Posted in: Comics | Tagged: comic store in your future, Comics, HRL

Comic Store in Your Future: Is It 2019 Yet?

Published Fri, 05 Jan 2018 10:30:07 -0600

Last updated Wed, 15 Jun 2022 16:28:43 -0500

Rod Lamberti of Rodman Comics, writes weekly for Bleeding Cool. Find previous columns here.

2018 is here. What all would I like to see in 2018 as a comic retailer store owner?

Better sales, of course. Marvel is getting a lot of heat from their lackluster 2017 year. It doesn't look like anything in the Previews book is going to turn things around for them. Hopefully 2018 is indeed the year Marvel turns things around and returns to the selling machine they once were. Just how far into 2018 are we supposed to wait?

If Marvel is unable to turn things around, then hopefully another publisher will fill the void left by Marvel.

Not trying to Marvel bash, but they had over a year to improve things and didn't. More variants and re-numbering were not the answers Marvel hoped they would be.

Hoping to read less about comic stores closing. It is depressing — for me, at least. We just had another store closing that was very sudden. Fewer comic stores means fewer entry points for people to get into comics. I will admit, a part of me wonders if someday one of the articles will be about my store. The title? Wrote too much instead of focusing on his business! I kid. 2017 I managed to cut costs and save money. There is only so much cost cutting I can do, though.

More customers. Of course, we always want more. People reading comics is what is the best driving force for comic sales. People that love comics are able to get others excited about comics.

Fewer variants. From all the comic publishers. Variants are basically a way for publishers to get people that are already going to buy their product to buy extra to get the variants. We often have people buying both covers of the various DC titles. We enjoy the extra sales, but they are made on already existing customers and oftentimes help burn out a customer.

Fewer titles. Yes, that sounds cruel, but the market place is too crowded. It's like a garden that is over planted, and as the various plants try to grow, they crowd out each other, hurting themselves and everything in the garden. Less is easily more in some cases.

I would very much like to see fewer spinoffs. As I have mentioned in the past, spinoffs hurt sales of whatever they spin off from. Avengers, Black Panther, Justice League, Spider-Man, X-Men, and more need to stay with one title and one title only. Amazing Spider-Man and Peter Parker feel like two completely opposite titles, even though they are about the same character.

Better planning. The Marvel one-shot Legacy was a glimmer of hope last year. It blew out of here. Wolverine returned. Wolverine then wasn't mentioned again in the Marvel Universe for the rest of 2017. Weird plan.

More creativity. It's great that a movie based on a comic property is coming out, but there is no need to plan a crossover around the movie. Readership doesn't get excited about that. They will go see the movie, but there is no one going, "Ohhhh, a crossover thanks to the movie, that's cool."

More standards. More continuity. More work. What is the direction of a title? A few panels at least to bridge the last creative team to the current one. Continuity doesn't have to slow down storytelling; it just shows that they are in a shared universe. One panel of Parker reading a newspaper and one of the articles is about a recent X-Men battle. Push creative teams to be better. More work, better product.

Give editors some power back. Creative people are still human and can easily make mistakes. When Batman went after Psycho Pirate in Batman #10 and reused the same lines over and over, it was so bad that in the trade released in 2017 they just left the repeated lines out. That should have easily been caught and taken care of by the editor before the issue came out.

More entertainment. Make comics fun. Entertain. Word of mouth is very helpful. When readership is talking about what they liked about in a comic, it gets more people interested.

Fewer relaunches. If a title is unable to keep going, then just let it end. Wait 'til a creative team comes along with an idea and direction that actually feels like it will be a hit.

World peace. It is something we should all hope for.