Terry Hones of www.hoknescomics.com brought an interesting article to my attention. It is from Antony Johnson, creator of Umbral, which spotlights order trends from retailers for his Image book.
For Umbral #1, 70% of our orders came from less than 30% of Diamond accounts. That’s every store that ordered 10 or more copies.
If you move that threshold up to 20 copies, you’re then accounting for fully 50% of our orders; and that came from just 10% of Diamond accounts.
And those numbers don’t even include stores that ordered zero copies. It may surprise you to learn that some stores literally only order Marvel + DC books, nothing else.
So think on that. More than 70% of Diamond accounts didn’t even order 10 copies of a brand new Image #1.
That is crazy to think that 70% of stores didn’t bother to order a new Image book. Not sure if this is happening just because his book is a fantasy book or if because retailers are starting to tire of all the new releases coming out of Image. If you remember last year, almost every new Image book was shooting up in price the week they came out. And then every book coming out from Image had a huge print run and the rise in price trend died off.
I can say I enjoyed numbers 1-3 of Umbral, but for my personal collection am dropping off after #3 as it does not fit my reading tastes.
Umbral #1 did have one of the lower print run totals for a recent Image book.
The full story can be found here.
I would personally rather have a totally new story than another X-Men or Avengers spin-off. But, a lot of shops near me don’t get all of the Image titles. I am having a hard time find Sheltered locally because stores never got it in the first place.
Agreed. I would like to see Marvel expand their line more to include new, non-superhero books. Seems that Icon is a dud at the moment other than Mark Millar’s stuff. How about an Epic line including more horror and fantasy like it used to be. I am (almost) completely off Marvel and DC and read all Image IDW Dark Horse and smaller press stuff.
It would be interesting to know more about these locations. Are they in small or mid-sized cities? Is there no market for anything other than the most mainstream stuff? Seems hard to believe. Does ordering from Image somehow harder for local comics shops? Bigger commitment up front or something?
Maybe it’s a generation of store managers still pissed off about McFarlane leaving Marvel : )
I’ve got such a huge reading list, Marvel and DC are really my only comics that involve superheroes. I read the others to balance things out between heroes and non-hero stories.
I think the problem though is, Marvel and DC do what they do best, which is heroes while the independents got their niche in telling other stories.
But between DC and Marvel, I’ve always been more of a Marvel follower. I think Marvel has better writers currently (Hickman is just awesome with what he’s doing with The Avengers) than DC as well, but then again, I’m primarily a Batman fan, never really big on the rest of the DC heroes. I do like Superman Unchained but I hear it’s gonna get dropped soon. DC’s best writer currently has to be Snyder though. I enjoyed Talon (primarily because it was sort of dark like Batman) but immediately once Snyder stopped writing it, it sucked donkey balls..
Also on Image Comics being skipped, I’d imagine a lot of shops order based on those who have pull lists. If no one is requesting a title, what makes them think people off the street are gonna be interested in some of the titles.
But I’d like to see more evidence in Antony’s claim. He uses his own comic as a starting point but I’m pretty certain every comic shop orders “The Walking Dead” each month.. and to be honest, I lost interest really fast with Umbral, the art was good but the story fell flat quickly with me.
The article title is misleading in my opinion though since he’s basing it only off his Umbral’s sales, not across all Image titles and perhaps other independent comic titles put out monthly.
A bit of this could be just plain old sour grapes that more stores didn’t order his book. I do find it a little hard to imagine that stores do not order at least a few copies if a new Image book to try to sell off the shelves even if they do not have pulls for it or preorders as people do buy every new Image comic.
I was going to say the same thing, seems like it could be a little bit of bitterness.. but thinking about the type of book it is, it’s nothing really ground breaking to say the least and the type of story caters to a small amount of people.
I would love to see Diamonds clients.. I mean, what percentage of the retailers are the likes of Barnes and Nobles, Toys R Us and the like? I mean, in Austin alone there are 3 actual “Comic” Book stores.. the stores who are likely to pick up a few copies since that’s what they deal with, comic books. I’d imagine a huge percentage of the orders are to stores who cater to masses that have no desire for the small independent books, they have the 10 year olds looking for Iron Man and Batman, not Umbral, a fantasy story they likely wouldn’t understand anyways.. 😉
Yes the article is only about Umbral. But I find the statistics shocking because not only does mean that likely other new image titles really are ignored completely by some “big 2 only” stores. I can’t believe there even are “big 2 only” stores. How is that promoting the comic industry or variety? We know sales statistics for all comics therefore knowing that Umbral had decent orders means that only a portion of stores are doing ALL the orders. Which made me wonder if Image titles in general are more speculated on than earlier believed. I agree with the point about Sheltered that if no file customers wanted it then a retailer may choose to not order any shelf copies – why take the risk !?
I guess these places probably know their market to some extent, but Image books get so much buzz online, it’s hard to imagine people’s curiosity isn’t piqued. I know I’ve picked up half a dozen Image books just because I’ve heard good things, or the cover looked interesting: Black Science, Sheltered, Sex Criminals… etc.
Seems like a missed opportunity for these retailers.