The direct market is supposed to be a wonderful idea for publishers.

Newsstands are nasty places. They have this bizarre idea that if they can't sell your comic, they should be able to return it and get their money back. This is dreadfully expensive because it means that you inevitably end up printing a whole load of unsold copies of every issue.

The direct market is much better. If the retailers can't sell your comic, they're stuck with it. Well, unless it was mis-solicited or hideously late, anyway. But the general principle remains - no returns. The retailer takes the risk. The publisher takes the money. Especially if the publisher is Marvel, whose "no return" policy has always had an admirable conceptual purity, sadly unmatched by its contract terms.

At first glance the direct market provides a great deal for publishers, and that's certainly what they must have thought when it first took off. But then, that's a very short-term view, because the direct market has obvious long-term problems. For one thing, it's a distribution network of hobby shops, selling to a relatively hardcore fanbase, which drastically cuts down the chances of selling to the sort of casual buyers who might have seen your comic on the newsstands. The lower risk also means narrower horizons and fewer opportunities.

'The retailer takes the risk. The publisher takes the money.' Secondly, putting all the risk onto the retailer gives him an incentive to order cautiously and minimise his exposure. This means fewer copies on the shelves and fewer potential sales to customers. And if the customers are buying fewer copies, then fewer of them will come back in future months, which the retailer will take into account in his ordering... and so on and so on. This is a particularly acute problem with the first few issues, where the retailer is ordering blind - once the book's up and running, the retailer will be able to judge his orders by established sales.

DC's latest answer to this problem is the Share The Risk programme. Basically, this means that every month DC will pick a bunch of titles and make them partially returnable. The exact details are a little fiddly - in order to qualify, according to the press release, retailers have to order the books "at or above their earned discount tiers' minimum quantities". If you do that, you get to return up to 20% of them.

It's not entirely clear whether this means you have to order all of them at that rate in order to qualify, or whether it's worked out separately by each book. I'm assuming it's the former. In which case, of course, DC could easily manipulate things by picking one reasonably promising book to sucker in the retailers, and then filling it out with questionable or unlikely comics. Then the retailers would have to buy these books at their "discount tier minimum quantities" - doubtless higher than they would otherwise have ordered - in order to benefit on the top seller.

The four books selected for the first month, April 2003, seem to fit this pattern. One of them is GREEN ARROW #23. It's the first issue by a new creative team (Ben Raab and Charlie Adlard, taking over from Scott Beatty and Phil Hester), so there's certainly a degree of guesswork involved for the retailers. But then GREEN ARROW is one of DC's top selling comics - in January, only JLA and the Loeb/Lee BATMAN did better - so the risk can't be all that high. It's a safe bet, which should attract the retailer to ordering up on the lower three.

'Bob Wayne says that the market saturation test "yielded fascinating results".' And those other three are far from likely high sellers. BEWARE THE CREEPER is a 5-issue Vertigo miniseries by Jason Hall and Cliff Chiang, and it's one of Vertigo's patented oddball relaunches where the central character is changed to the point that you wonder why they didn't just create another character and be done with it. It'd probably have done standard Vertigo numbers.

The other two seem unlikely commercial prospects - MUCHA LUCHA is an adaptation of a Latino children's cartoon (cartoon adaptations never do all that well in the direct market). SWEATSHOP is a comic book industry satire written by Peter Bagge (a wonderful creator, but his last DC work, YEAH, didn't exactly set the charts alight back in 1999).

So is DC being cynical? Well, not necessarily. After all some of the books they're trying to sell here come from their more arthouse wing - it's primarily an attempt to get readers to order outside their normal genres. If DC was going to try and gouge the retailers for money, it would hardly be doing it with BEWARE THE CREEPER. And there is, undoubtedly, a risk for DC here. The underlying assumption of DC's gamble is that there's an untapped market that would buy books like SWEATSHOP and MUCHA LUCHA if only they were on the direct market shelves.

DC's press release suggests that this is not pure speculation on its part. There is some talk about DC's market saturation test, which was basically an experiment in giving stores an absolute ton of books to find out how many they could sell. Bob Wayne, DC's vice president of sales and marketing, is quoted as saying that the market saturation test "yielded fascinating results". Regrettably, he does not choose to share with us what they were, nor have I been able to find the answer anywhere else. But presumably one of those results was that the stores were able to shift a surprising number of arthouse comics.

'DC's scheme stands in absolute contrast to Marvel's approach.' Of course, that might be a trait of the particular stores who participated in the experiment, which may not have been representative. We don't know. That's why there's still a gamble involved for DC here.

The scheme is only running through to September, incidentally. By then, it should be fairly clear whether the books are selling. Moreover, if DC is right, and there are more readers out there for these sorts of comics than the retailers think, then presumably the retailers will have grasped the point by then. In which case, DC might well be able to go back to the good old fashioned system of not doing returns, safe in the knowledge that the retailers will still be placing higher orders for their fringe titles.

It's an interesting scheme. And of course, it stands in absolute contrast to Marvel's approach - a point DC is only too keen to emphasise by providing enthusiastic quotes of support from Brian "Class Action" Hibbs. Leaving aside Marvel's contract issues, the publisher's clearly not all that keen on returnability in the direct market, and without even allowing re-orders on the first issues of new titles, it's all too keen to lump the risk onto the retailers. In one sense it can get away with this because it's a key player in the industry and most of the retailers can't survive without it; in the longer term, it may still encourage conservatism and lower sales.

Then again, it may simply be that Marvel shares the view that the future of comics isn't in the direct market at all, hence its revived trade paperback programme and links with Wal-Mart. Plenty would agree, at least, that the best way to boost audiences is to get out of the direct market and back into the mainstream, and that this is the best way to spend a limited marketing budget. If the direct market is in terminal decline, then innovative discount schemes are just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

But the direct market remains DC's core market for now, and that means making the best of it. Besides, if the direct market can be persuaded that there's an untapped audience in other genres, it may have a chance yet - although I suspect many comics stores regard themselves as scifi/fantasy genre stores which cover all media, rather than comics stores which cover all genres. Still, it isn't dead yet, and it's worth making the best of it while it's here.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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