A comment on the very late DKSA #3 and what DC is doing about it (see 'Dave from Reader's Exchange on DKSA #3') came in from Gail Burt of Metropolis Downey in Downey, California.  She says sales go down when books are late.   

I read Dave from Reader's Exchange's statement that 'nobody has said they are skipping Part 3 due to lateness.'  Perhaps that's been his experience, but I for one am relieved that DC will not be resoliciting, but rather will make the item returnable or allow order reductions. 

I ordered only about 125 copies - and maybe that isn't a lot, we're not a very big store.  But that's a huge order for me, especially at $8 a pop retail; and I have had quite the opposite reaction to the lateness.  Most of my pull and hold members will wait, no matter how long it takes, and buy #3 as they are committed now.  But casual readers (and my members candidly admit, too) consensus on issue #2 was 'What the hell was that?' and most have told me to cancel their order for part 3 since they were not crazy about part 2, and now that so much time has gone by, they are no longer even curious as to how Miller plans to end the story. 

Sad, considering that when issue #1 came out, I had a full on media circus with a newspaper coming out to do an article, complete with color pics of me with copies of the first issue, which turned out to be several columns long.  The story was an homage to The Dark Knight Returns and its success over the past decade and a half, along with my and other folks' comments on our confidence in Miller to deliver a worthy sequel. 

I'm awfully sorry these comic creators don't realize that when they do stuff like this, even their most die-hard fans are truly hard-pressed to defend them.  It represents a lack of respect on the creators' part for the people who support their work - the fans.  I say if you have too much going on to finish what you start, don't start.  If you don't have your deal hammered into place the way you want it, don't put out the first issue.  This sort of thing hurts comics in general, and I am positive it's part of the reason the genre is viewed as flaky and juvenile. 

Even those fans who really want to remain positive about delays like this constantly make remarks such as 'They know people just come in every week to see if it's in, and when it isn't they buy other stuff - they're milking it.'  This may have been true of the first three weeks of delay, but after that, all those casual people who came to my store weekly to ask have dropped off.

In the long run, it just creates a climate in which the readers feel ripped off or that they're being worked by the publishers, or that the writer simply does not care.  I tell the kids who hang in my store that I care about them as much as they care about me.  I think they get the message that the writers or publishers don't respect them, believe they can be manipulated, or whatever else their fertile imaginations can conceive.