Month: March 2023

Hey, Folks!

 

It looks like I have finally achieved a Thursday where I am both feeling well and I actually have something to say. Also, the spirit is moving me and I actually have the urge to get it out all out on “paper”. Honestly, too often I sit down to write something up for the EDitorial and realize that everything I have to say is stuff I will be saying when people come into the store and I don’t want to sound like a broken record. I’ll also admit to wondering if anyone is really reading the stuff I put out every week. Of course, then I don’t get anything put out and I will get comments from customers letting me know that they missed my little missive for the week or technology will have a breakdown and I can’t record the show (like Tuesday) and many folks definitely do miss my rambling videos. I guess I just want everyone to know that I do hear you and I will work harder to get something out that is actually entertaining AND informative…😊

 

So, I don’t know about anyone else, but I am currently enjoying the hell out of DC’s “Dawn of DC” promotion! If you’ve read comics long enough then you know that all of the Big Companies tend to go through periods of “good” and “bad” comics. The cyclical nature of comics will often see various marquee characters going through myriad changes and permutations with everything eventually getting reset, restarted, and rebooted and we are off the to races again. D.C. Comics has entered into another period with a new starting point with a bunch of their major characters and I have to admit that I am quite taken with a couple of the new directions.

 

I have, of course, been extolling the greatness of Chip Zdarsky’s run on Batman as well as the miniseries which is rapidly approaching it’s big finale, Batman & Joker The Deadly Duo by Marc Silverstri and company. Both books take a major swing away from what has been The Batman Playbook for the last several years with the endless amount of dramatic psychobabble. Zdarsky and Silverstri, with both of their current projects, instead give us good, solid Batman stories with Batman being portrayed as a sympathetic protagonist in a cracking good super hero story. I want to see Batman working with the police, solving mysteries, helping people, and stopping crime. What I don’t want to see is constant navel gazing, blaming himself for every damn thing that goes wrong with Gotham, the seemingly endless pontificating over his dead parents, and showing us over and over again how depressing Batman’s existence is and how he isn’t allowed even one moment of lightness or cheer. Remember when Batman used to have a sense of humor? And, by the way, I still can’t quite understand how many readers complained about Batman’s amazing fall from the Justice League satellite to the ground without killing himself. If it were in a movie it would have elicited cheers and in comics we get complaints that it “isn’t very realistic”…c’mon, Folks, it was COOL!

 

I’ve been a Superman fan ever since I jumped into John Byrne’s Man of Steel miniseries back in the 80’s, although he 80’s and 90’s era Superman books have always been my favorite. I will freely admit that once we hit the NEW 52 era that I very quickly lost interest in the Superman character. I’ve never completely stopped paying attention to the books, but I haven’t been a regular reader of all of the Superman Stuff until recently with the Dawn of DC stuff. Superman, written by Joshua Williamson and drawn by Jamal Campbell, has changed everything for me. This “new” direction on the character is not new at all…it’s a refreshing and much loved decision to go back to the 80’s style of Superman with the attendant cast and bad guys. I will admit that there’s nothing in the material that is going to make you fall in love with the character if you aren’t already, but I submit that the art and storyline is classic super hero material and would be of interest to anyone who loves a good old-fashioned comic book story.

 

Adventures of Superman, featuring Jon Kent, is just as good and for essentially the same reasons. Fresh and fun and featuring a well paced and action packed super hero story. The fact that it is centered around the multiverse and features a supporting cast of different D.C. mainstays from alternate universes is a big plus for me as well. I loved all of that pre-Crisis multiverse madness when I first started reading D.C. Comics and I am glad to see current editorial really leaning into it. Writer Tom Taylor and artist Clayton Henry are bringing their A game to this title and it shows!

 

A new title that just shipped in this week is the Unstoppable Doom Patrol #1 by writer Dennis Culver and artist Chris Burnham. I have loved the Doom Patrol since the classic Grant Morrison run of the late 80’s and the characters have rarely been as well served since then despite everyone from John Byrne to Keith Giffen giving the title a try. Culver and Burnham have done a wonderful job of combining all of the different flavors of Doom Patrol into a great start of the new title. There is a good balance between melodrama and super hero action and it feels like an X-Men title. Loved it and is well worth a try…so much so that I am taking a copy home for my husband to give a try…

 

I have decided to make some changes/updates to the subscription form this week and try to clarify how it works because of an influx of new customers using the service. Please understand that I try to put EVERYTHING available from my three distributors every week. That includes titles that I have ordered “for the rack” as well as a lot of material that we don’t carry on the rack at all. Whenever you make your choices and hit the SEND button either myself or Brian will process your order and make a pull list of the items that we have in stock or put an order for titles that we don’t carry. Because of shipping costs and the vagaries of comic distribution we generally put one order in a week on Sunday for material that comes out the following week. So basically if you order something we don’t normally carry or if we are technically “sold out” of then we have order the item(s) and then wait for the reorder to get here. Generally that means that we have it before the end of the week, but rarely before Wednesday when people start coming in for their books. If you order something that we need to order after 3:30-4pm on Sunday then chances are the order will not be placed until the following Sunday and will take an extra week to get here.

 

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get more information out there in front of you when you are using the subscription form. The problem is that the best thing about Google forms is how simple they are to construct and to use. Simple for us…simple for you…it really is a great system. But I was still running into problems when it comes to either items I haven’t ordered enough copies of or items which we simply don’t carry. Sometimes it takes longer for the special order items to get here or else the distributor/publisher will sell out of the item immediately or there is a variant cover that suddenly everyone in the world wants and there is a question as to whether I can get more copies or not. Brian and I do try to catch these things as they occur and make adjustments, but the system is not a perfect one. So, in order to experiment with a new way to deal with the issue, I am starting a new system to signal some additional information to you. From now on if you see an single “*” next to an item it denotes items that are not carried on the rack. If you order this item then it may take anywhere from a couple of days to longer to get into the store, depending on the distributor. If you see a double “**” next to an item this denotes something that is normally carried on the rack but we have sold out of all of the copies from our initial order and you may have a wait while we order in more copies. I’m going to try this new system for the next week or two and see how it works with adjustments and possibly more classifications to come!

 

Well, I’ll admit that I had more this week, including a rundown of the upcoming Free Comic Book Day event, but I see that it is already 3pm and I am WAAAAAAAY behind on everything that needs to get done before I leave the store today so I will instead bid you all a fond adieu. Please have a great weekend and I hope to see you in the store this week!

 

Eddie

Hey, Folks!

 

It looks like more interesting weather in our near future. Yes, it looks like there is another Snowmageddon possibly on the horizon! I am, of course, monitoring the situation, but it certainly doesn’t sound like anything that is going to require a store shutdown for Friday. Now that I am essentially living in the country and on the farm, I’m a little more easy going when it comes to less than three feet of snow…lol. I mean, the couple of days this season when I have had to deal with snow I’ve had more anxiety with giant country trucks riding by booty on icy roads than I actually had with the icy roads. So unless there is a HUGE amount of snow then expect us to be open the whole day tomorrow.

 

I have been trying to keep my mouth shut about behind the scenes problems I’ve been dealing with as a comic retailer lately. I mean there are some customers I talk to about this stuff, but mostly because they are small business owners themselves and therefore I figure they can understand some of my frustrations. I thought for a while I was bitching and moaning about business related problems a little too much in the store and that is not the comic buying experience anyone was clamoring for when they shop at Monarch Comics. I certainly didn’t want to completely turn into one of the grouchy old men who do nothing but complain about their business and inadvertently suck all of the joy out of what they are selling. There have been some major changes behind the scenes in the last several months and I wanted to explain to all of you what they are and how they have been affecting the running of the store.

 

Now that I have a couple of years of experience dealing with three different distributors for our comic books as well as switching all of our comic supply business to one rather than multiple distributors I think that I can say that I’ve got the hang of it. I’ve had to update my record keeping and spread sheet game to keep track of it all and things are working out better than they were several months. Part of the challenge for me has been dealing with switching a lot of our small press orders from Diamond to either Lunar or Penguin. There is a very good reason involved with this decision and it mostly centers around the extremely expensive shipping charges that we get from Diamond. Our shipping charges for our Diamond invoices are between 11%-33% of our weekly invoices. In comparison, Lunar is usually 2-3% of our total invoice and Penguin is, well, 0% of our invoices because they don’t charge shipping. This huge amount of shipping charges are not broken down by the box and there is no transparency in what we are actually being charged for from week to week. I have had to stop ordering comic supplies or merchandise material from Diamond because there are weeks that I can’t make enough money from them to even cover my costs. So, as more and more small press companies either defect from Diamond or become available from other distributors, I have been switching all of my orders from Diamond. The discounts for the material itself tend to be the better at the other companies as well, sometimes by as much as 10%.

 

The actual reality of ordering and tracking orders and sales from three distributors is where things get a little tricky. I think I have gotten it down oat, but I still tend to accidentally miss a title or two every week or else put something on the subscription form that is actually not available yet. There is also a weird schism going on where a titles might be available from one distributor one week, but not available from another distributor until a week later. I’m getting better at spotting these issues, but please forgive me if you order something and turns out it won’t be out for another week or two…lol.

 

Also, I want to reiterate that if you order something on the subscription form that is not something that we carry or if we have already sold out of all the copies we initially ordered and have to order more then tour order may take a couple of days more to get here. Every week I am here on Sunday and my main job is to do our weekly reorder and any sub form orders that are received after I put in that weekly reorder (usually around 4pm on Sunday) won’t be processed in time. These special orders will take at least a week to fill so it really behooves you to get those sub form orders in before the Sunday afternoon cut off. Now don’t get me wrong…there’s no problem with putting in an order on Mondays or Tuesdays, but we can’t guarantee we’ll see any special orders until the following week. Also, since we are now dealing with three different distributors there is no was to predict anymore when we will see any of our reorders. In the days before The Apocalypse, when we had only Diamond to deal with, I could be reasonably sure that when I ordered something it would be here with 2-3 business days. Such is not the case anymore in these interesting times. I’m getting better with Lunar reorders since they instituted a fairly affordable direct ship reorder system, but Diamond has gotten a bit iffy on shipping times and Penguin is the roll of the dice on how quickly you are going to receive your reorders from them. Thankfully, for initial orders all three distributors have upped their game as you can tell by the very early times I have been filming Monarch Comics Afternoon Delight since early December.

 

I have also cut back on the amount of Diamond Previews that I have in the store. This is partially because of the shipping charge issues I mentioned above, but also has to do with the cover price being raised from $3.99 to $4.99. I am basically trying to make sure that I have enough catalogs for folks that interested in seeing what is being published by small press companies as opposed to the D.C. and Marvel catalogs. It’s also worth noting that I get the D.C. and Marvel catalog FOR FREE and the Diamond catalogs I have to pay $3 each. Strangely enough, I do believe that I have covered pretty much everyone pretty well, but if you would like a copy and missed it them please let Brian or I know and we will do our best to set you up with a copy.

 

Okily dokily…back to work for me. I always handle Lunar and Penguin FOC orders on Thursday afternoon and it usually takes at least 5 hours to get through them. After that I typically process as many sub form orders as possible so Brian doesn’t have as many to deal with over the weekend. I should probably mention that Brian is still working diligently at processing all of the collections that we have picked up over the last two months. There will be more stuff going into the Dollar Boxes as well as the showcase and the back issue boxes, so make sure you bring in your checklists when you are shopping in the store!

 

Have a great week and please drive carefully when the weather turns crappy!

 

Eddie