Slipping Sales

Carl Lund clund at cox.net
Fri Jul 16 17:15:52 CEST 2010


On 7/16/2010 5:13 AM, dcml-request at nafsk.se wrote:
>
> Tony Leopold reported that 1,000 readers were lost for /Uncle Scrooge 
> /in less than half a year.
> Are the stories not very good?  Re-re-re-re-reprints?  I cannot find 
> copies around my city to peruse.  If /Darkwing Duck /is selling, one 
> would assume its stories are stronger.
> Perhaps an heir to the Carl Barks/Don Rosa dynasty needs to be found!
> L. Schulte

I've purchased every copy of /Uncle Scrooge/ that Boom Kids has 
published (I believe).  For me personally--and at 37, I recognize I'm 
not the target demographic--the story telling in the title has been 
extremely disappointing.  I read each issue, but I never go back to it, 
it never hits me emotionally, and it never makes me laugh.  I don't 
especially care for the art style (I know that others do), but I /think/ 
I could by that if the words meant something to me.  They don't.  
Honestly, as someone who's spent much of the past 15 years working with 
children and adolescents, I somewhat doubt the target audience is 
finding much to love about these books as well.  (In fairness, there 
have been a few stories in /Comics and Stories/ that pleasantly 
surprised me.)  Anecdotally, it seems to be getting harder to find the 
titles as well.  Their distribution was better than Gemstone's at first, 
but not I am seeing several (non-comic book) stores that carry Boom's 
non-kids line and that used to carry the Boom Kids Disney stuff, no 
longer carry the Kids line.  (But maybe they're selling out super 
quickly, just something I've noticed here in the American midwest.)  So 
there remains that whole chicken and egg problem of distribution and sales.

The kicker for me was in the first issue of Boom Kids' /Uncle Scrooge/ 
wherein Duckburg was spelled Duckberg.  (I was told it was because that 
was how it was spelled in the European script of the comic.)  It's one 
thing to want to move past reprints of Barks and other past greats, its 
another to (seemingly) not have basic respect for your source material.

What strikes me as interesting is that when my copies of /Picsou/, the 
blessedly humongous French edition of /Uncle Scrooge/ for any who don't 
know, arrive (mangled thanks to international mail), I see a plethora of 
reprints in a title that is clearly geared to kids.  Of course, I don't 
have its circulation figures, so maybe it sells poorly also.

Carl


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