Reborn II: Electric Boogaloo

Reborn II: Electric Boogaloo

Jun 15

Okay, so I’m trying to tweet out my heart about this whole Cap600 thing, and it’s not working so good, so at the risk of being dumb and forcing two blog posts about one topic onto our gentle readership, I’m gonna spew for a minute here, if only to try and get my thoughts down clearly.

1. The NY Daily News story was not about Captain America 600, and I don’t know if it was ever supposed to be. I think this is important. Marvel believed Cap600 had to come out today because it basically revealed the imminent return of Steve Rogers–it’s the start/prelude of the story to come in Reborn 1. So if this book comes out Wednesday, there’s no CHANCE for any trickle of supporting business based on the NYDN story. Plus, fans and retailers alike whine, “OMG SPOILURZ HATE U MARVEL.”

If it comes out today, it also doesn’t spoil the NYDN story, which for some reason had to come out today. I’m guessing that’s on the NYDN, and if I were Marvel, I might have negotiated harder for the exclusive to come out on Wednesday, since without their information, there’s, y’know, no real STORY for the NYDN to publish. So bad on them for that.

It’s possible the NYDN story was supposed to be more about Cap600, and because Marvel can’t write the story themselves and place it unedited, the reporter who wrote the story wrote what he thought was important, not what Marvel wanted him to write. It’s possible there were 3 graphs about Cap600 that got cut to make room for a story about Madonna’s little Malawian baby.

2. You can’t measure the success of today’s story based on sales of Cap600, or even sales of Reborn 1. PR hits are notoriously difficult to measure–it’s hard sometimes to tie direct sales to a specific PR hit. A guy could read that story, go to a comic shop today, and buy Cap600; he could also read the story online three days from now, write “July 1” on his calendar, and go buy Reborn 1 when it comes out. He could even read the story today, let the information rot away in his brain, and a year from now buy a trade paperback that includes Captain America.

These are all compelling reasons to want this level of PR, and I don’t say that in a “rah rah comics we need new bodies in the shops to validate our hobby because we’re insecure nerds” kind of way. From a business perspective, I think the positives outweigh the negatives.

3. What were the negatives? The way that the early release of Cap600 was announced was clearly a big negative–a small window, coming on a new comics Wednesday when retailers may not even see it. This indicates to me that maybe it was some kind of last-minute panic move on Marvel’s part based on hearing that the story would come out on Monday, June 15 and not Wednesday, June 17. Or maybe they’re dumb enough to think they could pull a stunt like this so quickly and so poorly that it would be a huge success. It’s possible, I suppose.

The Reborn 1 solicit/final order cutoff–which was actually no solicit, because of the news coverage, until Marvel wised up and moved the FOC to June 16. So it was a potentially huge blunder, corrected by Marvel, and it’s probably true that it shouldn’t have been a blunder in the first place, and that comics retailers in general need more and better information sometimes to sell their product effectively. That’s on Marvel. It’s a large problem that goes beyond this situation and gets to a lot of the problems at the root of direct market retail, where the people selling the books are the real “customers” and are often fans themselves who may not have been able to resist trumpeting this “exclusive” info via Twitter or Facebook or a message board post that would have ruined the NYDN story for sure.

Ultimately, I think Marvel’s won more than they lost here–hopefully they’ve learned something too. Or maybe they haven’t, and they’ll keep making bonehead moves with retailers on this kind of stuff. But even from the retail perspective, I would hope they’d see this as more of a win than a loss, overall–I realize it’s hard to see the long-term view here since they have to worry about selling books every week and keeping doors open and employees paid and what-not, but they can order their Reborn issues until tomorrow, and they can get their Cap600 on Wednesday, and if someone should happen to wander in today and insist on buying something, I bet they’ve got a copy or two of the first Brubaker Cap trade to move, which is really the best place to start anyway.

That helped, sorta. I always feel like a bonehead moving into debates like these, and then the rhetoric gets so fierce and tight that my brain gets tired and I want to go eat a chip or forty-seven. But that’s what I got. Thanks for reading and please be gentle in the comments. I’m a tender flower.