Fifth Week Doldrums

A look at the ins-and-outs of an extremely light week of books.

You Read These With Your Eyes (Feb 1st, 2023)

A quick feature about selling stories, featuring the week’s newest reads.

The comic industry is weird. It always has been, but this week’s particular strange is the result of the warping taking place in the status quo in the past couple of years.

The big thing that retailers are up in arms about has to do with DC’s output this week. Currently, the company commits to a fairly strict four-week schedule for their books that seldom moves. If a certain book comes out on the third week of the month, it tends to happen like clockwork. As a retailer, this is pretty advantageous, as it provides a sense of order to the general proceedings. But then fifth weeks occur, and everything goes to hell.

Fifth weeks are the result of the cockamamie way we’ve decided to run calendars. Within an industry that runs serialized content on a weekly and monthly structure, having the odd month pop out an extra Wednesday (or in DC’s case, a Tuesday), provides some interesting challenges. Currently, DC decides to keep their regular titles running on their strict schedule, and runs annuals or boutique one-shots on their fifth weeks.

This month’s bonus week definitely has DC’s weakest line-up to date. While they usually have some kind of anchour book to bring folks in (like, say a Batman annual or the start of an event), this week features an odd mix. Here’s a list of the books:

• Batman: Legends of Gotham #1

• DC Power: A Celebration

• DC’s Harley Quinn Romances

• Flash: One Minute War Special

• Lazarus Planet: Legends Reborn

Battling for the anchour spot, you have One Minute War and Lazarus Planet, with the DC marketing machine pushing those as status quo altering events. The problem is both are attached to mid-list titles so they aren’t generating a lot of outside interest.

Then you have DC Power and Harley Quinn Romances - two anthology style storylines that the company uses to showcase new talent using marketing themes as the driving sales force. These aren’t bad ideas, as they accomplish a few different goals. In the case of a book like DC Power, the company utilized Black History Month to monetize stories told by fresh talent that are appropriate for the theme. If that description seems a bit cold, that’s because it is. It’s sad that it something like Black History Month has to be used as a sales engine to put content like this in front of people’s faces, but at the end of the day, the company is working within the structure of capitalism to get these stories told. It isn’t an artful way to do things, but at least the stories are being told. The Romances book functions in a very similar way, but it only exploits the Valentine’s Day of it all. That’s less fraught than… you know… exploiting a full on culture because it is their month, but it runs on a similar track.

I don’t think either project is inherently bad - in fact, some of my favourite stories have come out of anthologies like this, and many of the creators go on to do awesome things. But they aren’t books that bring people into the store - they’re things that people add to their stack passively, and usually tied to their feelings on the theme being worked.

And finally, there’s the Legends of Gotham title, that functions like a pilot for an Outsiders book. It’s a solid tale (I always like to see Andy Diggle’s name on a book), but it isn’t something that opens the doors. It’s a curiosity. These are all curiosities.

So we basically have a week of product that a strict DC fan will probably wait a week on to come in store. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but I have seen retailers pitching minor fits. Because like it or not, we still live in an era where DC and Marvel’s output often dictates how a week of sales will go. If there’s an anchor, people will come in so they don’t miss the big happenings. Smart retailers use that anchor to sell a person on curiosities while they’re in the shop. That’s the reality.

In an ideal version of this world, both Marvel and DC would plan their months to have at least one anchour hit each and every week. Capitalism demands it. But on the other side, retailers should also be trying to build their shops to be resilient, and not depend on the week to week churn of it all. There’s a treasure trove of amazing product these days. A little something for everyone. The stock of perennial titles should be enough to keep a shop going for a while, so long as they are always reaching outside of who they already have. 

While I won’t argue the fact that having a timely anchour can help sales immensely, a retailer can’t point at a publisher and lay their ills down at their feet. Everyone is just trying to do their best in this world, given the circumstances that they have. I know that’s where I am as a retailer. I don’t always nail my weekly tasks, and that has ripples down the line. We can call for publishers to be better, but you’ll never see me putting a loss on my end at their feet (barring something far more direct than having a light week of comics).

In fact, while DC is running the lightest line up vs their regular output, single issues from all companies are a little light this week. This is the result of the year end crush that sees titles needing to be hit final order cut-off quite far in advance to work with printing schedules and the shut downs that occur up and down the publishing industry. Most of the books that are on the shelves this week came at the tail end of December final orders, meaning most companies were a little light on product to put on the schedule. And so, we get a week like this.

When I prepped the file pull document for this week, it clocked in at half the pages it usually contains. That’s pretty significant. Tomorrow is going to be rough without a little bit of hustle, and it probably won’t help retailers who already have a bleak outlook for 2023. But at the end of the day, this is all going to come out in the wash as the rest of the month balances out the releases. Ebbs and flows.

Everything is going to be okay.

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In the interest of using this lighter week to promote an absolutely unique product, we’re going to wrap this week’s feature with my top pick from the current crop of books.

MINI-SERIES | Where Monsters Lie #1

By Kyle Starks, Piotr Kowalski, Vladimir Popov, & Joshua Reed w/ editorial support from Misha Gehr & Daniel Chabon

I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for books by Kyle Starks. His brain hums at a frequency that melds perfectly with my own. That said, I try to be cognizant of separating things meant for me and thing that I find are good recommendations. Up until fairly recently, despite the fact that I absolutely adore his work, I was hard pressed to put certain books in people’s hands. That isn’t any knock on his craft - quality has almost nothing to do with the art of selling comic books. This work was pretty specific. This book, is not. This book has a little bit of everything, It hits a beautiful sweet spot somewhere between horror and humour while keeping the story grounded with a touch of humanity. It’s quite the trick.

The story itself concerns the happens at a community where slashers stay in between sprees. Not just a home, this community has a structure that helps each villain with their schemes - after all, you can’t contract a normal to build razor blade pits for murder purposes - and it is this structure that gives this book that something extra. It takes the wildness of murder people, and builds out the world with shades of our own. It plies rules to violence that we recognize, in order to build a world. And of course, we are discovering this little world just as it might start to crumble.

This is a book that I’ll be putting into so many hands. I hope you take a look yourselves.

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Variant Edition presents The New Releases Show

Every Tuesday night at 8:10pm MST, my partner Danica and I go over the new comics and graphic novels that are coming out. This week, we’re also talking about all those DC media announcements that happened today! And do a few goofums while we’re at it.

Folks, please enjoy. That’s it for me. Wednesday waits for no one.

Talk with you soon.

-B.