The Comics Rack

Comic Memories Pt. 12

Over time, the business of selling comics pretty well burns out the fan side of any retailer. Comics become product instead of entertainment. Phrases like "that was done years ago" comes up all too often in conversation. Some comics are ordered, and recommended, on the basis of the retailer's sense of what is good and bad, yet the customers often ignore quality and end up buying dreck. Eventually, most all retailers become jaded, and end up in a love-hate relationship with their customers who become sources of income instead of fellow fans. I guess that after some 6 or 7 years in the business, I was becoming as cynical and jaded as most (especially after reading, or at least skimming, every title that came through the door each and every week). Yet, the fan in me was usually re-ignited by my weekly trips to the Bud Plant warehouse.

Most everyone, whether a retailer or collector, was familiar with Bud. The arrival of the (I think) quarterly catalog was something special, since Bud specialized in offering the odd items that many of the comic distributors didn't carry (we would often offer the catalog to many of our regulars and allow them tack on items they would like to our order). Portfolios, art books, the rare (for those days) collections of comics, reprints, art prints...all made there way into the Plant catalog. In fact, the only drawback to using Plant's catalog for stocking the store was the shipping charges, which, of course, cut into our discount rate. So, if you can imagine all of this wonderment available in a warehouse location of umpteen gazillion square feet where you could keep the store stocked without the additional shipping charges, you can have an idea of why I consider Bud's LA operation one of the finest distribution centers that ever existed in the direct market (and why I felt like I was going to a combination of Disneyland and comic book heaven each and every week!).

Digression I: One of the top items on my want list was the Flashback series that was done by DynaPubs, the publisher of The Comic Buyer's Guide. Flashbacks were reprints of Golden Age comics done with color covers and black and white interiors that were reproduced from the original comic pages; making for a bit of muddy reproduction. They were, however, the only way to read Golden Age comics in those dim, dark days of the past. Plant had a number of the titles listed as available and Richard allowed me to order single copies of them with 2 copies for the ones I didn't have. One fanboy's dream realized! Years later it was interesting to be going through the bins at a local comic store and find one of the titles with my hand printed price sticker still attached...kind or eerie.

Digression II: Shortly after I started working at the store, Richard headed off one day to make a mid-week run to the various distributors and mentioned that we were expecting a Plant order, so I should be prepared. Awhile later the UPS man comes tooling up to the loading zone in front of the store. He gets out and then starts unloading, not just a couple of boxes, but many boxes...like around 30 or 40! All were from Plant and I was rather confused as to just what Richard had ordered. I found the box with the packing list and started to try to make heads or tails of the mess. Richard returned shortly and of course his reaction was, "What's this?" as if I had anything to do with what UPS had brought. Turns out that Richard had written up the purchase order for Plant and had order one each of the Russ Cochran EC sets that we didn't have in stock. But, when he wrote the order, he had written "1 ea." and circled the "ea." Someone at Plant's warehouse had taken this to mean 10 sets of each title and they had even been kind enough to write "good luck" on the invoice (just think how a phone call could have solve this mess!). To return the sets would have cost us money, so Richard was eventually able to strike a deal with Jon Hartz up at Pacific. Since Pacific didn't carry the Cochran sets, Jon let us trade them as credit against our regular comic order. Phew!

In addition to the items that had originally only been accessible through the Plant catalog, the warehouse was also stocked with current comics. As I've mentioned somewhere before, distributors would often order comics in excess of the actual order totals they received from the retailers: to both cover damages and to have extra product on hand if they felt a title had been underordered by their accounts. Pacific and Glenwood, however, had only had stock of Marvel and DC titles. Plant, and again one of the policies that has only helped the comic industry through the years, would have back issues of independent publishers on hand-in fact often more indies than titles by the Big Two. This not only helped the publishers, but also helped the retailers. We could see what a particular title looked like (important after the black and white meltdown), pick up a couple to try and, if sales were good, pick up more and plan to order subsequent issues and keep a stock on hand of the earlier issues (as an example, Bill Black has credited Plant with saving his fledgling reprint line, since Plant took a portion of Black's stock on Best of the West and Men of Mystery). And, since we, unlike other stores, did not sell back issues at a mark-up, being able to go into LA and come back with 3 or 4 issues of a popular title that we could offer to our customers at cover price was a real help and kept us in the black, since we didn't have to try and order large quantities of any given title sight unseen (In fact, it was by going through Plant's indie titles that we gave us the first inkling that Glenwood was in trouble).

Graphic novels were another are that Plant took seriously and, coincidentally, an area that Richard in particular had strong opinions about-

Digression III: The actual origin of the graphic novel is not really known, but it is a pretty sure bet that Richard coined the terms "graphic novel" and "graphic story" back in the 60s in an attempt to find terms to replace the rather derogatory connotations of the term "comic book." At the very least, he produced what is arguably the first modern graphic novel when he and Dennis Wheary published the George Metzger collection, Beyond Time and Again (you can see a picture of the cover here).

In any event, around 1979 or 1980, Marvel decided to start a graphic novel line when they released The Death of Captain Marvel by Jim Starlin. The book was a tremendous sellout and more graphic novels followed, although the line never really met its potential, since the Marvel graphic novels were nothing more than comic books with a larger size and higher price that featured (mostly) the Marvel characters and did not attempt to branch out into original stories. Putting these failings aside, however, the books did sell and were steady sellers. This did present a problem: how could a retailer possibly gauge how many copies to buy to be able to meet demand over a period of years without putting a hole in the old bank account? This is where Plant was like a candy store for comics. In the days when publishers didn't re-solicit titles, Plant had all the Marvel graphic novels in stock, so we could pick up one, two, or however many we needed to meet demand.

Another advantage to dealing with Plant was that publishers had to meet a certain standard in order to be included in the catalog. Near the end of Glenwood, it seemed that anyone with a pencil, ink and enough money to pay a printer could publish a comic and have it distributed, since each distributor was afraid that the other would carry a title that they didn't and one of those titles would turn out to be the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. With Plant, however, somebody was looking at the quality of the work and the sales potential and we all appreciated it.

I guess what made Plant superior to the distributors of today, and those that preceeded him, was that comics were not treated like comic books, but were, instead, treated like books. From my experience with book side of the store, I know that new sales were always of importance, but the back list of titles was also worth keeping in stock since sales from one usually fed into the other ("You like that new Farmer book? Well, he did two before it that tie in..."). With Plant, we got the new releases as soon as they were available, but we also were able to keep re-stocking without having to buy beyond our means to keep stock on hand. Just like a line editor would determine what product made it to the shelves, whoever was doing the buying for Plant was looking for quality, not quantity. Bud helped us keep our cash flow steady and, at the same time, helped keep the industry on its feet.

More Plant later...next time, another digression...