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Sunday, November 14, 2004
Everyone's Fault But His Own
If I may briefly respond to Bob Layton's open letter explaining how the death of Future Comics is the fault of short-sighted retailers and not his:
--The comics were awful, plain and simple. They were a throwback to the kinds of material I'd last seen published regularly in the early eighties. They were not what contemporary comics fans were interested in reading. "Old fashioned" is the polite term for the art and stories. "The kinds of comics grandpa used to think were dated" was the phrase I think I actually used amongst my co-workers upon seeing their initial offerings. The art was generic to the point where I honestly couldn't tell who was penciling which title.
--Given the above, it's not terribly surprising that they sold abysmally at our store. We couldn't give the damn things away, especially not at the $3.50 an issue price. Hell, we had people declining to take the "Free Comic Book Day" offering.
--As I recall, despite the deeper discount Future offered as compared to Diamond, the process by which we had to order the books was onerous, and we frequently had errors in our orders or received books late. I seem to recall that there may have been a minimum order on titles as well, though Mike doesn't recall that being the case. In other words, it was much easier for us to order the one copy of all of Future's titles that we could sell through Diamond than deal with Future at all.