Jerry Ringi of Amazing Fantasy Comics and Cards in
I have been a retailer since 1992 and in those years I have come to understand that Marvel not only wants to "bite" the hand that feeds them, they want to eat the whole body. In the years that I have been in this business here are some of the reasons why we should distrust Marvel.
1. Remember Capital City Distribution and how Marvel dictated where we purchase our Marvel books, and then could not or would not fill our reorders? (Yes, Marvel at one tine did overprint so we could get reorders).
2. Remember the inserted ads in their comic books telling our customers they could save money and not be subjected to any danger from going to a comic book store? This as they encouraged our customers to sign up for subscriptions from them at a big discount and yet degraded the direct market for giving discounts to their pullers. (Oh and yes we had to pay for the extra weight in our shipping charges.)
3. No over printing in their veiled attempt to force us to over order in the rare case that one of their titles become hot and the public wanted them. Since they could care less if we sold the books as long as they did.
4. Not taking returnable books that they had agreed to take back in a signed contract with Diamond (until they were taken to court and lost the case). Then we had to jump through hoops in order to apply, and then we had to wait for them to offer payment against the Marvel part of our bill.
5. Going to miniseries so that we would have to order two issues before we could get a feel if our customers were going to support that particular title.
I'm sure that I'm missing some, but these come to mind right away.
Marvel wants to replace Diamond Comics, retailers, printers, and shippers...
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