Comic Shop. Dan Gearino
payment for all comic deliveries? Do you realize the cost in lost sales of this policy? As I pointed out earlier, I would have spent another $1,000, this month alone, on your products. Multiply my business by the hundreds of independent retailers, large and small, across the nation, and you come up with a staggering sum that is being wasted. Stop and think, what is the variable cost of a 40 cent comic? When you have already paid all your costs except paper and shipping, how much does it cost to leave the presses running for another 10,000 copies? My guess is between 3 and 5 cents a copy. In a business with razor thin margins, you can’t afford not to get every bit of profit available.
And don’t be misled, we do not siphon off business from existing distributor accounts. Quite to the contrary, we salvage thousands of customers who otherwise would have left the field in disgust at the poor distribution. When you print continued stories, it is imperative that the customer who wants the next issue should be able to find it easily. This is not currently the case. Comic books are among the lowest items on a normal distributor’s priority list. And thus the whole point of continued stories (i.e. creating customer demand for future issues) is lost, and instead the opposite occurs as customers quit buying from frustration. Pardon me for being the one to say it, but that is stupid.
Another point is that we do not just salvage customers you otherwise would have lost, we also create new ones. At 40 cents and up, comics are no longer able to sell themselves. You have made the product so thin and unattractive with advertising that it takes salesmanship to get them to sell, even to collectors. How much salesmanship do you get in a 7–11? We go out of our way to sell comics, they are our main business. (For example, the Superman the Movie book from DC . . . I set up a stand in a local theater and sold over 1200.) Isn’t it about time we got some help and support?
Well enough of generalities. After four years I have some concrete suggestions that will make you money and make me money. Here they are:
1. Give us billing, or at least COD purchases.
2. Start a cooperative advertising program to promote comics.
3. Pay for artists and writers to do promotional tours.
4. Give us better information about what is coming out. We will buy many more books if the uncertainty about artists, etc. is alleviated.
5. Start up a listing (on one of the ad pages) where comic book retailers could list themselves at cost.
6. Make it an editorial policy to support us. Present policy never even mentions we exist.
7. Ask us for feedback. When you do something, we hear about it, believe me.
8. Set up a remainder sales division. Since I, and many other retailers, also sell back issues, we would buy thousands more comics if they were available at a remainder price instead of normal cost.
While I realize that not all of the above suggestions are currently viable, at this point anything would be better than the situation as it exists. I sincerely believe that I am echoing the sentiments of other independent dealers when I say I am tired of not getting any help from you, the people who benefit from my efforts. Right now, comics are my life. I work seven days a week, ten to twelve hours a day, to make my business exist and your business better. And you have been no damn help at all.
So please give me some feedback. We are both in the same business and cooperation between us can do nothing but make our mutual jobs easier and business more profitable. I’ll be awaiting your reply.
Sincerely,
Charles W. Rozanski
P.S. I am going to distribute this letter as widely as I can and ask my fellow dealers to send you signed copies to indicate their agreement with most of my points. Without an official organization to support us (we are all very independent) this is the best I can do to prove that other dealers are in agreement with my opinions.
Rozanski received a reply from Ed Shukin, Marvel’s vice president for sales, who invited him to come to the company’s offices in New York to discuss the matter further. Soon after, when Marvel was setting its terms of service following Seuling’s lawsuit, the publisher threw the door open to businesses that wanted to become Marvel distributors. The standard of entry was a certain monthly order threshold. According to Mike Friedrich, who soon would be working in Marvel’s sales department, the level was intentionally set so that Rozanski would be just above what was needed to become a distributor. More than a dozen businesses set up distribution deals with Marvel.
The dominance of Seuling was done, replaced by a much messier and more complicated mix.
Indie-Minded Elves
Wendy Pini, cocreator of Elfquest, became one of the first star artists to reach fans mainly through comic shops. In hindsight, she is a pioneer for independent publishing and for women in comics. At the time, she was just a young creator trying to find an audience. The following are excerpts from our interview.
Becoming an Indie Publisher
After being turned down by Marvel and DC and several others, we knew we pretty much had to Little Red Hen it. The story and characters were in my blood and I was passionate—obsessed, really—with getting it out there any way we could. We’d discussed writing it as a prose novel or as a screenplay. But in the end we both decided that the art was just as important as the words. So the comic format was ideal.
At the time we were impressed with indie publications such as Star*Reach and First Kingdom (our actual role model for the magazine-sized format). Richard taught himself from scratch how to be an indie publisher. I dove blind into the deep end of writing and drawing a series. Had no idea how much work it was going to be or how hard.
Therefore I blush to admit the issue of my being a woman pioneer in the male-dominated comic scene didn’t loom very large for me at the time. I just wanted to push ahead on the strength of my work. Also I soon became so consumed by deadlines that I didn’t have any energy to devote to the political side of things. I’m honored to be regarded as an innovator, now. But I was completely naïve, stubbornly single-minded, and driven back then. What we were—underground, indie or mainstream—never mattered as much as “Can I get the damn thing done close enough to deadline so Richard won’t kill me?”
The Role of Comic Shops
Without comics specialty shops I’m certain we would not have been the overnight success we were. What we owed, back then, to the positive word of mouth of comic shop owners—plus exposure at early comic conventions, particularly San Diego—is incalculable. It was all word of mouth in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But it spread damn near as fast as the Internet does now. Elfquest grew up right along with the burgeoning of comic shops all over the country.
What Elfquest did was bring in a new kind of readership to the comics market. It brought in fantasy and sci-fi readers, a lot of them fans of my prior work, who weren’t all that familiar with the comics medium. But they were eager to get to know the elves.
Most important, Elfquest brought in an unheard-of female audience. Girls were haunting comic shops like never before. Elfquest was responsible for opening up a new dialogue about who comics were really for. All at once women could say, “Keep your superheroes and your Archies! We’ve got this now!” As a result, and as more eclectic indie titles started to come out, comic shops had to clean up their act a bit and become more female-friendly.
Being Red Sonja
On a more serious note, despite those who have occasionally claimed that my Red Sonja cosplay has haunted me all these years and caused me to be taken less than seriously as a creator, I say the notoriety gained from portraying Sonja opened very important professional doors for me in the comics industry back then. It got my name and certainly my picture out there. . . .
Rather than hinder me, my association with the Red Sonja character brought me attention and, oddly, a certain amount of respect. I took my performances seriously. This was far from just T&A to me. And there were some—not everyone, but some—who seemed