Well, there goes Pinkhams non-posting record.

I've had "sushi" with Groth. I've done business with him, sold him art, tried to arrange with him to get Journal #2 printed years ago. Bought shit from his Albany shop.

I know Gary quite well actually, and I've known him for years. (I'm the short longhair that always came in with Bissette and busted your balls in the store, Gary)

Gary ran a nice shop, but that's about the ONLY thing I'll say in his favor.

Well, that and he can type big words well and string them together into somewhat coherent sentences, at least better than "editor McDonald".

Again, with a readership so small (coming up on 20 years now aren't you?) it's kind of nice to be able to publish a "journal of literary criticism" but frankly I think you publish the way I do retail. You know, sell enough to pay the bills, overhead, put a few bucks in your pocket.

Thank god for hard-core porn, eh? Glad I don't have to depend on selling that to keep my store open.

But, I digress....

Really. How interesting, considering I haven't mentioned the piece, or Groth, or Fantagraphics, in eight years. I wouldn't call your explanation ironic, Eric, so much as I would disingenuous.

Kim is Gary's equal business partner. I stand corrected. You know, I hear tell Charlie McCarthy described his business relationship with Edgar Bergen in much the same way.

PAD

You detect wrong. I was simply trying to provide a business-oriented standard for what would be termed "successful" in book publishing terms.

PAD

Good lord, Nat, I don't even remember which post is being referred to anymore.

PAD

If Serapion can assemble and post a convincing image of Kim as a dummy and Gary with his arm up Kim's butt, I'll give fifty dollars to the CBLDF.

Those definitions of "success" are like defining "success" in school as getting Ds instead of Fs. Being one of the few profitable enterprises in an industry that is otherwise dying is a fool's game...because eventually there's no infrastructure to support your own sales efforts. The last guy making award-winning buggywhips was still out of business when the last buggywhip retailer closed up shop.

If you aren't working to either rebuild the infrastructure we've got, or working to build a new infrastructure, then all you're doing is pushing product out the door and hoping the foundation doesn't collapse underneath you before you run out of product.

So the public evidence for a book that pays its advance back and entices the publisher to solicit another one is people reading it and others of its type on airplanes?

Okay.

I can't wait for Gary to pull Kim out of the box today.

Ah. Well, I must confess that I've never found the old "if-you're-not-part-of-the-solution-then-you're-part-of-the-problem" rhetoric particularly compelling, and it's not likely to become a more persuasive argument now just because we're talking about an area (comics) dear to my heart.

Anyway, you must realiaze that some folks who are building new infrastructures will chose to pursue options other than what you'd ideally want to see them pursue. Graphic novel publishers who work to make inroads into the traditional bookstore market are working (and working hard!) at something fundamentally different from the traditional comics direct market sales pattern--something that demonstrably works--even if it's not the kind of new infrastructure that you would prefer to see.




[This message has been edited by ATKokmen (edited 04-07-2001).]

I'd buy another banner ad for LEGAL DEFENSE COMICS to sse that, Mr Lieber [img]/resources/ubb/smile.gif[/img]

Steve[n]: Your futon mattress and hotplate await you ..... in the shed in my back yard.

Tom: It's not completely the mid 90s again until some sick, malicious sack of shit posts something vile about Gary's little boy.

No One In Particular: A friend of mine who works in the graphic novel section of a local bookstore told me that CORRIGAN was already a steady seller -- they've had to reorder every two weeks since the book came out -- before the TIMES article, which has brought in quite a few people looking for the book in the last few days. Ditto GORAZDE with its coverage, especially the TIME article and the TIMES BOOK REVIEW piece.

As funnybook novel sales go, my friend said that CORRIGAN & GORAZDE are in a dead heat for first, followed by MAAKIES [!!!], GHOST WORLD, WHY I HATE SATURN [!!!], and then a shitload of various manga translations. Eisner's novels, BORING, UNDERSTANDING COMICS, the LOVE & ROCKETS books, PEDRO AND ME, LITTLE LIT, and most of Ross, Gaiman & Moore's DC books do fairly solid business, but they don't show up on the reorder sheets as fast as the ones above do.

Their far and away biggest sellers, incidentally, are comics strip collections. Everybody likes comics strips. Even people who hate comic books [like me] like comic strips.

The last time I visited the local comics store, the owner complained of slow business. None of the above -- including the Gaiman/Moore/Ross DC books and the manga -- were in stock. He told me that the latest issues of BATTLECHASERS, DAREDEVIL, & GREEN ARROW, a reprint of Batgirl's first appearance, and a Marvel title [I've forgotten which] that Alan Davis had something or other to do with were the best comics currently on his shelves. He had ten to fifteen copies of each issue, compared to the twenty or so copies of any comic with Spawn, Spider-Man or the X-Men on its cover.

Here ends our lesson.

- milo, no sale