. We’ve started cherry picking a few titles out of the others to drop as well like anything named Star Trek. GODS, if they’d broken up into 3 issues for #1 instead of one three times as thick comic we’d most likely would have ordered at least 2 of each of those three or 6 to 7 copies minimum. We had no subscriber feedback wanting it and BC was pushing it as a mega order expected comic preFOC which translates into a glut of over production most likely coming so finding long term sales for a comic that sounded destined to be dollar bin fodder as dumpers unloaded their over ordered excess from chasing variants seemed destined to be a failure. In general, a $9.99 Marvel and the soon to come $12.50 versions will get shelf stocked so long as it’s not from something that’s proven to be a difficult sell in the past.
Every price increase has been a deal breaker for someone for the last 50 years but the sales still keep coming. The math works out the same. Buy 2 copies of any comic, any price and put one on the store shelf and one online and if either sells you break even. If both sell you actually make something. It’s the same risk no matter if it’s 10 $1 comics or 1 $9.99, the only difference is you only have to find one person who wants the $9.99 comic compared to trying to find 10 people in a limited market interested in the $1 comic. Some even say the price increases increase total sales because it encourages some of the people on the fence to actually set up subscription boxes for the discounts which then translates into more comics ordered than were being grabbed off the shelf irregularly and more frequent visits to the store in general since you have stuff waiting.
Trade prices are increasing just like everything else.
But, are the sales still coming? Sounds like that’s maybe the case with your shop, which is fantastic. But, everywhere else I look, I see shops drying up or comics becoming a smaller and smaller part of a business. To me, that says the sales are dropping.
According to Comicron which is the only source I know of for this information, Diamond in 2009 years end sales were $429.47 million.
In 2019, the last year we have complete data for before DC left, the number was $529.66 million.
That’s an increase of close to 25% in total dollars over 10 years which factoring in a roughly 25% cover price in that time period suggests total sales are staying about the same.
Whenever BC posts a list of shops opening and closing the numbers usually appear to be about the same.
I suspect there’s been some shift to where people purchase like the growth of the mega online super discounters that get pimped out for every item all the time but some of that I hope begins to be offset by smaller sale points bringing a larger number of places comics can be purchased back into the norm. The days of opening a shop and doing nothing but comics should be fading as customers want more and more is available from most of the places offering comics wholesale. The trick is finding that happy niche that fits your community and maybe encouraging a few additional sources to get into the game like the drug store on the strip and the convenience store on the corner. The reality is smaller places can now afford to get in the game. They probably will not even know it unless you tell them or turn it into a side business to supply them yourself. As they begin to grow and bring in new faces, some of those faces will migrate to larger comic specialty shops and begin to chase back issues they may not have wanted from online sellers they may not have ordered from if they hadn’t been exposed to the product by Bob the pharmacist guys magazine rack while mom was waiting for her prescription to get filled.
Those sales estimates also include graphic novels and magazines. I believe they still report that around 70% or more of the yearly estimated sales comes from graphic novels (hardcovers, omnibuses, etc).
It’s all estimates though from Comichron and Diamond. Diamond didn’t release all sales. So we’ll never get a truly accurate estimate. Take it all with a grain of salt…
