Asterix ‘05 Invasion Nailed Down



I can't tell if this is a new announcement or a confirmation of a previously published set of dates but it looks like the release of the next Asterix book will be this year on October 14, with the work being presented to the public on September 22. The article admits that the later Asterix books are widely acknowledged to be missing something content-wise when compared to the early albums in the run. The reason the release date is big news is that the last book from four years ago sold eight million copies, and the European comics market has become even more primed to facilitate top-of-the-charts hits since then.

The fact that the European book publishers can drive anticipation for an album with this kind of campaign may make many US comic readers ponder anew the issue of street dates for American trades and comic books. When that concept used to be discussed, it was often in terms of relief for the "get 'em, put 'em out" rush that many comic shops suffer through every week. It was generally argued away by comic shops certain -- with good reason -- that many of their peers would sell books early in order to gain a local or even regional market advantage. I'm now certain this would indeed happen, particularly in that despite Diamond having the market reach to enforce street dates by punishing those who broke them no one can really imagine the distributor would step up and do so. After all, Diamond logically holds the ability to all-but-eliminate the practice of late comics, but has never done so.

I was always attracted to street dates as a way to build marketing campaigns and publicity around certain releases. I would go to the comic store if I knew the new Eightball was going to be there on a certain date, for instance, and I would certainly plan coverage that linked into significant releases (more importantly, I could write features for publications with long lead times that linked in that way). Now that I think about it, though, I'm not certain that there wouldn't be problems there, too. Books would still be late. I'm not certain Diamond gets everything everywhere on the same day anymore. Publicity campaigns with a date would still be driven by political considerations at many of the big companies rather than on a consensus of past sales performance and merit. And I'm not sure there wouldn't still be clustering of titles on certain dates, which seems to me a greater problem than simply not knowing when books are going to come out. As a consumer, I still think it would be nice, but I'm not waiting up for it to happen.
 
posted 7:48 am PST | Permalink
 

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