Month: January 2021

Hey, Folks!

 

It will be a quick EDitorial this week as I am scrambling to get “End of the Month” stuff done. I’ve mentioned to many of you the interesting challenges to being the sole employee of Monarch Comics. I mean, “running” the store is certainly nothing new…I’ve been handling a lot of the heavy lifting for years and the stuff that was always Steve’s responsibility has not been too difficult. (Of course, I have yet to make my first monthly sales tax payment, but my accountant assures me that it is no big deal…lol) The big problem is that I got so used to sitting squeezed into my little desk futzing around with stuff like reorders, initial orders, the subscription form, inventory, etc. that I neglected to consider that I wouldn’t have the actual time to do such things while the store is open and busy. SO the last couple of weeks have involved identifying the work stuff I can get done at work and the work stuff that I have to take home to get completed. So if you stop by the store and I seem anxious or harried just know that I am being over dramatic and that everything is under control….mostly…

 

I did want to once again mention my latest addition to the store…a winged poster rack! I can’t convey to you how excited I was to make this purchase and how it feels me with happiness to see it standing tall and strong in the middle of the store! By pure luck alone, the day after I bought it Marvel/Diamond started running a big poster sale, so I was able to quickly fill most of the panels with an assortment of awesome posters and all of them at a big discount! With the exception of a couple of new poster selections all of them are currently on sale for $5 each! I also have a handful of D.C. Comics and Mandalorian posters ordered and due in any day now, so please make sure to flip threw them when you are visiting the store this week!

 

I’m also currently working on securing a supplier for more merchandise type items in the store. Diamond used to have a pretty wide assortment of such things as coffee mugs, t-shirts, wallets, keychains, and other assorted geegaws, but I’ve noticed in the last couple of years that such things stopped being offered in the monthly Previews catalog. So, I’m taking a moment to ask YOU, my beloved customer base, what kind of items you would like to see in the store. I believe that it is necessary to have these kind of items for folks who wander in looking for birthday gifts and the like for loved ones who are comic fans, but who don’t necessarily know what the person reads or already owns. I’m dipping my toe into the pool of more posters, obviously, and I am working on getting a wider range of t-shirts and the like in stock. I’m just curious as to what kind of items everyone would like to me carry that we’ve never tried before now. I’m opening the floor to suggestions…😊

 

I want to comment once again on the problems comic retailers are currently having with getting backlist hard covers/trade paperbacks back in stock. It really comes down to two issues, maybe two and a half issues. The first is the state of the printing industry. After the Spring shutdown, apparently restarting printing presses isn’t simply a matter of flicking on a switch. These massive machines need time to get back up to speed. Add to that the sheer amount of books and comics that need to get printed in order to catch up backorders and you can imagine the problems publishers are having getting things back in stock. The second problem lies with D.C. Comics and their “silly bugger” games involving their distribution plan. Understand that even though D.C. pulled out of Diamond as their distributor, Diamond still had the right to distribute D.C. backlist product through the end of 2020. D.C. had been working hard at getting their backlist product into the hands of UCS and Lunar, but then UCS pulled out of the deal. So, going into 2021, Lunar, the only U.S. distributor of D.C. Comics, is currently waiting for truckloads of backlist items to get transferred to their warehouse from both Diamond and UCS. This is a process and one that will take a minute to get sorted out. So when you walk in the store and see a bunch of holes on the wall that used to contain trade paperbacks you can now understand the difficulties I’m currently laboring under. Oh! And “the half” problem is that I haven’t had a spare moment to go over my backordered D.C. books from Diamond and UCS to check and see if they are now available for reorder from Lunar. I promise, Folks, I’m dancing as fast as I can and I will hopefully get closer to fully stocked before the end of the Post-Holiday Sale. In the meantime, if you are looking for a title, whether it is from D.C. Comics or not, please ask me about it at the counter. I can always check to see it’s availability and I love special orders!

 

One other thing and then I’m moving on to getting my January initial orders sorted. I’ve gotten four shipments of D.C. Comics from Lunar at this point and I think I have their shipping schedule sussed out. If you special order an item from the subscription form or by some other means it looks like it will take two weeks to get to the store. You see, when I order things from Diamond I have the option of getting items shipped directly from the warehouse which means a general turn around of 3-4 days from order to store. Lunar does not have a “direct ship” option so when I reorder an item from them I have to wait for it to be included in my next weekly shipment. Lunar, however, does not have the same shipping schedule as Diamond. My invoice for the following week’s worth of D.C. product is usually ready over a week in advance and I generally receive those books by Thursday or Friday. So if I reorder something on a Sunday then the invoice for the following week’s books is already figured and I have to wait until my next invoice to receive them. So, for instance, if you special order something I don’t carry on the subscription list I’m posting today then I will likely not see the order until the week of February 8^th. We’ll see if I can find a way to get orders filled faster as I become more accustomed to dealing with Lunar.

 

Okily dokily! I hope everyone has a great weekend and I’ll see you in the store soon!

 

Eddie

Hey, Folks!

 

Welcome to a rather late edition of the EDitorial! I swear that every time I think I’ve got my new, post-Steve schedule down pat something comes up and throws everything into disarray! I mean, I figured out early on that without Steve here to plant in front of the register to take y’alls money that I am no longer free on Wednesdays to sit at my desk and attend to the business of running the store. Not really a problem really, but it means that I get to take some work home with me to do at the dining room table. The problem that has now cropped up is that I keep forgetting to do little work tidbits while I am at home and then I show up at work on Thursday morning and realize that there is a ton of stuff that has to be sorted through before I can get to the Thursday business of writing/posting the EDitorial and the Subscription List.

 

Let’s use today as an example. My original plan was to sort of glide into the store, quickly write up an EDitorial, post everything, and then get some restocking attended to. Well, I sat at my desk and immediately remembered three things that needed to be done before I could even begin babbling away, including logging in all the preorder customers on the subscription form before I go live with it. I started dutifully banging away at the job and before I know it UPS shows up with some reorder boxes that were missing in action yesterday. I sighed and added it to the pile of boxes containing NEXT week’s D.C. Comics that I got in yesterday and still have to be unpacked and sorted. And let’s not forget the mess the back room is in or the amount of restocking I have to attend to because of the sale or the fact that my Diamond initial orders are due soon and I haven’t even begun to figure out. Also, I have the new poster rack to attend to and the stock I ordered in to fill it.

 

Ooooo…that’s something I wanted to mention! The new poster rack! Steve and I have had alternate views on carrying posters for years. I’ve always to expand our stock of posters, but Steve was not happy with their sell through rates. It was a valid point so I never pushed back too hard on it, but one of the things I wanted to do when I took over the ship was to really try stocking up on merchandise items like posters. In fact, for the last year and a half I’ve been trying to find a winged poster rack for sale on the internet and I wasn’t having nay luck at all with it. I mean, I used to love going into Spencer’s Gifts as a kid and flipping through the posters. Well, I had pretty much given up the cause, but then I got an interesting call the other day. A gentleman who owns a local business called and asked for Steve. I informed him that Steve was retired and asked if there was anything I could do to help. Turns out he was the one who could help me. He informed me that he had an old winged poster rack that was taking up space in his warehouse and asked if we would be interested in purchasing it. I was, of course, thrilled and immediately agreed to buy it if he could deliver it to the store. Well, a deal was made and I am now the proud pappa of a winger poster rack! To make it even better, Marvel released a poster sale the next day and I have ordered a bunch of posters to fill it up! It’s currently resting in the back room and hopefully I will have the time to get it cleaned up, out on the floor, and filled with new posters by the end of the week. I guess it goes without saying that I’m gonna have a poster sale!

 

Speaking of sales, the current Post-Holiday Sale is succeeding beyond my wildest dreams, although you may notice a lot of holes appearing in the hard cover/trade paperback displays. There’s a very good reason for this…actually TWO very good reasons for this happening. The first reason is that there are many stock items that are currently between printings with all of the publishers, both big and small. Apparently, when all of the printing presses shut down last Spring it was not simply a matter of switching them back on to get them printing at full capacity. Also, there was quite a backlog of print orders that piled up because all of us were very busy buying books, magazines, and comic books. So there are a lot of items that are selling now that I’m waiting for my distributors to get back in stock so that I can restock as well. Also, as I’m sure you are aware, D.C. Comics have finally settled on a US distributor for their products, Lunar Distribution. Unfortunately, there is apparently still a ton of D.C. backlist product that is still parked at Diamond and UCS. Until Lunar receives this stock from Diamond and UCS there are many D.C. backlist items that are currently unavailable to order from Lunar.

 

Of course, I could still open an account with Penguin/Random House, the distributor of D.C. backlist material that services the book stores, but that is a move I am hesitant to make for purely business reasons. On paper it sounds like a good idea. Their discount for D.C. books isn’t as good as the Lunar deal, but the shipping is free and I’m pretty sure that would bring them close to equal cost-wise. Unfortunately, there is another bit I have to keep in mind. You see, Diamond Comics discount tables are structured in such a way as to consider all of the product a retailer orders from them when calculating the discount. Monarch gets one of the highest discount percentages not because of the amount of new product ordered month to month, but because of the amount of backlist items we carry (and reorder). Now so far Lunar (and UCS before them) have honored whatever discounts stores had before D.C. left Diamond, but they could, at any time, institute a new system for calculating the discount a retailer gets for D.C. product. I’ve been holding off getting a Random House account for D.C. backlist material until I find out if doing so might harm the discount I currently get from Lunar. It’s kind of a waiting game and I’m hoping to find out what happens here shortly. I’ll keep you informed.

 

I’m going to be carrying a lot more merchandise type stuff in the next few months. I mean, I’ve already stepped the t-shirt inventory (witness the new t-shirts based on the Amazing Spider-Man #55 cover and Immortal Hulk #41) and I mentioned the poster rack above. I also got in some rather cool Mandalorain/Grogu welcome mats this week as well as some new Justice League keychain designs. Hopefully, I will be expanding on these new merchandise items in the next couple of months.

 

Oh, well, there’s probably more for me to babble on about today, but, geez, it’s almost three o’clock and the subscription form hasn’t been posted yet! Let me take one more quick moment to thank all of you who have helped to make my first month as owner of the store an incredibly successful one. Let’s hope I can continue to make good on my service as well as all of the new changes that are being planned even as we speak.

 

Have a great weekend!

 

Eddie

Hey, Folks!

 

I suppose I should start out the blog this week with a heartfelt apology to all my beloved customers. No, it isn’t about Future State again (THAT apology is later in the column), but instead is about something possibly more important…the temperature of the store. You see, I realized about 6:45pm yesterday that I had neglected to turn the heat on! This was actually the third business day in a row that I forgot to turn the heat on…lol. This is, of course, after about three days in a row where I forgot to turn the heat down when I left the store at night. For years, Steve drilled into me the fiscal importance of turning the heat on/off at the beginning/end of the day. I mean, he left little “love notes” to me for years about it…notes containing a lot of all caps and multiple exclamation marks. I was even thinking yesterday that I felt a little chilly, but just attributed it to the door opening and closing. In any case, I am most certainly NOT trying to freeze y’all out. I’m just a forgetful idiot…lol. So if you notice it is a little, well, frigid in the store don’t be shy about mentioning it.

 

So one of the changes I want to make in the store is to start carrying a little more merchandise on the counters. To this end, I hope you will start to notice some of the stuff I’ve decided to put on the counter. In the last couple of weeks I’ve started carrying more Funko vinyl POP figures (which are all 42 off the price marked right now!) and this week I’ve begun carrying Marvel posters again. The first two in stock are the Captain America #117 Facsimile Edition poster (featuring the first appearance of the Falcon) and the Symbiote Spider-Man Marvel Tales #1 poster (featuring a stunning image from Inhyuk Lee). There are also some pretty cool Justice League logo keychains (Batman, Flash, Superman, and Wonder Woman) which are pretty nifty as well. Next week I will have some absolutely adorable Mandalorian doormats as well as some new t-shirt designs (including the cover of the now famous Amazing Spider-Man #56 and the cover to Immortal Hulk #42!) So keep your eyes open during your next weekly visit to the store and please feel free to make any suggestions for the kind of comic book merchandise you would like to see on the shelves!

 

Speaking of posters, I had a weird moment of synchronicity over the weekend. On Saturday the phone rang and when I answered it some one asked for Steve Shufritz. I gave a small chuckle and told them that I was sorry, but they missed him by a week and a half and that he no longer works here. The guy seemed surprised and said, “But I thought he was the owner?” I said, “’Was’ being the operative word…lol. He retired. I’m the owner now…can I help you?” Well, he introduced himself as the owner of a local business and said that he had read Steve’s interview in the December holiday issue of The Mirror and thought he might have something in his warehouse that we would be interested in. I’ll admit that at this point I rolled my eyes a bit, but politely asked him to go on. It turns out he has a WINGED POSTER RACK! I was absolutely thrilled as I had been looking for one of the damn things for months and hadn’t had any luck scoring one online and had pretty much given up my dream of having one for the store. The gentlemen texted me some pics of the rack and it is a beauty! Of course, I told him I wanted it and I am now waiting to hear back on how much it will cost me. As long as he isn’t asking a king’s ransom for it I am hoping it will be in the store by the end of the month. I can’t believe that I had been looking soooo long for one and then it just ended coming to me!

 

I guess I should begin this week’s thrilling episode of “Apologizing for Screwing Up My Orders For Future State”. So, just to get it over with, once again and with exponential feelings, I am incredibly, remarkably, undeniably sorry for not having more copies of D.C. Comics’ Future State line available for sale on the rack. There is, however, some good news to come out of all this at long last. First off, D.C. has starting soliciting the inevitable second printings of the titles that have already sold out. The first round of second printings with a release date of 2/3/21 include: Future State The Next Batman #1 & 2, Future State Dark Detective #1, Future State Harley Quinn #1, Future State Swamp Thing #1, and Future State Wonder Woman #1. I have already placed my orders for these titles and I have also begun a list of folks who want copies of them. If you would like to preorder a copy for any of them please contact me on Facebook or in the store and I will add your name to the list. (Please make sure you actually want the book though before asking me to hold it for you.)

 

The second slate of second printings include: Future State Teen Titans #1, Future State The Flash #1, and Future State Kara Zor-El Superwoman #1. These printings will be due out on 2/10/21. I haven’t put out a Facebook notice or anything about them because my FOC for them is today because of the Monday holiday. I have already put orders in for them and I will take preorders until they are all sold from anyone contacting me on Facebook messenger or mentioning it while they are in the store.

 

I’m sure that there will be other second printings announced next week so please watch this space as well as the Facebook page for any announcements. Of course, there may not be any need for second prints after this week as it appears that not only have some of my advance reorders started to fill on next week’s Future State titles, but it looks like I have some Future State reorders of previously sold out titles showing up in my shipment including copies of Future State Justice League #1 (CVR A), Future State Superman Wonder Woman #1 (CVR A), and Swamp Thing #1 (CVR A). If any of you are interested in copies of the restocked titles then let me know ASAP before they sell out again. Also thank you to everyone who has been patient and understanding during this particular faux pas. I’ve gone big on the second issues of these books so there shouldn’t be anymore quantity problems going forward.

 

I’ve also received official word this week that D.C. Comics and Lunar Distribution are currently working with both Diamond and UCS at getting all of the D.C. Comics backlist material installed in their warehouse so that they can begin filling backorders on missing titles. Of course, I have no idea how long this process will actually take, but it was good to finally hear some sort of information regarding it. Also, please remember that if you order a trade paperback in January or February you will still get the 25% discount whether it actually shows up by the end of February or not. I think  that I’ve figured out Lunar’s reorder system as well so I should start having a better idea of when you can expect to get any D.C. Comics items that you’ve special ordered. Thanks again for your patience while I get this new distributor stuff figured out.

 

Well, that’s it for me this week. I’ve got plenty to keep me occupied today and, judging from the first week, it looks like Thursday is going to be my slow day for the week. That means I have a little extra time to focus on getting stuff done that I can’t when manning the counter. I feel like I have already slipped behind on some of the stuff I wanted to get started on, but at the very least the back room is starting to get sorted. I did get a chance to add some backstock to the back issue boxes (including a run of old Swamp Thing comics and some X-Men miniseries items) as well as to the dollar boxes. I’m hoping to get to more of that soon, but it is all predicated on how quickly I can get some other tasks completed. I’m also hoping to get some more cleaning done around the store as well. Please feel free to trace “DUST ME” sigils over the store to point out the worst problems…lol.

 

Have a great weekend, Folks, and I’ll see ya when I see ya!

 

Eddie

Hey, Folks!

 

Welcome to the first ever EDitorial with me, your stunningly handsome narrator, as the Lord and Master of ALL I survey! It’s been an interesting week. You’d think that after all of these years of getting prepped for The Takeover that I would have been pretty much ready for anything, but you would be wrong. I have been surprised and delighted by the amount of goodwill and support that I have received from all of you and I can’t thank you enough for making the beginning of my reign so very, very successful. Saturday, the first official day of my tenure, was draw droppingly busy. I was thrilled to see everyone…from the folks jumping in feet first to take advantage of the big sale to all of you who stopped by just to congratulate me and wish me luck. Honestly, it was moving and at the end of the day I was tired yet content with a job well done. I also want to thank everyone for giving their patience over the last couple of days as I wrestled with the new cash register system as well as dealing with a mob of comic hungry customers solo. You’ve all been fantastic to me and I hope that over the next dozen years I can continue to give you the customer service and support that Monarch Comics has strived to present to the public for over 30 years.

 

The Annual Post-Holiday Sale has begun as a roaring success pretty much right out of the gates. The back issue boxes that were fairly bursting with the new stock I’ve been adding during the end of Steve’s reign are already starting to slump and so I am going to be giving my attention to restocking them just as soon as I find a spare moment (HA!). I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to help people fill holes in their collections at such discounted prices. I’ve also been restocking the Dollar Boxes (now 3 for a dollar during the sale) and reaction to that has been heartening as well.

 

One of the biggest issues that I’ve has since last week has been literally just finding the time to get anything done! I mean the most jarring thing about my job has been the naïve realization that my old way of getting things done, like the shipping list or initial orders or whatever, has been upended as I also attempt to help customers and start the big clean up of the store in preparation for this Spring’s proposed remodel of the store. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day! Also, I’ve now become aware of the weird phenomenon of how every time I go to do something it magically unveils five other things that need to be done as well! For instance, on New Year’s Day the very first thing I endeavored to get done was the replacing of the old cash register system with the new one. It seemed like it would be a simple task as I had already assembled the new machine in the back room to test its inner workings and all of the technical functions were worked out ahead of time. But first I had to disconnect the old register and the credit card machine and then I had to get rid of the old refrigerator. But wait…there’s more! After moving the old refrigerator I discovered a dusty mess that had to be cleaned out as well as 40 minutes of untangling old cords to previous cash register. Then came the counter clean up and the setting up of the new system…which then revealed that the cord from the new printer wouldn’t reach the plug which required a trip to WalMart for a new extension cord. And don’t even get me started on how long it took me to remember that the new printer had an on/off button! Apparently this regime change is going to take a little more work then I ever expected…lol.

 

One of the first things I have done is spending a good five hours on Monday rearranging the comics on the “Recent Releases” rack and the tall white comic racks. With all due respect and love to Steve, the 90’s era racking of comics by subject matter (for instance, all the Batman related titles grouped together) was no longer working for me. It was a great system while the major comic companies were promoting the grouping of titles, but 20 years later it morphed into a confusing mess on the rack. Honestly, the main reason for the reorganization had less to do with customers (although the was important too) and more to do with streamlining my inventory procedures. It is just way easier for me to keep track of titles if the order they are in on the racks matches the order that they appear on my invoice as well as my inventory spreadsheets. So for those of you who are long standing customers I want to take this opportunity to let you know that everything is on strict alphabetically order on all of the comic racks. Of course, the hard covers and trade paperback selection will eventually get a pretty extreme makeover, but it is one of those things that will have to wait until I can get to it…hopefully soon.

 

Speaking of our hard cover/trade paperback selection I think it’s time to address some of the holes in our collection that people are starting to notice. There are a couple of forces that are affecting the industry right now and that are contributing to my inability to keep certain titles in stock. I know that you must be as tried of hearing it as I am of saying it, but the current Covid crisis is directly or indirectly responsible for a great deal of it. From what I’ve been lead to understand all of the comic book publishers, both great and small, have been dealing with trying to juggle getting their comics and trades printed by an industry that has yet to catch up after the shutdowns of the Spring. Titles from Dark Horse, Boom! Studios, D.C. Comics, and Marvel that were once ALWAYS available and in stock are currently going to backorder with alarming regularity along with assurances they will be back in stock soon. I have no idea how optimistic these predictions are, but for the time being I can only assume that we are only weeks away from thing starting to stabilize across the industry.

 

Another issue right now is D.C. Comics’ library of titles. As some of you know I’ve just starting dealing with yet ANOTHER D.C. Comics distributor this year (the third distributor I’ve been forced to run in the last year) and, frankly, I’m not sure how ready they were to be the “only” D.C. Comics distributor in the states. Now don’t get me wrong…the first shipment I received from Lunar was shipped early and it was impeccably packed with absolutely no damages or shortages. Honestly, it was a beautiful job and I have no reason to expect it was a fluke. The problem, however, lies in the apparent unavailibility of reorders of new titles as well as the shocking lack of D.C. backlist hard covers and trade paperbacks. D.C. Comics current line wide event, Future State, has been promoted pretty heavily over the last couple of months and the first week’s offerings came in and sold out with an almost distressing quickness despite what I considered pretty heavy initial orders. When D.C. was at Diamond this wasn’t a particularly huge problem as reorders were typically available for at least the first week, especially on a series with such heavy promotion. With Lunar, however, that has apparently gone out the window with all of the Future State titles going to backorder in days or weeks before they actually ship out. I’m not sure what the issue is at this point. It could be that Lunar simply puts everything on backorder whether they are actually out of copies or not in order to assess and cover any damages or shortages that get reported…after which they will simply release them back into the system and start filling back orders. It could be that D.C. is no longer going to overprint their titles at all and if retailers don’t order more upfront then they won’t be able to get anymore on the back end. Or it could be that Lunar wasn’t quite ready for the amount of reorders from all of their new customers.

 

As for the backlist situation, well, I’m not sure what to make of it. There are literally dozens of popular D.C. titles that are no longer available from any comic book distributors. The holes in Lunar’s back list stock are somewhat surprising. Again, no official word on what the problem is, but I’m hoping that it is simply a case of D.C. shunting their stock of back list titles from Diamond and UCS and getting them into Lunar’s hands. I have no clue as to what the hold up actually is and whether or not it will be resolved any time soon. So if you don’t see a D.C. Comics title in stock please ask me about it. I can certainly let you know if the item is currently available or not. I have been keeping an extensive list of back order or unavailable titles that I’m hoping to restock soon.

 

So Future State has turned into a bigger hit then even I was expecting! At this point I’ve only read Future State: Harley Quinn (loved it!) and Future State: The Flash (only so-so), but the enthusiasm for the new direction of the D.C. universe has been amazing! Most of the titles are sold out here at the store although the last time I checked there were still a couple of copies of Future State: Superman of Metropolis and Future State: The Next Batman on the rack. I want to let everyone know that I have placed reorder on this week’s titles as well as bumps to all of the remaining January shipping books. Of course, as I mentioned above, they all went to backorder although I am living in a World of Hope that they may yet show up. However, as a result, I have decided to limit orders for the Future State titles on a one-per-customer basis until I can be sure to get some more copies in stock. This is to spread out the copies as much as possible to customers who want to check out the new story line. This does NOT apply to customers who special ordered multiple copies/covers before FOC. Thank in advance for understanding my decision on this situation.

 

Well, customers are starting to stream into the shop so I will take my leave of you and get this as well as the Shipping List/Subscription Form posted. Thanks again to all of your help making Monarch Comics a continued success! Next week I’ll talk a bit more about the remodel, decisions in regards to hiring help, and FREE COMIC BOOK DAY 2021!

 

Eddie