What that’s led to is a market under intense pressure. Our corporate publisher colleagues are seeing years of low to no growth in the specialty market, and having to answer to their bosses, they hunt for new markets, new sales channels: digital, streaming, big box retailers, other media. Comic sales are a drop in the bucket for companies with licensed marketable characters. An essential element, for sure.

Creators also have many more markets to sell their services. We have lots of talent that once did top selling comics now working in other media. And if not that, some of them are now in essence retailers, artists doing their own variant covers, selling them direct to consumers…and competing against retailers.

The truth is, all the walls are down in comics. Retailers are scrambling to find sales in other lines, often paying more attention to the flood of Funko emails than they are to what’s happening in comic books. Compound that with so many more titles than ever before and each with a seemingly ridiculous string of variant editions— some with major ordering hoops attached…

On the operational level, retailers are being nickel and dimed to death. I am scrupulous about retorting every damage, shortage and overage every week. I’m not crazy mint-meister, thinking every comic needs to be delivered in 9.8 condition. But even still, the time it takes to report onesie-twosie issues with my orders is definitely not a profitable use of my time. And it keeps me and my staff from more time with customers, more time to know what it is we’re selling. All these minor irritations of running the business do cause something of a loss of enthusiasm.

In many ways, retailers have become so skittish about new product that if we don’t hear from a customer of two with an actual preorder, it’ll never get space on our racks. The more titles there are, the less predictable our sell-through.

We have an incredibly wide market, but as of right now, it is way too flat. More titles, more items to keep track of, more details about more things… and every day there are announcements of new things on the horizon, down the road. In many cases, I believe publishers are selling tomorrow’s comics at the expense of today’s sales. That’s hype of the two birds in the bush for the reality of the one bird in the hand. For retailers, if we hit 10-15% pre-tax profit margins, we’re doing well. But that means one unsold copy of a five copy order is unprofitable…and one unsold copy of a ten copy order is more flat-lining.

When I read about suggestions from some retailers to other retailers saying that a new titles should be “subs plus one” or something similar, it reminds me of the adage I was taught back in the ’80s when I got into this business: