Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by retailer Steve Bennett of Mary Alice Wilson's Dark Star Books in
Erratarama: After spending a good chunk of my last column detailing how I was unable to find the site for the Webcomic whose 10th anniversary was reported on NPR because I got the name wrong, someone was good enough to point out I got the name wrong again, The web comic in question was Sluggy Freelance, not Slappy Freelance. If you knew how hard I tried to get these things right and how hard I take them when I don't...it still wouldn't excuse carelessness on my part; my apologies.
As you know, Super-Fly Comics & Games purchased the new weekly comics portion of Dark Stars Books and it is a textbook example of what a comic book shop should look like--uncluttered. A lot of comic stores are woefully overstuffed, the philosophy apparently being 'Well, we have the merchandise, might as well have it all out on the floor.' And while I certainly understand the need to make every inch of your store work for you (especially considering how small so many shops are), when you cram every corner with product and place things on top of other things you can create visual overload and customer fatigue.
And I've seen what can happen when you're able to give your current stock more space; with all the real estate that became available when the new comics left Dark Star we've been able to properly display (and sell) merchandise that up until now has been gathering dust on some dark corner. Every time I come back from one of my 'weekends' off I check the inventory list and invariably find myself saying 'We actually sold that?'
My point being you can lose sales by overstocking your shelves, and by paring down what is available you can allow your customers to focus on what you do have for sale. And as for your overstock, well, you can always rotate what's on the floor and ultimately, isn't that what e-Bay is for?
But of course the really important thing about Super-Fly having the new comics is how it affects me. Though at first I didn't really miss reading the comics as soon as they came out of the boxes, after a couple of weeks I admit I began to feel their absence. Not to mention the easy camaraderie of being where, at any given moment, I can be quizzed about which Avengers are missing from Marvel's promotional poster for their Avengers Classic comic.
Even when they were within arm's reach it was tough reading everything that came out every week but now that they're a block away I found myself falling further and further behind on my pamphlets. So now every Wednesday morning before going to work I stop by Super-Fly to pick up my pull file, kibitz with Tad and Tony over the latest news and read as many new releases as I can.
Usually Countdown is on top of the pile, not that I've been enjoying it; up until last week I found it not so much 'bad' as indifferent and indistinguishable from so many other mediocre DC comics. Moving with glacial slowness, there's been only incremental progress on each of the individual plots (Mary Marvel finds someone new to lead her still further down the primrose path, etc.). But the last issue was the tipping point; it was nearly incomprehensible, even to someone who knows his DC Universe minutia chapter and verse.
Countdown is also ample evidence of what all these exclusive contracts have wrought; it's an open admission this is the best DC can do without using their top tier creators (and speaking of those with exclusive contracts, when, exactly should we expect to see new pages from either of the Kubert Bros?).
Still there is hope. I mean, they've asked Chuck Dixon to work for them again - and of course there's the return of Jim Shooter. While he'll never be one of my favorite writers he certainly understands how to tell a story (a real one, with a middle, beginning and end) when so many others don't. As Jim Shooter put it on Newsarama:
'The art in comics is generally better than ever, the writing is often clever and glib, but in spite of that, far too many comics are utterly unreadable. Even hardcore fans find many comics daunting to follow! The craft of storytelling is all but lost. A who's who of industry big shots have privately agreed with me when we've discussed exactly this subject, but it's a tough problem to fix, given the often huge egos of the creators, general creative anarchy and lack of trained editorial people'.
And it doesn't have to be like that, not with resources like Chuck Dixon and Jim Shooter working for you. Maybe on your next big corporate weekend retreat instead of plotting your next big 'event' you could have Chuck and Jim work with the 'kids' (writers and editors), teaching them the fundamentals of story construction, skills so many of them are sorely lacking.
And at long last finally, one of the continuing joys of being a Comic Book Guy is you never know what's going to arrive in the mail. Last week it was a bundle of free Futurama mini-comics to celebrate the release of new animation to DVD and the show's impending arrival on Comedy Central. Drawing the characters so they stay 'on model' isn't easy, but artist/editor Bill Morrison does an outstanding job of making this 16-page full color mini-comic look like an episode of the TV series.