I won't runaway

Comics Further to my previous post about a comics version of Amazon, I passed through Forbidden Planet today and set up a standing order for both Buffy & Astonishing X-Men and I'll be able to pick them up 'whenever' or 'y'know after a month we phone you and ask you if you still want them' which is very sensible of them. Oddly enough they had loads of copies of Runaways in stock although that seems like a convoluted storyline too far. Perhaps I will wait for the trades on that one.

In a slightly related post, Chris Butcher bemoans the lack of related back catalogue on the shelves at least in the US. One of the comments below is particularly apposite:
"The sad fact is, of course, that most Whedonites just plain don’t understand when you say “It’s not in print,” or “It’ll be a few weeks before we can get them in” because they’re used to being able to walk into a Best Buy and buy the DVDs of the series whenever they want. Why wouldn’t it be the same with the books?"
Why not indeed. The clerk in FP said that they received and put out seventy-five copies of Buffy #3 and they sold out within an hour. This is a high circulation title and it's becoming apparent that the publisher Dark Horse don't have the ability to cope -- variants and reprints are all fine but would it simply not be more prudent to print enough copies to go around in the first place, knowing that the market is there for them? My only guess is that in relation to the UK its an import issue but I've heard about availability issues in the US as well.

1 comment:

  1. What Dark Horse should have done (in my jaded opinion) is bypassed the traditional comic pamphlet approach and released them as 100+ page books at the same dimensions as the DVD box sets. Since the main audience for this is people who buy the DVDs not people who generally by monthly comics, that would have been a stroke of genius. But no, they stick with the status quo and wonder why all their customers are confused.

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