Nov 3
Housekeeping
Posted on Wednesday, November 3, 2021 by Paul in Uncategorized
No annotations this week, because… well, there’s nothing to annotate. The only X-books out this week are X-Men: Legends and X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic (and they’re both in mid-storyline, so they’re not due for a review either).
So… yeah.
On Sunday, though, it’ll be time for Wolverine in 1994.
Maybe we can just make up our own review for a comic that should exist but doesn’t.
Krakoa Suburbia: How The 99% Lives (the O has the X symbol in the middle)
Cover: Glow Worm and Bulk standing at the front gate of their little house, smiling. Bulk is holding a fresh pie. Nearby an unidentifiable child lies on the lawn, a bored emoji hanging over their head.
The emoji indicates that the child is part Phalanx.
I would buy that book!
Death of Doctor Strange: X-Men. In which the ghost of Doctor Strange comes to Krakoa to inform Magik that since he’s now dead, she has to fight off Shuma-Gorath next time, so good luck. Strange then travels to Amenth to personally mock Apocalypse for the rest of the story for taking twelve issues and multiple murders to just open a dimensional portal, a basic task he first learned easily when he became a sorceror. Apocalypse fumes while his ex-wife makes fun of him.
Meanwhile in X-Corp #6, the company is rocked by a corporate takeover by the sinister alliance of Azazel and Romulus, with their army of Pooka shock troopers lead into battle by Cardinal Panzer.
I find the decision to have no X-books this week bizarre. And with the line in hiatus during “Lives of Wolverine”, it’s a recipe to kill off momentum and act as a jumping off point.
It’s not exactly a decision – they’re running late. The schedule originally announced for November was:
November 3 – Hellions, Excalibur, X-Force: Killshot
November 10 – New Mutants, X-Force
November 17 – Wolverine, X-Men, X-Men: Trial of Mangeto
November 24 – Inferno, Marauders, X-Men: Legends
The whole thing seems to have slipped by a week.
The reason for the delays are apparently lack of paper and transportation.
There is a Death of Doctor Strange: X-Men/Black Knight book coming in the next few weeks.
Not quite that plot, though.
It seems that, bizarrely, New Mutants will be one of the titles continuing during the post-Inferno period.
I say “bizarre” since it is one of the lowest selling titles.
So, I guess besides Wolverine and Sabretooth, people will be able to read a New Mutants comic also. I think X-Men is continuing during that time also, since X-Men doesn’t seem to be getting relaunched with the other titles.
Anyway, yes, Marvel made the announcement that the majority of their line will be facing delays starting now and lasting in to 2022, due to shortages at the printer. Some books will be delayed by a week while other books could face up to a month delay.
“Inferno” didn’t seem to be on the delayed titles list, so hopefully Marvel is working to keep “Inferno” on schedule.
“lack of paper and transportation”
Hopefully this is a hint of Marvel’s 2022 event: Late-Stage Capitalism War
Inferno has just been announced as part of the latest wave of delays, although only by 1-2 weeks (making INFERNO #4 one of the very few Marvel comics due to be published on Jan 5th, as just about everything initially scheduled for that date has been pushed back too).
@Josie Ha that’d be funny if it wasn’t so real.
The supply-chain issues are gonna get worse, can’t have been helped by the botched transition to Penguin/Random House handling shipping. Many stores reporting heavily damaged and unsellable copies. PRH announced they’re adjusting their shipping and packaging protocols but it hadn’t taken affect as of last week, not sure where they’re at now, but, bad time to exacerbate an already precarious situation.
COP 26 announces an end to deforestation, and in the same week Marvel runs out of paper? That was FAST.
I think it’s noteworthy that Marvel have chosen to maintain physical distribution as primary despite the supply chain shortages, and delay all books digitally, whilst at the same time botching their distribution.
I imagine the new deal with Penguin/Random House is something important to them, and there would be issues with that if Marvel kept to the original schedule digitally. But that then suggests that digital distribution really is a threat to physical when I keep hearing that it’s not.
Given that I live miles away from a comic shop (and my house is already full of tat, so mail order isn’t a solution I’m interested in), it annoys me that I have to wait in order to maintain a (to me) dead publishing model.
Digital would kill the comic book stores.
Which are already struggling.
The importance of the comic book stores is that they overorder.
They order 50 copies of X-Men and then only sell 40 copies.
Without the comic book stores, it would show how badly comic books are truly selling in 2021.
Even the height of comic book collector fever, when Marvel brags that they sold one million copies of X-Men #1, there’s no telling how many actual comics were actually sold to consumers.
The fact that comic book stores were never lacking in copies of X-Men #1 and that many stores ended up putting copies in their quarter boxes during the late-1990s and early-2000s shows that retailers were stuck with a glut of leftover copies.
Why are we protecting an outdated medium (single-issue physicals) just to prop up comic book stores? If they haven’t figured out a way to capitalize on collections and manga, it sounds like their problem.
Did you miss where overordering is of importance to the publishers?
If you go from comic book stores ordering 50 comics and actually selling 40 to a model where the publisher is only selling the exact number of copies that the consumers are willing to buy, that cuts in to the publisher’s bottom-line to a greater extent.
Comic sales have already been steadily decreasing since about 2005, after they had already dropped off during the late-1990s.
So, by eliminating the comic stores and only relying on digital copies, the publisher is cutting out even more of their sales.
Not to mention that Marvel just made a nice sweetheart deal with Penguin to distribute their comics. So, that deal would fall through.
There are business considerations to figure.
A corporation isn’t making a decision because they take pity on the poor little locally owned comic shops.
You don’t have to support anything. If you want to purchase only digital editions, that is your option.
If enough people make that choice, it will bankrupt the comic book store industry, forcing publishers to only publish digitally.
However, a company isn’t going to cut in to its own potential profits because some people on the internet say it is “outdated”.
The idea that digital versions of anything will fully replace physical media is a myth. We still have books and newspapers, we still have new vinyl records and even audio cassettes.
It’s annoying that publishers have to release digital and physical copies simultaneously, but printed comics aren’t going anywhere. They’re collectible, trashy, disposable fun, and people like them. Lots of people create their own and sell them on consignment in comic shops. It’s fun to see your ideas produced in real life, whatever the medium.
@Chris V
Not sure you needed quite so much snark there…
The current publishing model is clearly based on shifting risk to comic shops and banking that the shops will order as many as possible, with the shops left holding any unsold stock.
My confusion is that – as Thom H said – we have quite a lot of evidence that digital and physical single issue comics are quite different markets and that the physical market is now thought to be quite inelastic (with gutted sales and a smaller reader base who are being targeted to buy more issues -per person than ever before). I’m not saying that’s accurate, but that appears to be Marvel’s perception over the last 10+ years.
Right now, physical comics are going away as there’s no paper, no trucks and no packaging! So why stop selling digital?
I repeat, with added emphasis, if they haven’t figured out a way to capitalize on COLLECTIONS and MANGA, it sounds like their problem.