lighthouse

There’s a huge difference between publishers sourcing TPBs and HCs through Ingram/Penguin/etc and sourcing floppies that way. There are a dozen options already for ordering graphic novels. When I sell to local libraries they’re upfront about their exact terms from several different distributors and they give me a chance to beat it. When Diamond puts a bunch of evergreen Image collections on a 70-85% off sale, one of my first phone calls is to my library clients offering to hook them up. BleedingCool is in the business of selling advertising. And they intentionally framed those articles to make them more sensationalist (something they’ve done for years because it works). But there’s a difference between “we sell our collected editions through several distributors” and “DIAMOND ABANDONED US SO WE’RE ABANDONING THEM !11!!!1!!”

Diamond sent out a survey to retailers yesterday. Ostensibly to help them plan for what the restart will look like. It asked about the current local situation (are you forcibly shut down, can you do curbside, can you do mail order, are you selling gift cards online, etc). It asked about what percentage of your revenue comes from comics and trade paperbacks, then separate questions for statues/toys and for games. Was really odd to me that if they were bothering to ask for breakdowns they would lump comics and trades together. And it asked (open ended response) what assistance would be most helpful when things do restart. I take it as a good sign that they’re trying to get feedback. Though you can tell a lot by what questions get asked and which ones don’t. For the record, my response was 61% comics and trades, though in the essay section I explained that was 28% new books, 20% back issues, and 13% trades. Don’t want Diamond thinking they supply 75% of my inventory when you add in statues and toys, when it’s really around 60% total. In the open ended section I reiterated the same feedback I’ve given all three reps I’ve talked to. Don’t send us 8 weeks of books all at once. Pretend a couple months didn’t exist and just roll everything forward. That’s far more important to me than Marvel increasing my discount to 70% or all the small publishers making everything returnable. Don’t bury me with 3300lb of comics the first week I’m back.

I’ve never requested to be removed from the Probation List, even though all previous issues were resolved over a decade ago. But given that it looks like Covid-19 will be keeping my brick and mortar shop closed for 8-10 weeks, I’m making that request now. I have several items I’m selling on consignment for customers in the shop that I’d like to see them not have to wait an extra two months. Similar to (though not as big as) the CGC 8.5 Hulk 181 I sold through here last week. Plus I probably have more wall books than I really need. @Foolkiller was arguably my harshest critic a decade ago (and rightfully so back then), but he stated in the Hulk 181 thread that he’s no longer in that camp. I’ve offered several times in the last decade that if there was anyone who got missed when I settled up a decade ago, to please let me know. No one has. I’d like to kick 2007-Lighthouse’s rear end as much as the next guy. But all I can do is be 2020-Lighthouse instead. So here’s my post in the discussion thread. I await Greggy’s confused reaction.

In reading that it’s weird to me that several of the shops they interviewed were acting like “we aren’t closing, why is Diamond ruining our business by stopping distribution?” With not a single shop giving the more common response of “if I’m closed to the public anyway, I’m really glad I don’t have $2500-3500 invoices coming in every week”.

It’s been a few months since the last updated ranking. Someone feel like posting?

The Mayor of Los Angeles told his citizens yesterday that they will be locked down for at least two months (and to prepare for more), and in the interview he indicated he's spoken with 200 mayors around the country about them doing the exact same. https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-19-la-mayor-eric-garcetti-says-city-is-not-ready-2020-3 My store has been closed for a week so far. I don't expect to reopen until June. And I expect no grace from my landlord. But I'll be fine as long as I stop eating all these snacks.

An email went out today that indicated Marvel had extended Diamond's payment terms to Marvel (allowing them more time to pay) to allow Diamond the flexibility to extend better terms to its own customers. An hour later an updated email went out saying the previous email had errors. Only change was that paragraph was missing. (My guess is that Marvel did indeed give Diamond better terms, but Diamond didn't want it in the release to avoid having 2,000 accounts expect to be offered better terms themselves.)

Most of those sales are through Ingram. On some small press stuff they’re a cheaper option than Diamond. But on Marvel and DC they’re not (unless you’re a very tiny Diamond account). I supply a few local libraries with graphic novels. And there’s enough margin between what they’d pay Ingram and what I pay Diamond that we clear a little even though I give them a massive discount. And it really depends on what you count as comic industry revenue. My Hero Academia destroys any “comic book” in revenue, even though few of those sales are in comic shops. First two months of this year we sold 107 copies of My Hero at $9.99 each. The only individual comic title that broke $1,000 for us was Wolverine and that was with a $7.99 launch of an issue 1 of a character who hadn’t been in his own title in years, and also had incentive variants. (Wolverine did a lot more than $1k for us). And we aren’t even a shop known for manga. Our manga display is less than 15 square feet of facing. It would all fit in one standard bookshelf in your house. Places like B&N print money with manga. They also print money with Walking Dead, Killing Joke, Infinity Gauntlet, etc. Evergreens sell “all day erryday”. But they don’t get those from Diamond.

The regulations are all local. I got an 8-page document from my County outlining exactly what I am allowed to do and not allowed to do based on my industry. It broke down exactly which businesses were essential (including things like car rental and home repair), which were forced to close, and which were permitted to be open exclusively for pickup, etc. As a comic shop I am allowed to be open for delivery only. I can take orders that I send out UPS or Postal. I can take orders that my staff delivers directly to customers (something I’ve actually done for my sub who is a grocery store produce manager... I bring him comics and he hooks me up with an 8-pack of toilet paper). But I cannot offer curbside service. Other business types can. My business type cannot. That’s the rules in my specific location. Some locales haven’t even closed businesses yet. Others have even stricter rules than mine. FWIW, new comics only represent 27% of my shop’s revenue. And less than 16% of my gross margins. But it’s the bread and milk that gets folks into the shop regularly to buy other things. No grocery store gets rich selling bread and milk. But you can damn sure go broke trying to be the grocery store that doesn’t carry them.

Diamond has major distribution warehouses in California and New York. Those states ordered them to stop coming to work. Diamond’s distribution model is based on trucking full trailer loads from Mississippi to various reship locations around the country, and disseminating the individual shipments from there. It saves on massive UPS charges, and allows them to make adjustments to orders later in the process. I typically pay around $200 a week in inbound freight charges for a shipment that weighs 500-600lbs. If that was shipped UPS the whole way it would be almost triple that. But when states like CA, NY, and IL shut down Diamond’s reship warehouses (in addition to shutting down their customers) they didn’t have a choice but to pause.

Yes it does. A decent-sized single location Diamond account with a borderline 54-55% discount sees typical weekly Diamond invoices of $2500 (with occasional invoices higher from event books or statues and whatnot). And that sized shop likely doesn’t have $22,500 sitting in the bank on a given day. And would be even less likely to have that amount after sitting closed for weeks on end while still paying overhead.

As a shop owner I am VERY pleased with Diamond's move, even though their hand was forced by the governors in the states where they have warehouses. It's unlikely any comic shops were going to be open to the public until late-May or early-June after this week. When the California governor enacted stay-at-home he indicated he didn't think it would be "many months" but that the "next 8 weeks" were critical. Anyone who think these lockdowns will last less than 8 weeks is naive. Given that scenario, in a choice between burying 3,000 LCSs with invoices while they can't sell to customers or just suspending weekly shipping altogether through the lockdowns, this is the better choice. What they need to do now as a followup is cancel pending solicitations, skip publishing Previews for two months, and just pretend these lockdown weeks never happened. If June 3rd is the date when shops nationwide are able to reopen, then ship the "April 1st" books to arrive June 3rd. Ship the April 8th books to arrive June 10th. And so on. And make the next round of new solicitations be for August shipping product. If a statue was previously solicited for June, you could probably ship it in June, it doesn't need to be pushed to August. But the printed material should just skip forward as many weeks as needed and then restart. Because OTHERWISE you are going to tell a decent-sized $2500/wk customer that "here you go, here's 9 weeks of books all at once, you owe us $22,500". And that shop is going out of business. Because the shop's own customers will just then be headed back to work themselves. They won't have 9 weeks of pull money set aside waiting for opening day. 8 or 9 weeks of no new comics won't kill the industry. People used to sit through a summer of reruns and they still started watching tv again when fall rolled around. Sports fans deal with having an offseason. 8 or 9 weeks off won't have that big an impact on the typical comic buyer. But burying 3,000 shops with a 9x normal invoice? Yeah, that would. And frankly, knowing this is the situation with Diamond makes the rest of my planning as a shop owner much easier to deal with. I'm not getting any breaks on my store rent. My part-time staff is all being fully paid while they stay at home. Knowing that I only have to dip into savings / credit lines / stashed wall book inventory to cover rent and utilities and payroll (without having to also plan for inventory expenses) makes this all a lot easier.

After an avalanche of PMs, I have a deal set for in-person pickup this week which is definitely the fastest payment for my consignor. Thanks to everyone who replied and PM’d. Appreciate the help getting my customer paid.

First off, yes, I am on the Probation List (have never asked to be removed even though all transactions were made good over a decade ago). And yes I have indicated multiple times in the years since, that I have no plans to be doing ongoing sales on these boards. Those things have not changed. But I have been offering this book on consignment for a customer of my shop for a bit, and circumstances have led to wanting to get him his cut sooner rather than later. So I am offering it here at a discount and wiping out the bulk of what my cut would have been on the book to do that. As I don't want to dredge up any ill will about the Probation List, I will ship the book first. You pay me after you receive it. It's a gorgeous copy, with top 5% color, maybe top 1% color. I have included a pic with a current Wolverine #1 atop the slab so you have a reference for how deep the colors are on this copy. It really, really pops in person. No pale orange here. $3500 shipped USPS insured. Payment by check or cashier's check only. No PayPal. Because I am shipping first (and taking a check), I won't be automatically accepting the first "I'll take it" from a random account with limited history. And sorry to potential international customers, but my goal is to take care of my consignor quickly, so domestic only on this one. I don't want to make him wait extra weeks. If you have a domestic board friend who wants to do you a solid and buy and reship for you that's fine. But unless your name is greggy, you'll need to have someone else do the buy and you settle up with them. (Greggy, if you want this book, you can come in person already. I'm tired of holding all these sweet sweet DCs for you). Oh and no returns. I mean, you're getting the book before you even pay, why would you need to return it? So all in all it's a transaction with some unusual circumstances, but it's also a gorgeous 8.5 Hulk 181 for a bit less than what 8.0s are currently fetching.

Five weeks ago I cut shelf copies in half at FOC. Two weeks ago I cut them by 75%. FOC yesterday I chopped 90% off what I would normally have. Instead of 500 or so shelf copies between 70 titles in a given week, I’ve cut from 250 to 125 and now to 50. I’ll miss some potential profits. But I won’t get stuck with a grand a week in tombstones. To be honest I wish I’d have cut a little deeper 5 weeks ago. But it’s the only part of the weekly Diamond invoice I can really finetune (other than choosing to wait on reorders of things like Watchmen, Saga, and My Hero Academia when I get low on stock). Rent is still due. I’m still paying my employees whether they work or not. Still paying utilities. The only expense I can adjust is inventory.

Diamond rep told me this morning they are making an announcement later today about the postponement of Free Comic Book Day (which is 3,000 gatherings of 50+ people all in the same day). I just hope they aren't silly enough to postpone to June only to have to postpone again. Throw a dart at August or September and hope life is normal by then.

And two days later the CDC recommends all gatherings of 50 persons or more be canceled for the next 8 weeks. *does the math* Yup. There goes Free Comic Book Day.

#3 definitely exists. It's the default image on MCS website. And I am nearly positive it's pictured (behind heavy glare) in that pic I posted above.

Man, 17 years ago and I doubt I could even name half those 17 goofballs...

Got a call from my Diamond rep yesterday wanting to confirm shipping method on my FCBD books. She was completely caught off guard when I asked her why they weren't already postponing the event. I've already told my customers that we won't be doing FCBD in May. Most likely it will be until July or August. But I got nothing but confusion when I asked the Diamond rep whether she thought it might be a PR disaster for the comic industry to be going ahead with plans to have 3,000 shops around the country each with 1,000+ people streaming in and out of it all in the same day. As though they'd not had a single internal discussion about "maybe FCBD shouldn't be in May this year".

All the Image newsstands from that collection are in the pics. We purchased another 1500-book newsstand collection over a year ago, one with several of the $1.99/$2.29 price variants. And we get a smattering of random newsstand stuff coming in the roughly 40 comic collections we buy each month. But this one and the one with the price variants are the only two with more than say 40 of them at once.

Correct. From a gentleman who owned a newsstand in New Jersey in the 90s and put away 1800-2000 comics over roughly a 2-year period. Mostly Marvel and DC. This is all the Image in the collection. There were less than a dozen Valiants, around 50 Topps, around 75 Dark Horse, around 20 Tekno, and the rest Marvel and DC.

And in retrospect had I stuck that collection in a closet it would be worth over $1.5m now. I remember being so excited I got triple Overstreet for the Amazing Adventures 11. And then the buyer had it graded at 9.6. I've heard story after story from friends about how the books they got from that collection later came back at 9.6 or 9.8. But oh well. FWIW, the selection at the current store dwarfs what we had back then. I doubt we ever had more than 500 Silver Age books out at a time at that shop, and we have 1200-1500 out every day now. Bronze Age is sitting around 2500 issues out on the tables, with around 2000 of those in 9.0 or better. But I definitely have fond memories of that store. Sigh, we were all so much younger then.

This is a good post to update. At the end of the first year we were sitting at just over 100 pull customers and 950 titles. If someone was getting both covers of Batman that counts as two "titles" for this purpose. But doesn't take into account books like Batman and Amazing Spider-Man that were coming out twice a month. So both covers of Batman would count as "2", not as the actual 4 comics or 1 as the actual number of discrete titles. At the end of the second year we were sitting at around 140 pull customers (and had had around 240 people cycle through to result in 140 net) and 1250 titles. Currently we sit around 160 pull customers and 1450 titles. At any given time there are 10-15 pull customers on a watch list, with 3-5 of those in a purgatory box where we are still holding their books for them but not adding any new ones to the pile. If the folks stay in purgatory longer than 2 weeks and we haven't made satisfactory contact, the books come back out and go back on the shelves or in the back issue boxes. We tell customers they need to pick up every 2-3 weeks, but we don't actually get concerned until 4 weeks. That's when we start calling with "hey haven't seen you in a while". If we can't reach them we continue pulling for two more weeks, then purgatory. We kept a 3-title minimum for quite a while. But we have now shifted to a 5-title minimum. If someone has 4 and we get a good vibe we might bend it a bit, but there was just too much turnover at 3 titles. There's really no rhyme or reason to which subs become deadbeats. We have had subs get 40 titles a month for two years and then just ghost. We've had people fall behind, get caught up, fall behind again and disappear. But we have found to recovery rate from "six weeks behind" to be around 20%. 4 out of 5 customers who get 6 weeks behind never recover. So we pay as close attention as we can to the folks at 3-4 weeks behind in hopes of catching them before a shame spiral sets in.

Looking at the table from last year, it's clear that Firefly, Buffy, Rick and Morty, and Marvel Action Spider-Man all dramatically outsold the national averages. I doubt there are any other shops in the country where Firefly made the top 10, much less #6. No issue of Firefly, Buffy, or Rick and Morty was in Diamond's top 500 single issues last year, so seeing the aggregate in the top 16 for those four titles is certainly exceptional. Some things are going to sell better because the staff pushes them. Our staff loves Ice Cream Man and A Walk Through Hell, so I wouldn't be surprised if we sell 5 times as many of those trades as a typical shop our size. If no one on staff happens to love a title that would otherwise sell well, we aren't talking about it, and we only get the sales that are customer-driven. We ask customers often what they are enjoying. That question serves multiple purposes. Assuming the question is earnest, it shows we care and aren't just cashiers clearing a line. It helps us handsell additional items to the customer we are asking (oh, if you're loving that you might try this). And it helps us stay on top of what is good. And if we know that Bug and Hammer have similar tastes, hearing from Bug that the new run of Aquaman is great can help us find things for Hammer to read. I suspect that the biggest reason we sell more of the "tv" comics is that we have a ridiculous amount of foot traffic. We are an A store rather than a B store. So if we see 200 people through the door in a given day, 150 of them were passing our front door on the way to somewhere else. Those 150 customers are much more likely to pick up episodic stories rather than trying to catch up on years of continuity. The 50 who drove specifically to us will have different purchasing habits than the 150 walking by. We track more demographic data than we probably need to. But mostly for the purposes of determining ad spend. The purchasing decisions aren't something we really tie to the demographics, even though there are definite correlations. People of color are far more likely to buy titles featuring characters of color. LGBT customers are far more likely to buy titles featuring LGBT characters (and are also more likely to buy sex-positive titles). But with most of the titles, the only chance of predicting what someone will like is seeing what tattoos they have.