I’m going to break a personal taboo and tell you about a dream I just had. I normally shy away from anything but the most passing reference to my dreams, because I know something that shockingly few people seem to understand: that other people’s dreams are incredibly boring. Listening to other people’s dreams is like hearing a drunk try to describe a joke. Not tell a joke, but describe one.
Anyway, that said, let me tell you about this dream I just had, skipping all the bits that don’t matter. In the dream, I walked into a hardware store to buy some glue and duct tape and a few other things, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that fully two walls at the front of the store were devoted to comic books. I was thrilled to find a new issue of Phonogram, as well as a Phonogram CD featuring tracks from the bands referenced in the comics (as well as an all-new Los Campesinos track recorded specifically for the compilation). So I got my glue, and I got some comics, and I got a CD as well.
[As an aside, I recognize fully that the point of this essay could well be that I think about Phonogram too much for someone who isn't Kieron Gillen. Or Jamie McKelvie. (There are probably days I think about it more than McKelvie does.) In reality, I just like comics about bands and the music scene way more than I actually like bands and the music scene. Hell, most of the comics I've written (still sitting in the drawer, likely never to be seen again) are about bands, going to see bands, watching bands break up, and all the common experiences in the music scene. So it's only natural that Phonogram fills a particular vacant spot in my brain, namely standing in for an entire genre of comics I've always thought should exist but could never get off my ass to make myself. But that is, most definitely, another story for another day.]
Now, for whatever reason, this dream got me thinking about a discussion that was first becoming popular on the WEF (and other comics discussion sites) ten years ago; namely, what comic book stores should be doing to get new people in the door. Then, like now, the most intriguing answer to this question, at least for me, is that the question is wrong; comics don’t need more people walking in the door, comics need to become ubiquitously available. [I should probably tell you straight away that this whole conversation, while certainly an important, even necessary conceit, bored me, then and now, about as much as hearing about other people's dreams. Even then, when it was "the important" discussion. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that the way to get people into a comic book store is to have the best damn comic book store known to man, and pimp the hell out of it. Over the past ten years, people like James Sime and Andrew Neal have proven that formula. But again, another story for another day.]
So, I was thinking about how hard it is for non-comic stores to get comics on their shelves. And, because in my dream the example was being set by a hardware store, I thought about things I buy in hardware stores, and how I would go about getting them on my shelves (my rhetorical shelves, seeing as I no longer own a comic book store). And I thought about ULINE. Over the years, I have placed several orders with ULINE, both as a store owner and as a private citizen. They sell boxes and tape and shrink wrap and displays and trash cans and, well, primarily hardware and supplies best suited to a shipping company or warehouse. Important stuff. They deal primarily in large, bulk orders to businesses. Yet the process of getting an account with them was as simple as filling out an order form, entering my credit card information, and clicking “submit”. They don’t care who they sell to — money is money. They do have a check box in their order form that will tell them if the order is being shipped to a residential address, but that’s so they know the best way of shipping (and know not to send a large pallet on a tractor trailer when you don’t have a loading bay).
But here’s where ULINE excels, at least in this argument — they have tiered pricing. Order small amounts, it costs just about retail price (usually a bit less, but not by much). Order in larger amounts, and the price goes down. Order in huge bulk amounts, the price goes WAY down, to the point where it would be perfectly practical to use them to order stock to sell at retail.
Comics should be like that.
You know how hard it is to get a DIAMOND account? It involves credit scores and business IDs and phone calls and certified checks (seriously, when I ran my store I would have to go to the bank every week and get a certified check in order to get my order; after, I think, a year DIAMOND allows you to switch to a regular business check). As any comics retailer will tell you, the DIAMOND website is just about the least intuitive site ever created, and ordering from it (or even just finding a product on it) is mind-numbing. And that’s for the people who have decided to focus their entire business on selling a product they can only get through DIAMOND. (This is where the argument of ten years ago would devolve, justifiably, into a discussion of how terrible DIAMOND is. That discussion can be found anywhere else online, so I won’t go into it here.) So while there might be plenty of non-comics stores that have some interest in stocking a selection of comic books, most would run up against DIAMOND and decide against it.
[Here I should mention that for the first two years of JIGSAW, when it was a comic shop and art gallery in NYC, I didn't have a DIAMOND account, and instead got all my comics through COLD CUT and private small press distribution, as well as the occasional "fell off the truck" deal with friendly creators whose books I couldn't get because they were published by Marvel, DC, or Image, who are all exclusive to DIAMOND. It was, in fact, impossible to keep a broad selection this way, and one of the motivating factors for moving the store was so I could afford to get a DIAMOND account, and have enough space to put it all.]
As this is stretching on a bit longer than I’d intended, I’ll skip the bit where I contemplated the perfect match that is comics and hardware, what with single issue comics being cheap, disposable, and the perfect length to read on a break on a construction site (how great would that be to see a line of guys in hard hats reading comics on their lunch break?). I fully recognize that the comics industry is so far in the hole in terms of “how things are done” that changing the system is next to impossible. And I know that the business is built around pre-ordering and exclusivity and all sorts of things that, while idiotic, are just status quo. And I know that DIAMOND can barely get their distribution correct as it is, so adding customers would cause more problems than it would solve. And, and, and.
But picture a different world. Where there was a website where a customer could go and buy the new issue of PHONOGRAM for full price with nothing more than their credit card. A world where that very same website could sell 50 copies of the new issue to James Sime at his normal retailer discount. A world where the owner of that hardware store could decide to try having a selection of comics for his customers to read, and could get a good discount without having to jump through hoops. A world where the ubiquity of comics wasn’t such a weird idea.
All I’m saying is that it was kind of a nice dream.