The Comics Rack

Digression The Second

One would assume that the Christmas season would be a real shot in the arm for comic shops across the land, but it just ain't the case. For some reason that eludes me to this day, the publishers seem to feel that comic sales are a real low priority during the holidays. Oh, I realize that there are Christmas themed stories that crop up here and there and that Gladstone keeps on trotting out a revamped Christmas Parade each year, but what I'm talking about are the big books. You know, major, expensive collections that would make a perfect Christmas gift either for the giving or for the purchasing after Christmas with all that Christmas dough that collectors can, and do, accumulate in lieu of actual "presents."

Back when I worked retail, our problems with the Christmas season started back in November. Back in those days, the comics shipped on Thursday night for pick up on Friday. This system worked fairly well, except when we hit Thanksgiving, which, as I'm sure you all are aware, falls on a Thursday. As I recall, for a short time with the direct market, the books would delay a day and ship on Friday with a Saturday pick up, but that soon went the way of all things and the publishers decided that the week in which Thanksgiving fell would be a "skip" week: meaning that there would be no comic shipments, hence no new product, for what we now call "Black Friday." To make matters worse, around this same time, the publishers all seemed to decide that the big releases would come out in late October/early November or January and that we, the retailers, could shuffle along quite well without any special product to boost our holiday sales. No collections, no EC boxed sets, no expensive Barks books from Another Rainbow...just the regular titles (just look at the promotions done the last couple of years for Halloween, compare that to Christmas, and you'll see what I mean).

This lack of product left us in a bit of a lurch. Nothing on Thanksgiving week and no big books for Christmas...all we could do was watch our sales drop off each year and, sadly, see all these customers come in after Christmas (many on vacation from Christmas to New Year's Day) eager to spend their Christmas dollars on something, but we had nothing new to offer.

One year, we had a bit of a brainstorm and went into the back room to dig up all the unsold comics we had boxed up. For quite some time, Richard had held back around 2-5 copies of some of the hotter titles (like the Byrne/Claremont Uncanny X-Men) and anything else that caught his eye and these books, along with the unsold stock became the basis for our After Thanksgiving sale. We must've had around 8 or 10 boxes of material, which would translate into somewhere around 3,000 comics. We decided to price everything at half off Overstreet and anything worth a dollar or more got a bag and board. Everything else went into boxes to be sold at a quarter apiece (prices on the quarter books dropped as the weekend progressed). It took me the better part of a week to price all the books and we put them out in waves as the day progressed with a sign listing when things would go on sale (Batman at 1, Kirby at 2, X-Men at 4...that sort of thing). Needless to say, the faithful flocked to our sale and we went through most all the stock by the end of the weekend (when I think we had gone to 10 for a dollar in the quarter boxes and half off all the bagged comics). The only near problem we encountered was when we put out the X-Men books and had a near riot as around 20 guys fought their way to the racks. Needless to say, the sale saved our collective bacon that year.

Today, I wish that I could tell you things have changed, but that isn't the case. In going over the lists for what's supposed to come out in December 2007, I see nothing special. The only book that might generate a buzz (but has a rather limited audience) is the Savage Sword of Conan collection from Dark Horse. Marvel and DC are acting like business as usual and there isn't an Omnibus or Absolute edition on the horizon, although Marvel is releasing 2 Archives this month. There is a lot of cash available this time of year and the publishers just don't seem to understand that it is there for the taking if there was only new product to attract it. I was also talking to my local comic store earlier this week. Seems that even though comics regularly ship on Wednesday, the comic shipment for this week, the week AFTER Thanksgiving mind you, is delayed a day due to the holiday last week.

Seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same...