Marvel to give away free comics to retailers...but what's the catch?

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Submitted by Mike 'Ace' Maillaro on Wed, 01/11/2017 - 03:00

I saw this reported earlier in the week, and wanted to provide some perspective and commentary on it.

Marvel Comics has announced plans to overship all of its January 2017 titles by 10% for free to retailers. This will mean for every ten copies of a January Marvel book bought by retailers, they'll receive an additional copy; and furthermore, Marvel will be rounding up the percentages, meaning if less than ten copies of a book is ordered, a free copy will still be send along with the paid titles.

That gives retailers extra copies of books to for a profit of full cover price per issue (minus the shipping charges from the distributor). So will Marvel's sales be 10% higher in Diamond Comics Distributors' sales figures for January 2017?

Yes and no, according to Diamond. "When publishers ship extra books to retailers at no charge - which is done by more than Marvel - we’ll add it to the unit share of the charts, but not the dollar share," said Diamond's Michael Moccio.

Source: Newsarama

Commentary: On the surface, this sounds great for retailers. BUT, I want to point out a few things here.

- “Minus the shipping charges from the distributor” – This means the retailer is paying the shipping for books they did not want and did not order.

- For the most part, comic shops order what they reasonably expect to sell. I worked in a comic shop for most of my teenage years. Getting extra issues of a hot book is great, but throwing in extra issues of most series just means the comic shop need to find space to store it, or figure out something to do with that extra issues that won’t be selling anytime soon. I have heard of some comics shop proposed "

I also think it’s a bit shady that this will inflate Marvel’s “unit shares” for the month. Is Marvel that desperate for some good press that they are artificially inflating their numbers? Maybe they should focus more on producing books that people actually want to read. That seems to have worked for DC throughout DC REBIRTH.

Instead we get uninspired events like Civil War II or head-scratchers like Foolkiller. I like obscure characters more than most, but Foolkiller does not need his own book. It’s quarter bin fodder waiting to happen. And guess what, comic shops? Now you get an extra copy to throw in the quarter bin too…which you paid the shipping on!

The sad part is there are plenty of Marvel books I really enjoy. Just off the top of my head:

All-New Wolverine
Amazing Spider-Man
Black Widow
Both Captain America books
Carnage
Daredevil
Doctor Strange
Gwenpool
Hellcat
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur
Moon Knight
Ms Marvel
Old Man Logan
Power Man and Iron Fist
Punisher
Scarlet Witch
Silk
Silver Surfer
Any Star Wars book
Spider-Man 2099
Spider-Woman
Squadron Supreme
Mighty Thor/Unworthy Thor
Thunderbolts

And both US Avengers and Wasp had great first issues last week. Give me more well written fun-to-read comic books, and less gimmicky events, variant covers (looking at you, US Avengers), and free comics that no one is asking for.