This germ has bigger muscles than Superman..
The hammer had fallen on Monday. On the week before, the people of the United States were warned to be cautious, stay away from large gatherings, wash their hands, wear gloves, to not cough & sneeze on people, consider rinsing yourself off rather than waste/hoarding toilet paper...but the numbers were climbing, people were taking the Corona virus either too lightly or had no real choice and had to continue going about their day...I saw the comic shop that I go to was selling everything at 20% discount, so I rolled the dice and went in on Friday, saw only 3 people there (luckily, 7 people did not enter the premises, so the 4 of us were safely equidistant), made my purchases and skedaddled promptly.
The quick fox returns to the den from the trip deep down the rabbit hole, covered in dirt on the long way back, yet with tail intact, feeling none the worse for wear and enlightened...
Non-essential is the key word here. Beginning Sunday, all the comic shops that weren't closed are ordered to close. This is something comic book people feared...the death of the Direct Market from having no business, lots of unsold products, no sense of when exactly will they be back in business, no idea if recovery is possible. I see a lot of the shops are turning to online sales for now, but I've also heard & read the word "Non-essential" used to describe books as a low priority for the post offices and other delivery services. Some crowd-funding entrepreneurs think they're being clever by disguising their book bundle in boxes that look like they contain food, but that doesn't sound foolproof.
So..with all the talk of the Direct Market going down comes talk that the publishers will go down with them. A lot of the books published within the last two decades were clearly marketed to a specific type of consumer - the guys who spend maybe 30 or 40 dollars minimum per week, who aren't shy with using their debit/credit card. They're usually men, regardless of whom the books are aimed at (I don't really want to bring up Comicsgate vs. SJW audiences in this post, but I will say that the retailers have a right to be concerned if the publisher is cranking out product for a target demographic that's not buying them enough to make healthy sales while losing the longtime consumers who stopped buying when they saw they were phased out and there was nothing new for them). Within the last month, I've seen that the old tricks can still turn a trick:
Y'know...when you hear about a comic book being "sold out", that doesn't mean they were sold to customers walking into the store..it means the retailers purchased all the copies printed by the publisher. If the publisher wants to, they'll offer to print out a Second Edition that the retailers can purchase...and if all the retailers order all the copies from that 2nd then maybe the publisher offers a Third Edition...and of course, none of this means your average consumer brought a copy of either - it could mean the retailers have the copies sitting in storage, hoping that turns into a pile of gold...and it could, now, because ALL the comic shops in the country are closed, indefinitely, so all these new books that are supposed to come out within the next 3 months are either not going to be shipped to stores (because the retailers are hoping for a last-minute reimbursement/cancellation) or take the new books but not order anything new indefinitely until they can see light at the end of the tunnel. The consignment system is tricky because success with comic book sales depends on speculation, which is why a number of shops were depending on toy sales over the last few years...toy stores are not considered "essential" either.
So for now, the shops are screwed, the publishers are screwed. Lots of doom and gloom talk on social media. I expect a mass implosion when business resumes..lines will be slashed by more than 3/4 - you're only going to see the shops remaining in business fall back in the late-1990s groove of severely under-ordering books, even main Batman books - the "Pull List" is a thing of the past...and what remains of the Direct Market is going to recoil back into the cave-like atmosphere that gave comic shops a stigmatization that never went away.
The Bubble has burst.
I'm going to have to just wait for the trades to read more about Punchline, the Joker's new girlfriend, who kinda acts like Mercy Graves, Lex Luthor's valet...well, there's only so many personalities a female comic book villain can have, but she looks great.
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