Hey, Folks!
Well, I got to work and was all set to make this another short EDitorial as I have a lot on my plate today, even more than an average Thursday, but then I made the mistake of checking Facebook one more time before beginning this little missive. Eschewing their normal habit of dropping huge, comic-size bombs on Fridays, D.C. Comics decided to let the cat out of the bag 24 hours earlier in regards to their upcoming publishing plans after the January 5th ending to Dark Nights Death Metal. But let’s put a pin in that and talk about a couple of other things first.
This week I want to thank everyone who regularly uses the weekly subscription form. Honestly, you’ve made my life so much easier. As I’ve mentioned in this forum before, it has been a real challenge keeping up with my inventory numbers since the Spring shutdown ended. Not only has there been some serious bumps along the way with the major and minor publishers in regards to new comics getting released, but UPS shipping has been something of a nightmare as they struggle to deal with the overwhelming amount of packages moving through their system. Add to that D.C. Comics defection from Diamond and all of the challenges that has created and stir in soupcon of booming business and you can probably imagine why things have been a bit topsy turvy. The subscription form, however, has been a tremendous help at gathering sales data and figuring out just that I need on the rack and what I need to special order. I feel like I’m just about there in terms of covering all of your regular comic book needs although clearly some work still needs to be done on my part. I still don’t like looking at a bunch of sold out comics on Wednesday morning, but thanks to your efforts I can honestly say that 9 times out of 10 when I sell out of something it is because that’s all the copies I needed and that information has been culled from your sub form responses. So thank you for helping me help you.
Why am I going on about the subscription form this week? It’s because I had a minor league screw up this week and I’m swallowing my pride to ‘fess up about it. Cable #5 shipped in this week and it was part 8 of the current X of Swords storyline running through all of the X-Titles. I love this story and I think it is one of the best X-stories that I have read in a good long time. I’ve been pushing it pretty much non-stop and let me tell you it is a great embarrassment to me that I screwed up and didn’t order enough copies of Cable #5. I noticed it as soon as I got a good look at the invoice last week, but I wasn’t too worried about it because Marvel has done a great job of having extra copies of the individual chapters available…at least for the first few days after release. I figured I’d just order up 20 or so extra copies and that would be that. Unfortunately, while I was able to bump up numbers on the other two chapters this week there were no more copies of Cable available to properly restock and now I’m short some comics. I know how frustrating it is to miss a chapter on such a close knit story and I would hate to have anyone miss the rest of the storyline because I stupidly had a brain fart and didn’t order enough copies for coverage. Marvel has not announced a 2nd printing for this title, but I fully expect one will be announced later this afternoon with the regular Marvel Mailer e-mail and these rushed second printings usually take at least 3 weeks to materialize. In any case, I won’t to assure everyone who may have missed a copy of Cable this week that I will have more eventually and the only question is will it be first printings (which I have on back order and may still fill) or second printings. I just wanted to straight up explain things to you and hope you’ll have the patience to wait until I’ve cleaned up this inventory snafu. I will also go so far as to assure you that this will NOT happen again and will endeavor to keep my eye on the ball a little closer.
SO D.C. Comics has a new promotion and story line coming up in January after the end of Dark Nights Death Metal! How would have thunk it? Rising like a Phoenix out of the ashes of the previously teased Generation Zero/One comes D.C.’s Future State! Bookended by a couple of one shots (Generations: Shattered #1 and Generations Forged #1), Future State will take over the D.C. Comics line during the months of January and February with a couple of miniseries running into March. This line wide story arc will feature tales of our favorite D.C. characters in the near and far-future timelines created by the end of Death Metal. And IT WILL NOT BE A REBOOT! Forgive my shouting, but I wanted to make sure the back seats heard me…lol. These one shots and miniseries will be roughly broken up between the Batman family, Superman family (including Wonder Woman), and the Justice League family. These series will be produced by a star-studded line up of creators, including: Mariko Tamaki, Brian Michael Bendis, Gene Luen Yang, Joëlle Jones, Joshua Williamson, Nicola Scott, Cully Hamner, and John Timms along with creators from the worlds of TV, movies, and animation and other DC publishing lines including John Ridley, Brandon Vietti, Meghan Fitzmartin, Brandon Easton, Alitha Martinez, L.L. McKinney, Paula Sevenbergen, and Siya Oum, among others. I have to admit that I am rather excited for the whole event even though normally a collection of one shots and miniseries like this tends to not have very far ramifications as a rule of thumb. I don’t care because I have a feeling that the quality of the individual stories is going to be very high indeed and I am excited to see what kind of multiverse we will be looking at for the next 5-10 years. I love D.C.’s multiverse and I have been hoping since the end of the first Metal miniseries that there would be a return to the infinite multiverse at the end of Snyder’s story. There are way more details concerning specific titles for the event online and I’ve posted the big D.C. press release on the Facebook page for your perusal. As a side note, this will be the first big comic event that I will be handling as the new owner of Monarch Comics and I must admit to being pretty excited about that as well…😊
That’s it for me this week, my friends. I just finished unpacking a huge amount of boxes including various reorders and next week’s D.C. books and I have a bit of work to get them sorted. I hope everyone has a great weekend!
Eddie