Should Buffy 8.1 Have Sold More?

Dark Horse reports a second printing on the recently released Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight #1, which came out yesterday in comic book stores. That comic had received an inordinate amount of buzz for its attempt to become the official continuation of the television series, a claim it could make because of the involvement and intent of series creator and comics writer Joss Whedon.

Writer Warren Ellis asks why the series' first printing sold out, noting that print runs are set after initial orders are received, and that given the advance buzz -- Dark Horse admits they were well aware of anticipation surrounding the series -- a healthy print run to take care of extra demand should have been possible. As the thread continues, this becomes a discussion of how the book sold generally. The immediate consensus, and I don't see any reason not to think they're onto something, is that the sell-out was due to a combination of several factors, primarily a marriage of Dark Horse's conservative printing habits and a sometimes-unstated and likely subconscious desire companies may have to negotiate a popular comic by having a sell-out and second printing, with such an occurrence's PR value as a bonus. "Dark Horse Comfortably Meets Demand on Buffy #1" isn't a headline you're likely to see in the comics press.

I find all of this fascinating. I try not to play the "sold out" PR game without some real numbers involved, and try to be generally suspicious of companies either manufacturing such an event or negotiating such an event in a way that makes for an advantage. "Company fails to deliver enough copies of comic" is another headline that can be applied to many such events, if you look at it a certain way. In general, I think stories like this one point to the fundamental flaw of the DM as currently constituted: it's unlikely to be able to handle events of high interest without a lot of priming to get it up to speed. This is both a limit of its current make-up, and the existence of rewards for behavior other than getting the biggest number of comics into the biggest number of readers hands.

Addendum: this note at Mike Sterling's indicates something humorous about the way Buffy orders played out -- that people asking for the comic on the day it was supposed to come out helped a retailer in planning re-orders for the actual release one week later. Please let this not become an actual strategy.
 
posted 4:06 am PST | Permalink
 

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