Tales from Direct Sales

Originally published August 7, 1998, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1290

Reading that Diamond Comics was going to be endeavoring to implement a “street date” program certainly brought back a lot of memories. Several lifetimes ago, I worked in the direct sales department at Marvel Comics, and street dates were just one of the many issues and items that came up during the five years that I worked first as assistant sales manager and then sales manager, alongside (well, actually a few steps behind) the late, lamented Carol Kalish.

“Street dates” were hotly debated and generally felt to be unenforceable at the time for a couple of reasons that no longer apply: First, that various distributors in competition with one another might not adhere to the required dates, and second, that assorted retailers who were racing to get the new titles out first and fastest would undercut each other. However, nowadays there’s only one direct distributor for the major companies, and there’s a lot fewer retailers. Competitive situations can still exist, but Diamond is in a far greater position to control it.

Marvel Comics had specified street dates, even back when I was there. The street dates were noted as being several weeks after the ship dates, to coincide with the expected release dates of the titles on the newsstands serviced by the much slower Independent Distributors (ID’s) who supplied comics to 7-11s, mom and pop stores, etc. No one in the direct market paid attention to it, and frankly, no one at Marvel cared.

Except one time.

Marvel was publishing the adaptation of Return of the Jedi. The street date, as listed, would have coincided with the release of the movie. The retailers, however, put the books out as soon as they had them in their hot little hands, several weeks before the film was to hit the screens. Mark Hamill, a New York resident at the time, happened by his local comic shop and discovered that the adaptation was out and long-awaited answers to top-secret questions were suddenly available for public consumption. Understand, Lucasfilm was super-paranoid about keeping a lid on things. Key pages, such as Obi-Wan’s revealing to Luke who “the other” was (as if, I’m sorry, it wasn’t screamingly obvious by the end of The Empire Strikes Back) even had fake word balloons at early stages of production. So Mark thought that George Lucas might be interested in knowing that–in those pre-X-Files days–the truth was, nonetheless, out there.

Lucas was interested, all right. To be specific, Lucas went ballistic, and the fallout hit the direct sales department in a manner vaguely reminiscent of the climax of Bambi vs. Godzilla, and you can take a guess who Godzilla was.

We made frantic phone calls to all the distributors, trying to stop anyone who had not yet distributed the comic from doing so and telling them to “recall” any that were already out. The subtext of the conversations was quite clear: Not for one microsecond did we expect anyone to do what we were asking, and they knew it. It was a matter of fading ten yards and passing the buck. Lucas was on the warpath and our official take was, “Hey… don’t blame us. We have an established street date.” Not that anyone had paid attention to it before, but that was our story and we were sticking to it.

Not only that, but Carol sent me out on a mission. We couldn’t do anything about every other city in the country, but we could at least try to clean up our own back yard. It was the single most bizarre mission I had ever engaged upon during my tenure to that point… and possibly even after. I went around to every comic book shop that I knew of in Manhattan and told them to pull the comic. I was greeted with varying degrees of incredulity by each of the store owners. Every single one of them complied with pulling it from display, but they weren’t stupid, of course. One of them said to me, “You are aware that there’s nothing to stop me from putting them back out the moment you’re gone.”

Doing my best Jack Webb, I replied, “No. I am not aware of that. And I have no intention of being aware of that. As far as I’m concerned, I asked you to remove it and you removed it. My job here is done.” My guess is that it wasn’t more than thirty seconds before the books went out.

A few days later, USA Today (I think it was) published a spoiler article detailing all the “secret” stuff which they’d obtained from another source entirely (who knows how they managed to miss the comic.) That took the pressure off us. That didn’t stop word from circulating that, in order to placate Lucas, Marvel had fired ten people from direct sales over the incident. That was impressive, particularly considering that direct sales consisted of Carol, me, my assistant Sandy, and circulation head Ed Shukin. Even if they’d fired publishing VP Mike Hobson, that was only five. They would’ve had to start firing people from subscriptions.

Street dates. Sheesh. What a nightmare that was. Well, hopefully they’ll have better luck this time around.

Gee, now I’m waxing nostalgic about tète-à-tètes from my sales days. What other highlights can I dredge up:

Damage returns. Lord, what a struggle. Marvel had a damage return policy, wherein distributors would sent in credit vouchers for damaged books. Most of the distributors sent them in occasionally and claimed two, maybe three out of every hundred, usually due to string-tie damage (caused by the strings that held the bundles together cutting into the covers.). Most of the time they didn’t even claim that many.

But there was one distributor, who shall go nameless, who turned in ungodly numbers of damage returns. Carol suspected that what the distributor was doing was overordering and then claiming the unsold copies as damage returns. So we insisted that the distributor send us the allegedly damaged books so that we could inspect them. He complied and the next thing we knew, boxes and boxes of the dámņëd books were cluttering up the direct sales office. Sure enough, the vast majority of them were eminently saleable. In fact, one time another distributor happened to be up in the office and discovered several boxes of a particular title he needed which we were sold out of. They were ostensibly damage returns, but they were in such pristine condition that he bought them off us immediately.

Bagged books. Marvel Books was a separate division at Marvel that was created to try and get Marvel product into different markets such as K-Mart. They turned out to be an ongoing nightmare for direct sales, because time after time they came up with new product that infuriated the distributors and had them all screaming at us, even though we’d had nothing to do with it and no prior knowledge. There was one time when Marvel was sponsoring a distributor get together, and we figured we’d be nice guys and have the latest issue of Comic Buyer’s Guide waiting for them in their hotel rooms upon arrival. The CBGs arrived at the last minute, and I simply brought the bundle to the hotel and had the hotel distribute them in the rooms. Since I never had the opportunity to read them, I totally missed the front page article about Marvel Books’ latest direct sales-exclusionary plan (if I remember correctly this was the time they were commissioning reprint editions of hot books such as GI Joe and selling them in bagged editions.) The distributors kicked off the meeting the next day ready to lynch us.

The big storm. There was one particularly vicious winter, and during one ferocious storm a distributor called me up, furious. His policy was to airship books, and his shipment was stuck on the ground at the airport. He’d been on the phone with his freight company and they had told him that they had no idea when his comics would be airborne. They were prioritizing trivial things like medical supplies and leaving the comics on the ground. So he called me and demanded to know what I was going to do about it.

This was, of course, insane. I couldn’t wave my hand and stop the storm, the books were already in the distributor’s possession (i.e., they were in the hands of his designated shipper) so they weren’t Marvel’s property anymore, and I wasn’t a customer of the freight company. Nonetheless, I called the freight company. I explained the situation to the woman who answered, alternately begged and pleaded, threw the name “Marvel” and “Spider-Man” around a lot, and even made the argument that comics could be classified as medical supplies because the fans needed their weekly “fix” lest they fall into comic withdrawal. Either because I sounded convincing or the woman felt sorry for me or was just sick of me, she managed to rearrange and bump some other shipments (hey, the transplant patient didn’t really need that spleen) and get the distributor’s comics shipped out.

In a burst of gratitude, the distributor called Carol and complained that I hadn’t gotten his comics to him fast enough. Carol, in a polite but firm way, basically told the distributor to take a flying leap… presuming he could get off the ground.

Do I hold a grudge? Nah. Not for this, or for any of the countless other instances where the distributors made me nuts. Because if it weren’t for them driving me crazy… why, I’d never have quit and become a full-time writer. So… thanks guys. And by the way, I still have a few rack credit forms that I’ll be getting around to filling out real soon now…

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. He saw a trailer for The Rugrats Movie and saw a disclaimer that said, “This film is not yet rated.” Aw, come on. If The Rugrats Movie isn’t by definition suitable for all ages, something is definitely screwed up.)