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I see on forums (forii?) across the webernet with people questioning how and why certain stores “only” get certain things, why things are missing, why one store gets books a week or two after another store, etc. I thought I would take this week to answer some of those questions instead of going on about how much I hate the “Christmas” season and, in kind, humanity in general during said season.

Let’s get into it, shall we?

“There were 2 covers for “Amazing Ultra-Men” but my comic shop only got the ‘B’ cover.”
“My comic shop didn’t get “All-New Fierce Guy” this week but Ted’s Comics did.”

Both of these questions have a simple answer - human error. Now, where the human error occurred, that can vary. First, there’s the store owner/manager/trained monkey who has to record the order, either in the old-fashioned pen and paper method that gets mailed or faxed to the distributor or entered into a data form that gets emailed to the distributor. They may miss a line or miss-type something that results in that book not getting ordered.

The second error could occur when the product becomes available and the peoples in the distribution warehouse are “pulling” product for stores. This is a pretty simple process, in essence, where good folk read a pull sheet and grab that quantity of a certain type of comic and put it into a box for Joe Retailer. What can get complicated is when you think about the fact there are 3500 plus stores in North America who are all getting their comics “pulled” at the same. Every week. All year long. And pull sheets aren’t sorted by title; they are generally sorted by code numbers, making the potential for boo-boo’s even greater.

It’s got to be a bit of a tedious process and I can easily see how Billy could have thought that he pulled 40 copies of “The Mighty Omegas” for Alex’s store in Wyoming but accidents happen and with several million comics a month being distributed across NA, fatigue and human error is bound to occur.

Oh, and then there’s the shipping companies. I have gotten boxes for stores in other provinces and other stores have gotten boxes for me. It happens.

“The latest trade of “Unbelievable Mutant Mommas” was supposed to be out last week but it didn’t ship. When’s it gonna be out?”

When it’s late, it’s late. We, the lowly retailers, don’t get always get updates when late product is going to finally arrive. Sometimes we do but with the sheer number of books shipping in a week/month/year that are running late, we just can’t remember them all and, no, there’s no quick reference master list with that type of info.

This kinda goes hand-in-hand with, “How much will it be when it arrives?” or “When you were selling this product 4 years ago, how much did you sell it for?” A good business person knows a lot about their product. An excellent business person knows an awful lot. But in the end, there’s only so much we can know and sometimes even less we can instantly access to give you some instant gratification. Sometimes, we need a moment or it may require some research and if it does, please be patient. If a busy business owner is willing to take the time to find it out for you, cut them some slack while s/he interrupts what they were doing to tell how much your $3 comic costs exactly (yes, it does happen).

“My store carries “The Excellent East Coast Bashers” but not “Ted Humphries - Squirrelly Avenger”. Why don’t they carry both?”

In short, there’s a lot of f***ing comics out there kid and we only have so much money to buy stock. The key to that sentence is that we BUY our product. Whatever you see on the shelf, we had to purchase and cannot return or exchange. Once it’s in our store, it’s ours forever.

Back in the day, newsstands (drugstores and the whatnot) all got their comics from regional distributors and could tear off the covers of unsold comics and return them for credit. While eliminating the risk of over ordering, the profit margins were small and with the extra paperwork to get credit for unsold product, the effort outweighed the return and many stores got out of selling comics.

From there stemmed the “Direct Market”, where retailers would buy the product outright for bigger margins. This led to stores being able to support themselves by just selling comics, assuming they were savvy enough to know what to buy and how much. These days most retailers cry out for huge margins and full returnability not realizing the absurdity of the request.

“Can you order…?”

This question can end a million different ways but the answer is generally always the same. If it had a street date of more than a couple of months ago, it’s no longer available. Most companies make their product, comic or toy, based on initial orders from distributors. Sometimes they make a little extra but there are very few distributors who “stock” merchandise. Once the product is released, that’s usually all there is. The exceptions to these tend to be trades and Manga, mainly due to their lack of collectibility, which are often reprinted and kept available.

There’s more (there always is) but you probably have better things to do. I don’t, so ask me what more you would like to know about this wacky, madcap industry called comics. Until then I shall remain your

Shepherd

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Welcome to Canada, home of the over converted SRP and constantly fluctuating dollar. As we’ve all heard by now, the Canadian dollar is hovering at par with the US and publishers of comics, magazines, books and more choose not to either A) adjust their cover prices or B) just remove them all together. I guess it’s better to look silly than professional.

Many blogs and columns have addressed the issue with a lot of people who aren’t in the know trying to speculate why publishing houses are doing (or, more acurately, not doing) when it comes to cover prices. I won’t go there cause the only people that can answer that are the head honchos at Marvel, DC, Random House and more and currently, they refuse to do so. What I will touch on is what the people on the front line ARE doing about it.

In Edmonton about 3 weeks ago, a BIG news item came out talking about how Audrey’s Books was now charging the US cover price instead of the Canadian. A nice gesture, sure but not without it’s flaws.

First, they didn’t institute this policy until the dollar actually touched par. Why didn’t they feel the need to not overcharge customers when 3 weeks earlier the dollar was sitting at 1.04? Was the 4 cents too much to lose? Hard to image when you’re charging cover prices based on a 1.35 exchange rate. So, even though it was too late in the game they manged to get some media attention and look like darlings. (And I’m not meaning to pick just on them, many businesses did this - car and applicance dealers, etc. - but Audrey’s got a lot of media attention over it.)

The second issue is how they and several other businesses have decided to just start charging people the US cover price, basically giving people this huge discount against what they were paying the week previous (even though the week previous the dollar was only about 2 cents more costly). Again, a nice gesture but what happens in a month or 6 time when the dollar drops again? Will these stores just flip back to the overinflated Canadian price? Probably except the issue then becomes that the covers prices won’t be adjusted properly and stores will be taking a loss.

Charging the US price is a short term solution that only plays customers like a yo-yo which is why HH, who started discounting Cnd cover prices more than a year earlier, has adopted the policy of pricing all of their product based on the exchange rate they are billed at by their US distributors. Pepole pay what we pay. That seems fair.

And for full disclosure, this was not a concept we came up with. Kelly Dowd, owner of Red Skull Comics in Calgary, began this policy back in 1998, when the dollar was in the gutter and it was a gamble since he was then charging more for many books. Most publishers wouldn’t price comics with the actual Canadian exchange rate becasue it was so high. So if the dollar was sitting at 1.65, they would use 1.5 in hopes to keep more customers. Sadly, this cost retailers money but Kelly discovered that if you have a good store and your prices are fair and honest, it won’t matter what the price tag is, people will still come and buy from you.

So thank you Kelly for helping us help the Geeks of the world. Well, at least the Geeks in the Edmonton area.

* First Rant in a while and I’m a bit dreary so my apologies if this lacks it’s usual venom.

Welcome to the first installment of Experience Points, Canadian Geek’s new RPG centric column.  Without further ado, on to the article.

I started role-playing when I was in my pre-teens.  My ‘gateway drug’ was Star Wars d6 from West End Games – of the reasons I ended up playing this game, the biggest was because it was Star Wars.  My gaming groups weren’t larger than 3 or 4 and after my first few adventures, I ended up being the GM for everything.  Eventually, one of my friends came across a number of Dungeons and Dragons materials at a garage sale.  He picked them up and promptly handed me everything so that I could learn the system and run a game.  We ran one D&D session.  I really wasn’t interested in running a game in that system, which made it difficult for me to really provide a great game for my players. 

I was able to put together a few Star Wars games, but nothing that really lasted long-term.  Eventually, I began looking online for an online group to game with.  I eventually found an established Star Wars play-by-post community which I played with for a few years.  Again, because I was reliable, knew the rules, I was asked to GM.  I put together a few games, but unfortunately, with play-by-post, games with new players tend to die as the players go ‘poof’.  As time went on, I moved up the site’s administration ranks and took the reigns.  I made a number of changes that I felt would improve the community, which I feel it did.  What I did realize however, was that I was completely bored of Star Wars.  To this end, I founded a new community, to meet my need of ‘not-Star Wars’.  This community infused me with a new outlook on role-playing.

 With this newfound interest, I searched out more communities to find out what I could do to improve mine and improve my skills on both sides of the table.  I found a number of very interesting podcasts which gave me a number of thoughts.  Why do people shy away from role-playing?  Is it because they haven’t had an experience or a poor experience? What is the difference between a standard board game and a pen-and-paper RPG?

 As I thought about it, my opinion became such that I don’t believe that board games are any different than role-playing.  I asked my friends about it, and I did receive a number of responses that showed me that many of them had tried an RPG, but found the experience lacking in some way, compared to a board game.  The most common reason for not playing RPGs was the time.  Based on the knowledge of RPGs of the people involved, I completely understand the concern, but I think there are many other options available that do not require long-winded campaigns.  Another comment was the differing reward structures between RPGs and board games.  A direct quote: “RPGs reward effort, whereas board games reward strategic thinking”.  Again, I think this attitude comes from playing online in a D&D/Experience Points based system – there are plenty of other systems that emphasize the story rather than character advancement.  Does this enhance the strategy aspect of the game?  Maybe not, but other systems exist that provide more out to the players than just than dungeon-crawling.

There are so many different game systems available, in more settings than you can imagine.  So many great games like Mutants and Masterminds, Spirit of the Century, Star Wars: Saga, Dungeons and Dragons, and Vampire: The Requiem, to name a few.  If you’ve never played an RPG, I’d love to talk to you about it.  If you have and didn’t like it, I’d love to know why.  You’re reading this blog, so you’re not afraid of being called a geek.  So my question to you is, why not role-play?

The most obvious purpose of a movie trailer is to entice you to want to watch the movie. I doubt there’s a single trailer out there that didn’t entice at least one person you knew to go watch it, regardless of how horrible the movie may have looked to you. This is their purpose, and they are successful; but, of course, what often happens is the trailer contains the best parts of the movie, and you wonder why you saw the movie at all. Or the trailer actually manages to complete mislead you as to what the movie was actually about.

What? It could happen.

But what happens if a movie trailer is so fantastically, utterly impressive unto itself; what if it sets new levels of the mystery and suspense involved in watching a trailer; if it cannot live up to the standard that it is creating, because once the mystery is solved … you wish you were still left in the dark. The greatest example of “success” in this category, of course, is Blair Witch. They released a trailer (along with a large amount of viral marketing) that took hold of the world of entertainment for longer then most, grabbed a bunch of people, and threw them into theaters where they proceed to throw up. Well, some people did. It’s true!

But Blair Witch succeeded not because of the marketing, or the trailer, but because the movie DID NOT REVEAL what was chasing them. It stayed permanently in the unknown, and that was absolutely for the best. Blair Witch was a success. It SUCKED ASS, but it was a success. (Blair Witch 2, on the other hand, rocked my socks. Go figure. I am so in the minority on this.)

The trailer for Cloverfield is impressive. The teaser was also impressive. It has people talking, wondering, speculating: What IS it?

Setting aside the obvious answer that everyone is so inclined to put forth (me not excluded), is there ANY answer that would impress anyone? Just like, when the “monster” on LOST (also produced and created by JJ Abrams) is revealed, is there even the remotest chance that it will satisfy what anybody had in their mind?

Or will they go the Blair Godzilla route, and simply not reveal Godzilla at all.

Er, I mean… whatever the creature is.

Regardless. I enjoyed the trailer, you will too. Speculate away!

VIEW THE HIGH DEFINITION VERSION HERE

Late by a day, but this is SO worth it. SO worth it. I am joygazm’ing. And by all rights, if you aren’t by the time this trailer is done, there is something really, fundamentally, wrong with you. (That or you’re one of those strange people that thought Wanted was a self-indulgent over-violent pile of dung — in which case there’s still something fundamentally wrong with you. :P)

There doesn’t appear to be a YouTube version of it available yet, so zip on over to Yahoo! and watch this. In my eyes, it is very well done. Wesley looks just about as pathetic as I would expect him to, and Angelina.. well, who can complain about her? And I had no idea Morgan Freeman was going to be in the movie. Joy joy!

My faith in this film is at fantastically renewed. Keep watching to see if they screw it up.

VIEW THE TRAILER HERE

Not a lot to say this week, so I’m just going to get right to it.

GONE BABY GONE

A lot of people do not like Ben Affleck as an actor. Whether it be Reindeer Games or Pearl Harbor, they simply don’t think he can act. I don’t necessarily disagree, but, I still have this weird fondness for the guy. Perhaps it’s just because he’s best friends with Kevin Smith. somehow making him purely by relation a ‘common’, likeable guy. Thankfully, for some, Ben Affleck is not acting in this film — better or worse, he’s actually directing it.

And for his directorial debut, he’s picked.. what appears to be a rather emotional, powerful, story. And WOW, does it ever pack a lot of star power. Morgan Freeman alone can carry ANY picture, but then they just go crazy, and add Ed Harris! ED HARRIS! Come on people. This should be amazing — and seeing as it’s in theaters now — we’ll find out soon enough!

VIEW THE HIGH DEFINITION VERSION HERE

P2

There’s been a lot of talk in the area of comics recently regarding violence against women, and misogyny in general. Violence against Black Canary, Tigra. Walking a line between general ’super villain’ violence, and some deeper hidden hatred of women. Didn’t it all start with Sue Dibny? I think so. Anyways. What I’m wondering is, if there’s going to be any sort of backlash in movies in regards to this. Maybe there already has and I’m just missing it, but I don’t remember hearing anything about it.

None of this is to say that this movie, this trailer, is misogynistic. I just started thinking about it. I wondered if the roles were reversed, would the movie have any merit? Would it be compelling? Would it work?

Don’t know. As is, the movie seems rather scary. In a … this could happen, my god is Wes Bentley ever creepy kind of way.

VIEW THE HIGH DEFINITION VERSION HERE