Despite being positioned by some members of the comic book press less than 48 hours ago as the solution that “saved” the comic book Direct Market, the team behind the proposal involving the ComicHub suite of tools are pulling back their plans for a temporary retail solution to Diamond Comic Distributors’ suspension of service due the coronavirus.
“The ComicHub advance digital reader copy initiative isn’t going to move forward right now,” retailer John Hendrick of Big Bang Comics told Newsarama Thursday afternoon. Hendrick, along with Ryan Higgins of Comics Conspiracy, took lead roles for ComicHub in communicating the proposal to their fellow retailers and the comic book press Wednesday.
“It’s obvious from the concerns voiced by our peers that this isn’t an initiative they can get behind,” Hendrick continued. “This was designed by people who love comics with the best of intentions, to get cash flow back moving in our industry again from the retailer all the way up to distributors and publishers.
“But until such a time as we can all agree on a solution that fellow retailers can support there is no point in Stu [Colson] continuing this at this time.”
Colson is the founder/owner of ComicHub.
“Unfortunately publishers who were interested in joining the platform now aren’t and we can 100% understand their decision despite the positive reception by customers and creators,” Hendricks concluded. “This might not have been a long-term solution but we didn’t need it to be one. We just needed it to tide us over until the industry returns to normal. Whenever that is but hopefully soon.”
In case you’ve heard the name bandied about over the last three days, ComicHub is a pre-existing suite of tools (including POS and front-end ordering) used by comic book retailers, publishers, and creators, and seemingly very well regarded by its retailer customers. It quickly gained more widespread notoriety earlier this week when Colson began pitching a plan for ComicHub to, within weeks, begin serving as a mass-adopted temporary tourniquet for the Direct Market rocked both by Diamond’s shutdown along with city and state social distancing guidelines forcing businesses to close their doors.
While largely emphasizing how retailers and publishers could start using the system rather than why they should use the system, Colson proposed ComicHub be used as a means for brick-and-mortar (or mail-order) comic book retailers and publishers to generate revenue during Diamond’s shut-down. The basic pitch was this: comic book stores and comic book publishers working in tandem via the service, pre-selling eventual print comics to readers with the customer receiving a digital copy instantly along with a receipt for the eventual printed version weeks or months down the road.
The pitch strongly emphasized what would be sold were printed comic books with the digital copy being an add-on, to differentiate it from existing digital services like comiXology. The reader would purchase the printed version at full cover price in indefinite advance, with the instant digital version serving as a free incentive for readers who’d have something to tide them over until publishing resumed.
Sort of crowdfunding on steroids, or in an alternate view readers/customers acting as micro creditors-lenders to retailers and publishers, theoretically the system would allow for retailers to keep paying their bills and generate income while distribution was on pause. That in turn would allow retailers to pay their outstanding Diamond bills, which would allow Diamond to pay outstanding money owed to vendors (publishers). The Diamond receivables along with the revenue from the new comic books pre-sold through the system would allow publishers to continue paying their staff and creators to produce new work uninterrupted.
While a premise with some merits to explore and with proponents of genuine intent, the system as proposed clearly had some hard questions it needed to answer. Like how publishers and retailers would distribute a significant backlog of printed comics when physical distribution resumed, without interrupting the revenue stream generated by the distribution of brand new monthly comics, the very problem the system was being proposed to solve.
In other words, if retailers and/or publishers “owed” customers months worth of comic books when printing and distribution resumed and with the revenue those pre-sales generated already spent, how would all those comic books owed all be delivered to fans while not interrupting the flow of brand new comics?
How long could that system of creating a backlog of comic books owed continue while still remaining feasible and what security would the customers have if distribution remains suspended longer than anticipated?
And what would happen to customers who purchased from retailers that go out of business during Diamond’s shutdown anyway? Who would ultimately be responsible for securing and completing those transactions when a retailer who already took their cut of the purchase price in previous months was now out of the equation?
The system as proposed also seemed dependent on quick, widespread adoption by readers, retailers, and publishers to reach the mass necessary to operate as intended. In the comic book Direct Market, that effectively means it needed DC and/or Marvel Comics and likely both (70-ish % of the Direct Market between them) to sign on. Marvel and/or DC’s adoption would be the difference between ComicHub maybe being a tool that could help some retailers and publishers in a small way without the ‘Big Two,’ to being the potential game-changing solution it was being billed as with them signed on.
While it seems likely the proposal achieved some success in terms of the major publishers who listened to the pitch this week, it also seems highly unlikely Marvel or DC would or could give the system their support in the time it took for this proposal to be embraced in the time it was.
‘Industry-saving’ and matter-of-fact ‘How It Will Work’ headlines and social media posts promising the system going online in weeks occurred on Tuesday and Wednesday despite neither questions about its methodology having immediate answers nor publishers or retailers publicly pledging their support. In fact, prominent retailers have come out publicly against the system, completely opposed to the premise of encouraging their customers to embrace digital, even temporarily, one of the main reasons the proposal has been scrapped.
In a community whose future is in legitimate existential crisis, understandable wishful thinking perhaps prematurely elevated an idea worth exploring into something more than that. And as of Thursday, it was still going on.
Jon Arvedon of CBR reported just hours ago that “news broke that ComicHub was stepping in to help get new comics into the hands of readers” (ComicHub wasn’t and isn’t stepping in, it was a proposal seeking support and no longer is) and that Image Comics is “opting out of the temporary distribution method” (Image can’t opt out of a system that didn’t and now won’t exist).
While retailers, readers, and creators all await more word from the major publishers – particularly Marvel and DC – how they plan to deal with this crisis, perhaps this episode will serve as a cautionary tale about asking the hard questions first.