Welcome, dear readers, to our regular letter column; a series of missives from and to the internet, delivered by a series of tubes.

We welcome your comments and questions. They don’t even have to be about comics! Or anything! They just have to be questions. Honestly, we’ll answer ANYthing.

Today’s installment is a little strange. Scott asked us for our thoughts on Villain’s Month, and Brandon went a little overboard - as in “wrote more than James did answering every other question combined” kind of overboard. So, in the interest of not handing you a 9,000 word column, we’ve popped that section out for it’s own little thing. The other questions and answers will run on Monday.

Thank you, internet.

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Scott gets serious: What are your thoughts on the state of this DC Villains’ Month thing?

James: I can only speak to it as a comic reader (and mostly non-customer), and even then, it seems like a nightmare. Quadruple shipping of books. Switching of creative teams. Bizarre gimmicky covers. The whole thing just seems genuinely hard to follow and, honestly, if it wasn’t for a shop employee (Brandon) going through the lineup with me, pointing out what I probably want and asking some very specific questions to suss out the rest, I’d probably just have thrown my hands up in the air and washed my hands of the entire line for the entire month of September. I honestly can’t fathom what people without dedicated employees like Brandon are doing, and I imagine he’ll have a lot to say about the specifics of the whole thing.

Brandon: I can’t actually remember if I’ve actually written about this before or if I’ve just been honing my thoughts out loud for the past several months. Suffice to say, I have more than a few opinions about how DC is handling Villain’s Month, and almost all of them aren’t good. It didn’t start that way. At first, I thought the endevour was a brilliant idea. As originally pitched to the public, it would be a month where villains would take over certain books, each given a sub-numbering (like Action Comics #23.1), each a single issue story that could be purchased and/or ignored as a reader saw fit. The platonic ideal of that method is great: not only would a book have the sales power of an ongoing, rather than the middling sales potential of a one-shot, but it also didn’t mess with the order of things. If a person didn’t want a Villain’s Month issue, they could still go from issue #23 to #24 without sending the more obsessive-compulsive parts of their brain into haywire. In doing so, DC seemed to be devising an event that could make everyone happy. The retailers could sell a ton of books, and readers could pick and choose if they wanted to sample various titles or skip various tie-ins with little to no consequence. Sadly, this fleeting bit of brilliance was short lived as more details began to roll out.

My heart first sunk when I discovered that DC would not, in fact, be doing this as a line-wide initiative, but would be picking and choosing from the stronger books in their line, shipping multiple copies of each. Don’t get me wrong, I understood why they decided to go this route - they wanted this to be a big sales event, and they rightfully assumed that shipping 16 Batman books would garner higher sales than 4 Batman books, and 12 others that routinely move (at most) half the quantity of their lowest selling Batman title. That said, it struck me as slightly short sighted. Yes, their sales for that month would be amazing, but it would almost invariably be at the cost of their October sales. Not only would they be breaking the bank for those poor souls who would see parts of pull list quadruple in cost for the month, but they would be breaking the monthly habit for those whose books would not be shipping that month. When you go from putting out 52 monthly books (which - to be fair to DC, they weren’t in the months leading up to this event) to 18, you’re going to be leaving more than a few people out in the cold with no comics to read for a whole month. I know they realise this is a very bad thing. Part of the promise inherent in the New 52 line were books that would ship once a month, every month, because the market was punishing late shipping books with steep drops in sales. Armed with this data, DC still made the decision that making the majority of their line disappear for a month would be balanced out by a single month of sales. Presumably, they are armed with the same information that I have, except expanded to provide an accurate picture of the industry as a whole, and not just my shop, and whatever sales information I can gleen from the vague numbers that hit the web: when a book breaks out of its monthly habit, it begins a bad trend. It accelerates a decline, and staunches any upward momentum. In short, this means bad things for each and every title they’re skipping for the month - including their best selling title, Superman Unchained (which will need all the momentum it can get when Jim Lee jumps off the book). Anyway, I would have been remotely okay with all of this, if the books retained a creative through line. After all, while there are people who are getting books for the characters, and not the creators, those people do not single-handedly account for a book’s sales. Take one look at the three wildly varying sales level of the five (now four) ongoing titles starring Batman, and you’ll see the varying levels of interest in the creators and stories that are powering each of the books. Had these multiple shipping books retained their writers, even if they were just providing overall plots, that would be ideal. If one of those books could retain the regular artist, even better. This did not happen.

The mad jumble of creators on the Villain’s Month books immediately meant I could not count on previously gathered information. Above talking to customers about whether or not they wanted to buy into weekly shipping books, I had to tell them that the issues of Batman would not be what they were used to. Not all of them, anyway. This caused more than enough people to shrink what might have been a quadruple dip back to the regular single dip. Oddly enough, this could have been mitigated if DC had done a little bit of grunt work, and shifted around their featured villains a bit to suit the titles just a little bit. They made a good decision putting The Joker into the main Batman book, and by having Scott Snyder co-write The Riddle one shot in the same title, but why is The Penguin in this book? Having just been featured in Detective Comics for the better part of the last year, wouldn’t it make sense for that story to be in there? Wouldn’t it make more sense to move the Court of Owls one shot into the main Batman title? Not only is it where the characters originated, but that book is being written by James Tynion IV who regularly co-writes the back-up story in Batman. Hell, put the Ra’s Al Ghul story by Tynion in the line-up as well, and you have a reasonable line-up to sell four stories to all those currently getting Batman.

(And while I’m on this track, why is the John Layman Clayface story not in Detective? John Layman WRITES Detective. Clayface was in one of his stories! This is easy math. I’m equally stymied as to why all three Peter Tomasi tales aren’t all in Batman and Robin, the book he writes. Again, simple math.)

It’s not just the Batman books that are messed up in this regard. There’s a Dial H story running in the pages of Justice League. This makes no sense. The Venn diagram of that audience is very nearly two circles that do not touch at all. Also, while Black Adam has been a regular feature of the Justice League book, and the Secret Society have been the main villains in the Justice League of America book, their respective stories have been placed in the other series - which means I have to tell people who are getting Justice League that they should check out one issue of Justice League of America, and those getting JLA, that they should be getting one issue of JL, all because someone, somewhere didn’t think it would be a good idea to keep characters featured in certain series within the pages of that series. It’s maddening - and I haven’t even gotten to the worst stuff yet.

Along with the initial announcement wave came the news that all of these books would have premium “3-D Lenticular covers” - fancy little things that would drive the cost of each book up to $3.99, and that book that were regularly $3.99 would be losing their pages of bonus content for the week month. In short, the regular $2.99 books would jump up a dollar, and the regular $3.99 books would feature less content. Essentially, this was yet another reason for customers to skip out on the series, on top of all the other reasons.

Anyway, all of that was not very good, but that was the hand I was dealt, so I made the best of it. I contacted nearly all the customers in our database (some people could not be contacted or didn’t get back to me), and I was able to set some pretty decent order numbers. Things were going to be… well, not great, but they were going to be okay, and my customers were going to be happy.

And then this happened:

Press Release from DC:

Due to unprecedented demand for the September 3-D motion covers, DC Entertainment announces that orders on the 52 Villains Month issues will be allocated. These issues are now sold out at the publisher level.

Now, each 3-D motion cover issue will have a Standard Edition with a 2-D cover, priced at $2.99 US. The Standard Editions are scheduled to arrive in stores on the same day as the 3-D editions, starting with titles on FOC starting August 6 and closing on August 12, which will arrive in stores on September 4.

In addition, the entire run of 3-D motion covers will return in December in the Villains Month 3-D Motion Complete Set. This item is on FOC on August 12; see below for details.
“Because of the time needed to create the 3-D motion covers, we were forced to set September print runs much further in advance than we normally would,” said Dan DiDio, DC Entertainment Co-Publisher. “As we got close to the FOC dates, even though we were very aggressive with our sales forecasts for the 3-D editions, it was clear that orders for these issues were going to be greater than the quantities we had printed. Once we saw from the first 3-D edition FOCs that we were oversold on initial orders, we decided to institute a system across the entire 3-D line that was in accord with previous retailers’ ordering patterns to minimize the impact of fringe speculators.”

“It’s very exciting to see how much interest there is in these 3-D covers, which are latest in a long line of innovations from DCE, like the fold-out poster in Superman Unchained #1 or the die-cut covers from the Death of the Family issues,” said Jim Lee, DC Entertainment Co-Publisher. “Our goal every September has been to create great, new ways to draw attention to our entire DC universe line and the reaction to Villains Month capped by the launch of our first universe event ‘Forever Evil’ has been just incredible.”
The allocations will range from approximately 50% to nearly 100% on different titles. The allocations are based on an average of your orders of each Villains Month titles’ base title over the past few months.

Like the 3-D motion cover versions, the Standard Editions will be first printings of each title.

To give retailers as much time as possible to focus on ordering the Standard Editions and the 3-D Motion Complete Sets, retailers will no longer need to place FOC orders for the 3-D editions for the remaining weeks in August—therefore, the 3-D motion cover issues scheduled to arrive in stores on September 11, September 18 and September 25 will not be listed on FOC.

Retailers will receive an email from Diamond detailing their allocations on each 3-D motion cover edition before the Standard Editions’ FOC date, and should check their allocation on each 3-D issue carefully.

Retailers should watch their FOC lists in the coming weeks for the Standard Editions of all 52 Villains Month issues.

Please note that the digital versions of these issues do not have 3-D Motion Covers. Like the Standard Editions, the digital editions are priced at $2.99 US and will be available for download the same day the 3-D and 2-D print editions ship to stores.

Retailers who wish to decrease their orders on any of the 3-D motion cover issues should contact their Diamond Customer Service Representative or DC Sales Representative.
DC’s red-hot 3-D motion covers are set to return in December in the new Villains Month 3-D Motion Complete Set! This set will include second printings of all 52 Villains Month titles with the 3-D motion covers plus the Forever Evil #1 3-D Motion Cover Variant Edition. (Standard Edition cover shown.)

The Villains Month 3-D Motion Complete Set (JUN138292) will be on FOC on August 12, and is scheduled to arrive in stores on December 11 with a price of $199.99 US.

Please note that because of the longer than normal production time needed to print 3-D motion covers, this is the soonest they can arrive in stores. The issues included in this set will be printed to order; they will not be allocated. Covers in this set, including Forever Evil #1, will be labeled “second printing.”

And don’t forget to order the DC Comics—The New 52 Villains Omnibus HC (AUG130289), which has its own 3-D motion dust jacket and is scheduled to arrive in stores on December 11.

Some of that is pure retailer-ese, so I’m going to break things down a little.

All the Premier Publishers (Dark Horse, DC, IDW, Image and Marvel) and a small smattering of other publishers (Boom! Studios, Dynamite, Oni and Valliant) participate in a “Final Order Cut-Off” (FOC) program, which allows retailers to adjust their orders right up to the point where the publishers send their books off to the printers… hypothetically speaking. In practice, publishers often send away their numbers to the publishers a few days early, if not weeks earlier in some cases. (I know that Marvel routinely sends books off to the printer a few days before retailers punching in their final numbers.) Anyway, over the past few years, retailers have become used to this system. Many don’t even place proper initial orders, opting to fill in slots with token orders of “1” while they continue to gather information (drops, adds, creative team changes) for a title. Needless to say, the fact that DC is essentially CANCELLING the FOC program for the month for these “special covers” has upset those people. Some are claiming that this action MAY, in fact, be illegal. Personally, I’ve been waiting for someone smarter than I am to really read through the terms of sale retailers sign with Diamond to suss that out. Maybe someone has, and everything is kosher. I’m still doing quite a bit of digging here on my end to figure some more things out.

At the VERY least, this news is a huge problem. It has retroactively turned every single retailer into liars, as we’ve been pounding the pavement, insisting that this event was what it was: 18 titles, shipping multiple times (in most cases), at higher price points, with neat looking covers. We were also told that our orders would be counted, and at no point was there a mass communication from the company that we would not receive what we ordered… until one day after we were asked to place our FINAL ORDERS for the first week of comics. (A side note: if certain retailers were lucky enough to be close to a location where DC did their “Roadshows” - which is to say, if you didn’t have a store in Canada, and were located in some of the more densely populated portions of the US, with a structure in place where you or another employee could take off for a day or more to get to one of these “shows” - you were told that there was a CHANCE the books would be allocated, due to the nature of the covers, and when said covers would have to be printed.) Currently, as I write this, it’s Thursday, August 8th, and orders for the “2D” editions for the first week of titles are due… on Monday. I have yet to receive a communication that details my allocation, and I have… ooohhh, roughly four days to communicate this information to all of my customers. I still don’t know what I’m going to tell them. For all I know, everything could be fine. They are, supposedly, basing allocation off of a retailer’s previous ordering history. That could mean that I WILL get (hypothetically) 100 copies of the Justice League books just fine. It could also mean I’m only getting 50. It all depends on what they mean when they say “based off of previous orders”, and how the orders of asshole retailers who ordered 8 times their regular numbers in order to “corner the market” factors in. If DC is SMART, retailers will be GUARANTEED base numbers. That way, responsible retailers who aren’t inadvertently gunning for the swift heat-death of the industry will receive what they ordered, and those other speculative assholes will get what they deserve as well: a reasonable amount of comics that will cover what they need for people who will actually READ the comics.

Unfortunately, this scenario is still pretty terrible. It damages retailers who were told that they could adjust their orders at some point in the future, who are now stuck with their “token orders”. It damages retailers who actively sold “package deals” for complete runs of the 3D covers. After all, do you think there might be some disparity between how many copies of Batman will head out the door vs. the numbers of a book like Green Arrow or Swamp Thing? If DC does base their allocations on what was previously ordered for a title, some retailers won’t be able to cover their pre-sold cover orders. I should note: this is not the fault of those retailers. They were told that their orders would be honored, and rightfully assumed that they could sell right up until the Final Order Cut-Off. After all, there was no communication to the contrary… until a day AFTER the first round of FOCs were due.

So here’s where we stand. Best case scenario? DC sends retailers orders on their books that match reader demand. Those orders are padded slightly by token orders for 2D covers for those who just want their stories, and can read them for a full dollar cheaper. Harm is still done, but it’s at least somewhat contained.

That is not what is going to happen.

No matter what is sent out, this entire endeavor will end poorly, the actions of a company that was either being stupid by not completely thinking this through, or disingenuous by knowing that this would happen. I tend to run more optimistic than most, but even I find the timing of much of this to be suspect. For instance, why wouldn’t DC tell every retailer ahead of time WHEN final numbers were needed for this endeavour? The two options, once again, are stupidity, or duplicity. Either they didn’t suspect this would happen, and then caused much of the problem by telling SOME retailers (not all) that there might be some allocations, or knew that this was going to happen, and allowed it to play out in this fashion for the sake of fast money, vs. a long term investment in, say, retailers and the industry. Honestly, when did they know this was going to happen? Surely, it was before Tuesday. From the sound of things, it was before they set the final numbers themselves.

Whether it was stupidity, or duplicity, the result will be the same: September will end in flames. There will be more than enough retailers who will similarly act stupid or duplicitous and charge their customers a premium ABOVE AND BEYOND $3.99 for the chance to get their hands on a fancy covered book. Inevitably, this will sour some people, many of whom will jump ship to another shop, or stop buying comics completely. Beyond that, there will be general confusion. After all, I can’t get this information out to all of my customers. Despite my best efforts, some of them still don’t know Villain’s Month is a thing because… well, because they don’t return calls, or are still on lavish vacations, or they refuse to speak to anyone and get scared when you initiate conversation. Of the people I was able to contact, I will be able to maybe, MAYBE, if the stars align just right, 50% to tell them that - whoops, DC made a boo boo, and they either might not get the cover they want or they have the option of buying a copy for cheaper, if they so desire. That adds up to a FUCK TONNE of confused customers, some of whom will assume that *I* lied to THEM in order to squeeze out extra money. Some of those people might quit comics altogether. Others will go to other shops because… well, because they didn’t know what happened, and that other shop didn’t “do wrong by them”. I know that all sounds pretty dramatic, but I assure you, there are people who quit comics every single month, either due to changing life circumstances or tastes. (I should note, maybe 0.1% of those people actually post about quitting to the internet, and when they do, they are generally quite polite and reasonable within their posts. Those OTHER posts you see about people quitting are 100% grade-A horsehit, as evidenced when they claim to quit - AGAIN - a few weeks later for ANOTHER stupid reason. But I digress…) There will be some immediate bleed from this, and that’s before we get to the long term damage.

Readers like regularity, and the zeitgeist is heavily tipped towards “instant gratification media”. This is the reason why Marvel releases their events in a more confined period of time: people want things to happen, and they want it to happen NOW, ALL AT ONCE. While Villain’s Month hits the “instant” part of instant gratification, it does little for the “gratification” part. With allocations, retailers will not be gratified, and by extension, their customers won’t be gratified, and this feeling will linger. Maybe the next time DC attempts something like this, retailers will be less trusting. Maybe customers will. If we can’t trust them to deliver promised product, why should we lend them our support? If they’re just going to change the product that they’re selling to us, why should we trust the information we’re given? Orders will start to be more and more conservative. Customers will opt to try their luck elsewhere.

 

Mark my words, this is bad, probably the absolute worst thing they have done in quite a long time. It will have long term, devastating effects for their line, and if something doesn’t change, and doesn’t change fast, they’re going to find themselves in a worse state than when the New 52 relaunch was necessitated not two years back.

But hey, at least September’s sales figures will be great for them - and make no mistake, all of this damage, the whole god damn circus of it? Is all about that. DC’s facing their fiscal year end (Sept), and their numbers are down, down, down again. They need this to be big for them, because otherwise, head’s are going to roll, and this might buy the guys in charge another year at the helm. Unfortunately, it will come at a large cost that the company won’t likely recover from within the year, not without another relaunch of sorts (which I suspect is coming in December, right after the 25th issues, just in time for the end of another quarter).

I just… look, I’m angry. And I don’t want to be angry. I just want to sell comics to people who want to read comics, and right now, DC is making that very hard for me to do. They are making the “getting comics” part hard, and that’s supposed to be the easy part. When I can’t even get the comics without ulcer inducing horrors, how the hell am I supposed to have the energy to sell them? Just… please, please, please, somebody over there, cut the god damn shit, and just get to making comics. Stop the gimmicks, stop pulling people off titles, stop telling people to change course. Let creators create. Let books be what they’ll be, and let books live or die on their own merits, without the editorial hand twisting feverishly. All the course correcting is doing far more damage than letting creators do what they’ll do. It shakes off more readers who are enjoying the comic that already exists than who will pick it up because of the change. And dammit, stop with the fucking gimmicks. Have we already forgotten where gimmicks got us last time? Where the glut of special covers lead us to? THE INDUSTRY ALMOST CHOKED AND DIED, AND YOU’RE DOING IT AGAIN, GOD DAMMIT.

Stop.

Stop it.

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That’s it for the ninety-second installment of Um, Actually (if you’re counting the one Brandon did without James last week, which I guess you probably should because we counted the one where James talked about the All-Star Game for like 3000 words). Check in every Monday and Thursday for a new batch of questions. If you have anything you’d like answered, hit up our contact page! If you submit anything via Twitter – to @blogaboutcomics, @Leask or @soupytoasterson – remember to include the hashtag #UMACTUALLY so that we don’t lose it. Remeber: you can ask us anything. Seriously, anything.