After a long era of peace and shared goals, a kerfuffle has broken out in the comics retailing community. Atom Freeman, proprietor of Prana DMS, a marketing and retailer services company, posted on FB regarding some dissatisfaction about the format of the Retailer Day programming, which is run by ComicsPRO. His issue is with the very brief five minute windows for presentations.
If I’m doing the math right “Retailer Day” at San Diego Comic Con is something like 50+ vendors doing 5 minutes each with retailers being given a “box lunch”.
Publishers and other vendors are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on this week and the best their trade organization can do is a carousel of people 5 minutes at a time and a dry turkey sandwich?The #1 publisher who is bringing people into comics shops in droves gets 8 minutes. 8 minutes. No offense to the people who think they just need retailer facetime to grow their small brands, but this is irresponsible.We have sponsored, out of our pockets, that breakfast for the past two years and this year, we got nothing from the organization but a copy and paste email. One of our distributors was able to carve out 5 minutes to split between two projects that are making money for comics retailers each month.Friends at Lunar? Consider this our notice that we will keep REKCAH and COMICS! The Magazine under 2 minutes. DC should have at least 10 minutes with retailers after the year they’ve given all of us.
Joe Murray, president of ComcisPRO reached out to the Beat to provide their own statement:
If folks don’t know, I’m the President of the Board of ComicsPRO and I’m happy to address some perceptions about SDCC Retailer Day.—-
We love hearing publisher feedback and are continuing to adapt this experience. This year San Diego asked us to handle organizing the room block and we reached out to our distribution partners to let them know. They requested the ability to select and schedule their publishers in the amount of time they determined per publisher. Their schedules were given to us to add to the day’s programming, and while we know it is long we wanted to give the distributors the time they requested. This felt like the best bridge from having one distributor run the day to three. Next year, this could look entirely different so please send us any thoughts you have after the event so we can keep growing it.The industry has rapidly changed over the last few years and our approach to these events evolves as circumstances change. We work closely with publishers and retailers at all our organized events including ComicsPRO organized retailer days at NYCC (last 4 years), MCM (last two), Rose City Comiccon (two years). We’re always open to constructive dialogue.
As someone who has attended these events, the five minute format is indeed a bit exhausting and isn’t enough time for much of anything except a howdy. But the retailer events have traditionally been held to one day at SDCC – Friday – and squeezing everything in to the already overstuffed schedule was always going to be difficult. As one commenter in the thread noted, making SDCC a “Swiss Army Knife” for all of comics is always going to present problems and scheduling conflicts. And each distributor wanting to have its own slot – and THREE distributors – is just more programming.
In previous years, ComicsPro held a breakfast event and panel, then Diamond held a lunch where only its exclusive publishers would present. Even with that it was a long, long event, some 2 1/2 hours. So there is always going to be a time factor involved. Retailers do not come to SDCC to sit in retailer programming, they want to roam the halls and explore.
Where this conflict gets a bit more conflict-y: Murray says that he tried to post the above to Freeman’s FB post, but it was deleted – which Freeman confirmed to the Beat.
Come on now kids. Let’s go back to that era of peace and shared goals.
