So…..where to start? I guess I’ll start with some of the market aspects. I know Monster Mike was worrying about folks finding a copy, thinking that a pack of dirty speculators (like myself) may have erased all available supply. It appears that won’t be an issue for a couple of reasons. One being that there really doesn’t seem to be much of a fervor in the secondary market on this, which I find exquisitely fascinating. To me, that’s bold and direct evidence that the golden goose of empty hype may have shat out its last egg for a while. You can only go to the whip on the same magic trick so many times before the audience becomes numb to it.
This is not to suggest that speculator runs can’t do any damage. I think we should be rewarding any interest in our local comic shops. If a patron, particularly a new patron heads to said local shop only to find that the super exciting “what’s all this hullaballoo about?” issue isn’t available for purchase….well, that’s a problem. That’s an interested party that may never come back. But again, that doesn’t seem to be the case here. I was in my LCS today a good three days removed from launch and there were stacks of this issue available.
I wonder, though, does the lack of mania here actually reflect the masses finally giving in to richly earned cynicism, or is the fact that DC was actually able to keep this a secret partially to blame? It’s pretty common for the punditshphere (myself included) to lambast the publishers for leaking their big reveals to the press early. But when you think about it, whether we’re talking about Johnny Storm , or Miles Morales, or Superior Spider-Man, or the nineteen other secret Marvel deaths they’ve bungled, it never did seem to hurt sales, did it? So maybe they knew something we didn’t.
Hard to say. I still think this is just mass apathy from a very tired and abused comics constituency. Whatever the case, I don’t know of any fellow comics reader or article on the usual sites that really believes this “death” is real or will stick. Which is a bit sad. We’re jaded past the point of no return, which is kind of frightening, but also kind of liberating. The Big Two have been using empty hype like a bad drug for too long. There will be some withdrawals coming down from that, but the recovery is surely going to be better than the junk we’ve been getting lately.
Contrast that with Alpha Flight # 12, circa 1984. Different time, different attitude. In 1984, John Byrne killed off Guardian and we all considered it deliciously ballsy. It’s not like comic book deaths were rare or permanent back then, but there was no obsession with the hands of the puppeteer, and no sense that the publisher was “just fucking with you”. I guess I don’t know why Byrne decided to ace the team leader of Alpha Flight, but I suspect it had to do with A) Introducing a sense that anything could happen at any moment and B) Forwarding the character arc of Heather Hudson.
Who could forget the final pages of that comic? The good guys were not doing particularly well, and this was in keeping with the themes of Alpha Flight to that point. Mac Hudson was a scientist, not a military guy. Same with Sasquatch. Shaman and Snowbird were mystic protectors, sure, but the Beaubier twins were basket cases, Marrina was psychopathic more often than you’d like, and Puck was just a midget with a giant “P” on his chest. How’s that gonna work? And what the hell was Mac doing dragging his non-super-powered wife into that mess? That ship was destined for trouble from the start, and boy did it hit the rocks in # 12. It isn’t just the fact that Guardian died, though, it was the way he died. His battle suit failing catastrophically, a harried Mac Hudson is interrupted at a critical moment by his wife Heather. No telling for sure if that’s what ultimately sealed his fate or if he was doomed any way…but if you’re Heather, how do you not interpret that as causing the death of your husband? A few seconds after that interruption, there was nothing left of Guardian but a little pile of ash. Heather had a lot of growing up to do, and grow she did, right on the page.
Nobody had a clue that was coming, mind you. There was no such thing as Previews or Newsarama to spoil things for you. There was simply word of mouth after the fact, and Alpha Flight 12 left quite a few jaws on the floor. Perhaps I’m not remembering correctly, but there was no speculator run on that kind of thing in ’84, either. Alpha Flight # 1 cost more than cover, because, DUH, but after that the issues in demand were # 13 and # 17 because they had goddamn Wolverine on the cover, man! Don’t you know that Wolverine on the cover is big bucks, man!!! Talk about a magic trick that’s lost its magic.
No, everything was a secret. Any info you had on upcoming projects was likely to come from the publishers themselves in the form of house ads. They didn’t tell you much, either. Can you imagine the emotional wreckage that would be the comics landscape if there were an internet just before Marvel unveiled the New Universe? None of us would have survived. Our brains would have been burnt little nubs, and Kickers, Inc. # 1 would have produced a brief burst of incalculable rage and then instant death. As it was, we got a few months of a purple lightning bolt on the back cover our Marvel books. We were lucky.
Or were we? I feel like we were better off then, but maybe not. The downside was that there was no rational way to make decisions about your reading habits, other than live communication with other actual human beings (the horror!) and quizzing them about what was going on in the comics they were ingesting. There was no solicitation telling you that Frank Miller was about to unleash perfect comics with Born Again. One month, Daredevil was absolute rubbish. Then came Born Again, and then you blinked and the month after that you got goddamn Madcap by Mark Gruenwald. To call that a jarring shift of the gears would be the understatement of the millennium. That was life. You either collected Daredevil or you didn’t, and there was no way of discerning the potential quality until you dove in face first. Sometimes you got some poop on your face doing that, but at least in the Born Again era, the feces only cost 75 cents, so you almost didn’t mind. Most retailers will tell you that prior knowledge is critical to the game at this point. It’s hard to order non-returnable comics correctly, and the money is made on the hits. You don’t make any money ordering 5 rack copies of Firestorm. Yeah, you’re ordering at a discount, but if one of your readers drops the book, and another takes a vacation and buys her copy in Sarasota instead of your shop, you are fucked. There’s no upside, and there’s no margin for error on most comics. You make money with hits. If you order 50 copies and two people drop the book and one goes to Sarasota, you’re still OK.
So if the Justice League of America # 4 contains the “death” of a prominent character, that’s something a retailer wants to be privy to if he or she thinks it will sell a ton of copies. Sure, some folks will take the time to request a re-order or get a second print on a sell-out. But really, if you miss the boat on a hot book you just lose. Everybody loses, actually. The reader is disappointed, the retailer is out some significant money, the publisher is out a small amount of money, and there’s just bad will all around.
The retailer needs to have some indication about how to order, but of course you can see the problem when said retailer has to rely on the publisher to give them that information. I don’t know how to tell you this…but the publishers are slightly biased about the number of books they are sure will be big hits and change everything about comics forever. In fact, if you listen to the publishers, you’ll find that they are producing a dozen of these books every single week. It’s amazing.
And that’s the problem with Previews. The reader wants information about the upcoming books so they can make informed decisions about where to spend the ridiculous sums of money it takes to buy comics these days, but how can the publishers relay that information accurately without spoiling everything? The retailer wants the same info to order correctly and serve their customer, but it’s in the publishers best interest to spin everything as The Next Big Thing, and again, how can they tell the retailer what they need to know and preserve any kind of surprise? If Admiral Ackbar were here, he would promptly bark at you that the whole situation is a trap. And he’d be right.The solution? Destroy the internet, I guess. It’s only going to end up as Skynet, right? We don’t need it.
That’s my answer. You may offer alternative resolutions by commenting below.
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