Editorial: Cassandra Complex - Previews & Perishers

The Direct Market needs the Previews catalogue, whether we like it or not - but that doesn't mean there isn't plenty of room for improvement. Antony Johnston offers his reccomendation for the one change that might have the biggest impact.
28 November 2003

YOU GOT MORE RABBIT THAN SAINSBURY'S

You can take the boy out of activism, but you can't take activism out of the boy...

Matt Fraction, Savant co-founder and general renaissance cowboy, swore off activism a while back, citing a general despair that the shouting and hollering he, Savant, and plenty of other people (myself included) indulged in hadn't actually achieved much in terms of changing what people were reading. Sad, but true.

Over the last week, though, he's been pondering Previews (I'd give you a link, but Matt doesn't seem to believe in blog permalinks) with his old kind of fervour, and I find myself agreeing for the most part with his suggestions for improving it. Separating the non-comics items into a separate catalogue, getting rid of the rotated-by-publisher covers, giving non-Big Four publishers more space and prominence than the 2" box per comic they currently get... But while sensible and logical, sadly, none of these suggestions are new. They've been made many times before, they just haven't been implemented. Regardless, it's set a few minds a-racing, including mine, about the issue of our beloved catalogue, and how it could be improved.

One of the first remedies that comes to my mind (and which was also put forward during the same debate by Peter Siegel) isn't new either, but it still never ceases to boggle my mind - giving retailers and customers different catalogues.

You might well ask why that would make a difference, but ask any decent retailer and they'll tell you that a standard non-Big Four Previews solicitation doesn't tell them enough about a comic to order it with confidence.

(Notwithstanding the retailers who order based solely on how other books by the creators sell - which you may think is outrageous, but for those retailers it seems to work ninety per cent of the time...)

Retailers, like Number Two, want information. And there are two stumbling blocks to that in Previews as it stands.

The first, affecting non-Big Four publishers, is the size issue - a tiny cover reproduction and 80 words of copy just isn't enough to get over any meaningful information, beyond a quick synopsis and an idea of what the cover might look like if your idea of comics shopping is to press your nose against a store window and squint at the racks inside.

But even if every publisher was given as much room as they wanted to solicit their titles - and by god, you'd probably need a truck just to carry the bloody thing out the store - we still hit problem number two, which is the unavoidable fact that readers will be scanning Previews too.

This makes publishers reluctant to give away too much of the plot, to speak in marketing terms which the average reader might find offensive ("This comic will sell to self-obsessed 14-year-old boys in trenchcoats who wish they lived in THE MATRIX"), or to detail special retailer discounts and offers.

(For example, Marvel got grumbled at a while back - no, I know, it's incredible - when it printed an increased discount offer for retailers on one of its titles. Trouble was, a lot of readers saw it and proceeded to accuse their retailers of 'ripping them off' because they didn't pass this saving on to their customers.)

The problem is, the Direct Market necessitates a catalogue. Sure, you don't need this with other media. You don't phone up Virgin Megastore and tell them you'd like the new Britney album that's coming out in two month's time, or run the risk of not being able to buy it at all. But as it stands at the moment, and much as it might frustrate some of us, comics can't get away with that. There are stores out there, some of them very successful, that take no preorders from customers at all - but there's at least as many that would collapse without some guidance from their customer base as to what they should order on titles outside the Top 100.

So to me, two separate catalogues would just make sense. You stuff the retailers' version to the gills with information on storylines and creators, art previews, script previews (hell, finished-issue previews if you have 'em), marketing information... everything they need to make an informed ordering decision. You get rid of the ads, and instead give publishers the option of how much space they want for their solicitations, charging different amounts for each. You make it very, very retailer-friendly, and you supply one copy to every retailer for free.

The readers' version is where the ads go to live, and you stuff that full of them, along with your cover thumbnails and a few more words - let's say two hundred, enough for anyone to make a decent and informative sales pitch - about each comic. Add the order number, release date, and that's it. No need for anything else, and the space you'd save at the front alone would easily accommodate the extra space for wordage. And this one, if you must charge for it, you price as cheaply as possible. Let the advertising pay for it - like, you know, advertising is supposed to do.

(What about books, and statues, and magazines, and role playing games? Yeah, whatever. I'm working on a utopia here, not a thesis. Play along.)

The result? Readers get pretty much the same catalogue as before, though substantially less tiresome to wade through, and maybe even with reduced cases of hernias from picking it up. Retailers get a catalogue not full of bunkum about storylines "because you demanded them" or "bold new directions", but instead filled with information that allows them to gauge how well it could sell at their store.

I know, I know, it's a pipe dream. But dammit, it's a nice pipe.

NEVER GOT NO MONEY, SMOKES ALL MY FAGS

Oh, dear. Everyone and their auntie knows about CrossGen's money troubles by now, but are they really so bad CrossGen can't even afford to publish the very last issue of one of its flagship titles? Read that again: the very last issue of one of its flagship titles. They've decided that rather than have SIGIL #43 drawn and printed, they'll just put Chuck Dixon's script up on their... no, not their website, nothing so grand... on their message boards.

I'm no CG-basher - I'm hoping to high heaven that they continue putting the rest of MERIDIAN out in trades, now that I've just gotten into it, for a start - but this move just smacks of short-sightedness (not to mention shallow-pocketedness). I'll wager the bad feeling it generates among people who've diligently bought the first forty-two issues is going to cause CrossGen a lot of damage in the long run, and I'm amazed no-one at CrossGen seems to have realised this...

GERTCHA!

Along the same lines, GUN THEORY has been cancelled. GUN THEORY was the first (and, as it happened, only) creator-participation title to be published by Marvel's Epic imprint, written by Daniel Way and drawn by Jon Proctor - and right out of the gate its sales were abysmal. I didn't read it myself (for shame) but I'm told it was pretty good, a decent noir-ish adult crime story.

Here's the thing, though - GUN THEORY was a four-issue miniseries, and #2 came out last week. #3-#4 have already been solicited, but like the Tsunami trades (also by Marvel) have been cancelled regardless.

Two more issues, which would then have given Marvel a complete story that it could have published as a trade with, one presumes, mainstream appeal.

I despair.

OH DARLING, THERE AIN'T NO PLEASING YOU

No, I haven't suddenly dragged out a BEST OF CHAS 'N' DAVE album - I'm just humouring Andrew Wheeler, who challenged me to come up with lyrics from the Cock-er-nee songsters that actually suited comics discourse. Andrew, I believe you owe me a pint.

What I have been listening to is ABSOLUTION, the recent album from Muse, and enjoying it greatly. I never really gave them much of a chance before, as they seemed to be a kind of poor man's Radiohead - and I'd sooner stuff scorpions in my ears than suffer them, thanks very much - but the excellent recent single TIME IS RUNNING OUT, much stronger and 'rockier' than what I'd heard previously, persuaded me to give this album a try. And it's rather good - very genre-hopping, but that's no bad thing, and it really does rock out in a few places. Nice.

Antony Johnston is the author of JULIUS, SPOOKED and THE LONG HAUL. His new ongoing series WASTELAND begins in July 2006.

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