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Wednesday, August 17, 2005
New Comics Day...From Hades!
Viz, in their infinite wisdom, decided to release both the first and second volumes of Zatch Bell to comic stores in the same week. I don't know whether that's confidence in the product or suicidal arrogance.
It's funny, but once we ran out of the Serenity covers with the girls on them, all interest in the book went away. I mean, you'd almost think people were buying the book as in "investment" rather than as something to read with a sales pattern like that...
This is a general suggestion for all comic customers: If you have an item that you wish to purchase bags and boards for, and it's an unusual size (i.e. not a standard size comic or magazine) you really need to either get good measurements of the thing or bring it in with you. Trying to guess which size bag will fit your "old timey paperback joke book" when the only difference between the two bags you're looking at is half an inch in width just wastes my time and yours. And it annoys the hell out of me.
Speaking of annoying bag and board queries: You really don't need to buy bags or boards for your trade paperbacks. I can sort of see wanting them for your hard-covers, since those dust-jackets are pretty flimsy, or an older out of print book, but in general, when you ask me "what size bags and boards will this Essential Avengers fit in?" what I hear is "I don't actually plan on reading this." This is doubly true when you ask me where you can get mylars that are sized for manga books.
At this point, should you really act surprised to hear that there isn't a new issue of Astonishing X-Men, Daredevil: Father, Secret War or Spider-Man/Black Cat out yet?
Mike and I had a little discussion about which comic was worse, Supergirl or Justice. Mike felt that Supergirl was worse, since at this point Justice only has the potential to be truly awful. We got busy, so I didn't have time to offer a counter argument, so while I agree with him that, based on first issues only, Supergirl is the worse comic, it's only really bad in the sense that a comic by Chris Claremont or Roy Thomas is bad: over-reliance on narrative captions and an assumption that the reader has read every comic featuring every character who appears in this book. While Justice only starts with a fundamentally flawed premise; that the Super Friends (not the JLA, the Super Friends and the Legion of Doom) really needed to be featured in a dark and gritty story in order to demonstrate how seriously the characters need to be taken, and there isn't really much room for improvement at that point. Not that there's anything wrong with serious super-hero comics. But this is Space Ghost all over again...
And to end on a happy note, a conversation with a customer that actually left me slightly flabbergasted: "Do you carry horror comics?" Sure, we've got all kinds of horror comics. Was there a particular one you were looking for? "Do they make any comic books about zombies?" ...What, seriously? "Uh, yeah. Are there any horror comics with zombies in them?" Oh, I think I can manage to find one or two...
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