Image by h-bomb via Flickr
If you follow comic book news, you knew this was going to happen, and one of the reasons why we are working on a different business model for next year with our store Alternating Reality. While we will still carry comic books, realistically the only way to keep things going at the store level (at least online) is to carry the limited edition comic books. According to Bleeding Cool though, Larry’s and Jetpack are angry enough at Dark Horse right now that they do not want to and are not going to stock that publishers comic books.
Starting on December the 14th, it will see the whole line available digitally on the Wednesday of publication at a price $1 or $1.50 cheaper than the print price, effectively undercutting the comic shop on day of release. Dark Horse had been releasing lower priced digital versions at a later date, though even that had been getting closer to print date of late. Now they’re all in. To the extent that New Hampshire comic shop Jetpack Comics and Massachusetts’ Larry’s Comics have decided to stop stocking any Dark Horse comic at all, for the shelf. If you shop there and want a copy of Buffy Season Nine, the Origin of the Jedi, the new Brian Wood/Becky Cloonan Conan, Hellboy’s decent into Hell, or the increasingly impressive Dark Horse Presents, you’ll have to make a special order Source BleedingCool.com.
Larry’s comics has a comment here on their site, Jetpack basically spelled it out on twitter, that they are asking for a general boycott before comic book stores are “plowed under and forgotten”.
The bad part is that the LCS is already dying, I go into local comic book stores all the time, and see the same old thing. But the digital age promises great rewards for comic book stores that understand what those opportunities are, and how best to exploit them. It all hinges on the collectable comic book market. The weekly comic book is dead or dying and just doesn’t know it yet. Anyone whose business model relies on the weekly comic book is dead or dying and just doesn’t know it yet. But collectors, those that understand the value of comics will always be willing to purchase physical copies because they can do anything they want to do with the including reselling them. Digital comics are a black hole, you buy it, you read it, eventually your computer crashes and you end up with nothing. The purchaser of a digital comic has nothing to resell, nothing to keep, nothing to own or share or otherwise make money off it when you decide to sell your whole collection. The regular comic book buyer has nothing, gets nothing, and can resell nothing.
But if you follow Slave Labor Graphics and their recent idea of doing the e-book first, print only if the market determines this is a good thing to do, this is the best boon to smaller publishing houses since the heyday of the 1990’s. E-comics are awesome in helping discover new authors, new markets, and new ideas for a minimal cost.
The money is going to lay in special edition, limited edition, specially commissioned covers and comic books.
Jetpack knows this, they do their own special covers all the time, we know this, we are just getting into our own special cover process, we already work with Zenescope, and are coming out with a Zombies VS Cheerleaders limited edition cover. These sell, they sell well, and they carry a significant premium price because the print runs are limited.
Honestly that is where the market exists, that is where the market is going. A boycott against Dark Horse is not going to have much of an impact except for showing that they don’t need the local comic book store to make money. It’s ok if you want to do it, but like Borders, we need to realize that the industry is changing and has changed permanently. Unless we want to go the way of Tower Records, we will adjust our LCS business models to meet the new challenges of digital comics.
Sure we can boycott, but in the end, LCS’s need to change to meet the new challenges, or fail out completely as our customers go and do something different.
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