Location, location, location (and quality)

Robert Hutchings robertmhutchings at yahoo.com
Tue Feb 17 16:31:07 CET 2009


Dear All,

Some thoughts:

With respect to where Gemstone comic books are sold—comic shops, Barnes and Noble, etc., I have to believe that the folks at Gemstone know that the lack of visibility is a critical issue. I suspect that bookstores operate like supermarkets: In the supermarket industry, a store makes most of its money by selling a particular space on the shelf to a particular company, rather than in a markup from wholesale to retail. So, Kellogg’s pays to have its cereal on a particular shelf because research has shown that the shelf is the closest to eye level and that products close to eye level sell better, and so on. End caps—the ends of the supermarket aisles—are particularly expensive because practically everyone walking in the general area of that aisle sees the product. I would not be surprised in the slightest if chain bookstores charge publishers of books, magazines, music, etc. to have their products on display. How else could they possibly offer 35%
 discounts on books? Depending on some variables, they buy them at about 60% of their retail cost, which leaves about 5% profit, minus employees, shipping, utilities, etc.

Having been a lifelong buyer of Disney comic books, I finally quit buying them a year ago. Two reasons: first, Gemstone was reprinting too many of the stories I already had. Second, I didn’t like most of the stories produced by the newer writers (at least those Gemstone printed, anyway). Whether they’re American or European or Venusian didn’t matter; they simply—in my mind—weren’t good enough to buy. There weren’t many longer stories, the personalities of the characters tended to be too different from the personalities I grew up with (Barks, Rosa, and Van Horn), the stories seemed too formulaic—it was like the story was planned out in advance instead of kind of taking on a life of its own as the writer wrote (which was the case with many of Barks’s stories; I don’t know about Rosa or van Horn), and the stories just didn’t suck me in. In truth, what I wanted was something on the level of Barks, Rosa, and Van Horn. Sometimes some
 writers got to that level: some of Rota’s stuff is very impressive, as is Scarpa’s and a few others. But those stories didn’t appear often enough. It’s possible that this is all an issue of translating and dialoguing, but boy, I guess I don’t think that’s really it. I’ve always found David Gerstein to be pretty top-notch, and the supporting cast of dialoguers isn’t bad. Somewhat interestingly, though, I think the art put out now is generally really good—just not good enough to overcome the shortcomings of the story.

Robert Hutchings



      



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