Go, Read: Dustin Harbin On The Future Of The DM

The former longtime retail employee, former convention organizer and current working cartoonist and illustrator Dustin Harbin has a longish post here about what he sees as the future of Direct Market retailing. Both the post and the discussion that follows it are engrossing. I think that Shannon Smith's objection that there's a necessary distinction between what's inevitable in a marketplace and what's rushed-towards by fearful market players is something that needs to be worked through for a greater understanding of what's at stake.

I think there's an historical conflict in play as well, in that the appeal of the comic shop for many customers is that it's the place where all the comics exist that one knows about and probably at least slightly more comics than that. As a consumer, it seems to me there's a fine line between a store having a specialty sales aspect that distinguishes it from other stores -- like selling high quality Silver-Age comics, or doing a thriving quarter-bin business, or carrying small-press comics, or offering a rich supply of manga -- and from allowing that focus to make the store seem smaller than one's personal digital options. When you're a devoted alt-comics, small-press guy like Harbin it may be harder to understand why specialization isn't automatically a virtue, but to put it another way: when I used to visit Chicago and had time to visit one store, I hit Chicago Comics rather than Quimby's because more of my comics bases were covered at the former.

It could also be that the entire discussion hinges less on what comic stores offer aside from the traditional weekly comics experience, or that said experience no longer appeals in an paradigm-shifting sense, and more on that the major suppliers have poisoned the well on that experience in a startling variety of ways and don't have any easy way to back away from what they've done without causing further damage.
 
posted 4:25 am PST | Permalink
 

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