Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by retailer Steve Bennett of Mary Alice Wilson's Dark Star Comics in
I could just kick myself. It was a couple of days after posting my last column about some of the other late comics and how when they're delayed it can effect a comic shop when one of my coworkers pointed out that I'd completely forgotten to mention the new Anita Blake comic that's coming (theoretically) from Dabel Bros. Anita Blake, of course, is a vampire hunter, the lead character in a series of very popular novels by Laurel K. Hamilton. And since Dark Star sells both new and used copies of her books we're very familiar with her work and were already planning on getting the comics. But her fans beat us to it.
Thanks to the Internet, news of the Anita Blake comics spread like wildfire among her fans and the sites did an outstanding job pointing them in the direction of direct market shops. Months before the comic was supposed to ship we started getting phone calls asking us if the comic was out yet. Soon we had half a dozen deserves on the first issue from people who not only hadn't shopped with us before, but probably had never read a comic book before (one of whom ordered a grand total of nine copies).
In every aspect this was a golden opportunity, so naturally the Anita Blake #1 comic is two months late and (interestingly enough) isn't supposed to ship until the end of September. Sure, an Anita Blake comic is never going to sell in Civil War numbers, and its absence isn't going to have that much effect on our bottom line. And those who had preordered the comic, while not exactly happy with the news about the delay, haven't threatened to cancel their orders - not yet, anyway. So everything's just fine, right?
No, it's not.
As was the case with Doc Frankenstein, I have nothing to tell those Anita Blake fans who have gone out of their way to reach us already predisposed to be enthusiastic about our product (supposedly exactly the sort of customers our industry is looking for), because the publisher obviously didn't think it worth their time to inform us what's going on. It's hard to imagine any other business where that would be acceptable.
Of course delays are inevitable and aren't exclusive to comic books; they happen in all the media competing for eyeballs, whether it's television, movies or computer games. Especially when it comes to the later two, release dates can repeatedly be revised (sometimes all even publications like Entertainment Weekly can tell us about when a movie's coming out is 'Fall 2006'). But we should never be complacent about them, accepting them as just a harmless idiosyncratic quirk of the business. Because we really are competing for those eyeballs and delays are exactly the sort of thing that can make a potential customer go somewhere else to spend their entertainment dollars.
At Dark Star every Wednesday we have a standard joke, 'Oh, look, 52 shipped this week'. It's not much of a joke, I'll grant you, but it's the best we can do, given the subject matter.
