Stupid Publisher Tricks Article by aviewaskewed, 02:06 AM 11th Oct Disclaimer: The following column is entirely the opinions of the author (even at that we aren‘t sure), any similarity to the opinions of any other staff or affiliate of theendlesscrew.com is entirely coincidental and unintentional. Unless specifically noted otherwise, all creator comments have been gleaned from other sources and no creators have actually endorsed any aspect of this column. You know those days where you swear you’re going to get things done early, but you don’t? Yep, I’m having one of those, fun times. With Infinite Crisis hitting this week, all the attention of the comics industry is focused towards that, mine as well. DC has promoted the crap out of it, and we’re all waiting to see if they blow it or not. So I thought we’d relax a bit this week, and I won’t hit you with any heavy topics, and we’ll have a fun little list type column of things I call “stupid publisher tricks”. What’s a stupid publisher trick you ask? Why, it’s anything that a publisher does that has no real value to comics other then to just try and get more copies sold. Just because I find them stupid though doesn’t mean they don’t work, though I wish they didn’t most of the time. Let’s go to the list: 1. Selling out: This is something I’ve talked about before that I dislike. The sellout is one of the greatest stupid publisher tricks because it looks very smart on the surface. You sell out of a book, meaning that it was a hot issue, and people should go buy the second printing. The thing that irks me about this is that we are never given numbers. DC or Marvel or whoever just hand out a press release, and expect all the news sites to pick it up, with absolutely no journalistic digging into exactly how many copies were sold, and how the sellout was achieved. I’m no bastion of journalism, I admit that, we get a lot of our stories here from other sources, simply because we have no contacts within the industry at the moment. This column is never very journalistic, but it’s ridiculous to me that the bigger sites who DO and SHOULD have sources within the industry, are content to basically play “pat-a-cake” with publishers on stuff like this, presumably to get the benefit of being in their good graces enough to get “exclusive previews of pages” or whatever. Not like it’s hard to de-bunk this stuff anyway, a conversation with my retailer a few weeks back yielded the results of DC’s “Sacrifice” sell-out: DC slashed the print run low, I mean LOW, my retailer could not fill all of his orders for the storyline, and DC had apparently slashed it so much that if a copy came in damaged, there was no way to return it for better because damage replacement copies did not exist. They wanted the sell-out so badly they were negligent in customer service. But you won’t find that story anywhere else. You’ll just find the press releases that tout the “sell out!” and how good that is for comics. That’s one stupid publisher trick I refuse to fall for. 2. Variant Covers: Yeah, yeah, huge debate on it being a collectible, and there’s some evidence that in small doses it helps. But there in lies the problem, it starts in small doses, and before you know it they’re slapping it on any “event” issue they want to sell a bunch of copies on. This nearly crippled the industry in the 90’s, and now we’re coming back around to trying this stunt again, and I worry. So far restraint has been shown, so perhaps this is one stupid publisher trick they may have actually learned from. Only time will tell, but if you start seeing the latest issue of “Generic Super Hero team” with a regular, foil, gold, and chromium variant covers? Run for the hills, and get ready to tell your kids about this great thing that used to be around called comic books. 3. “Red Sky” issues: Time for a history lesson on this one (yes, I do average one of these per column these days, what of it?), back when DC was publishing Crisis On Infinite Earths, the main story happened in that maxi-series, but obviously because it effected the whole of the DC Universe, it spilled into other books. Sometimes this lead to drastic life altering changes for certain characters, other times it was nothing more important then characters looking up and saying “oh, the sky has turned red”. So a “red sky issue” has become industry code for an issue of a major crossover issue in which nothing of any value really happens, essentially? It just uses the “insert crossover name tie-in!” blurb to sell a book that wouldn’t sell otherwise. It’s bad business, in the short-term it’s good business because you’re selling more copies of a book you wouldn’t sell otherwise, but in the long-term you’ve shaken reader faith, they become wary of crossovers, and we’ve actually seen a few such events absolutely tank because of this kind of “red sky” treatment. 4. Fifth week events: DC used to pull this stunt pretty frequently a couple years ago, and Marvel used to pull it every summer, where they would take a unifying character, a villain really, and create some dastardly scheme to destroy the earth, or twist it (Examples: Last Laugh, and Onslaught immediately spring to mind) and maybe there’s a couple special issues, or a mini to help bookend things, but the whole point is that it spreads into EVERY book in the line, leading to extremely fragmented story telling, and fans left to buy EVERYTHING to really try and get the full story. It’s a well that’s no longer tapped because in the case of The Last Laugh, the well was poisoned, hey, I honestly tried to follow it, but that’s just too many books to pick up, it’s too much of a strain on your wallet, and you wind up having to sacrifice things you normally read to follow the event, or stop following it in disgust. Thank God this stupider publisher trick has been abandoned for the most part, may it rot in hell. 4. Major events in a mini-series given away in another book: Oh yes, you Countdown followers know EXACTLY where I’m going with this one. The OMAC Project was one of the many hyped, perhaps most hyped in fact, series of the “Countdown to Infinite Crisis” minis, when OMAC #3 ended, we saw Max Lord (the major villain) with seeming complete control over Superman. When OMAC #4 opened, Max Lord was dead, his neck snapped, Wonder Woman and Superman standing over his body. The decision was made to have this major event happen over three issues of two Superman books, and Wonder Woman. Again, I call this a stupid publisher trick in the same vein as the fifth week event. It’s disorganization of story, and it makes readers who feel confident, and in truth may not have access to any other means to make them believe any differently, that the money they plunk down on this mini guarantees that they will see all major events of the story between the covers of this series. This one is probably not going away, as it was recent, and most of the, at least public, comment from those responsible for it within DC seems to be “too bad for you, we stand by our decision”. My response? Keep it up guys, and see how long the fan base is going to put up with it. There’s a reason we’re calling the current crop of big crossovers a “return” and not a “continuation” of the trend. Not much news this week, and since we’re already seeing this go up late (my apologies) and the Yankees have sadly ended another season in defeat, I really don’t feel like trying to pick through and see if there was much worth my commenting upon. Next week I’ll be taking some time to look through the first issue of Infinite Crisis. I know it’s going to probably be overkill as basically everyone else will be doing the same, but I think it’s a big enough event that I can break my usual “no topics that will date a column and make it worthless once the event passes”. See you then. If you think there’s a “stupid publisher trick” I missed, you can email me, or post it up on our forums, and I’ll try and work it into a special section of the column next week. Back to Rants