The other day we had a couple of Milwaukee guys stop in the store. They're Kevin and Kurt from Imaginary Tales, their own little comic book studio. Together they have created "Brandon's Little Problem." It is the story of an elementary school boy named Brandon who does those typical kid thinks. Things like sticking stuff up his nose. When he sticks a small alien transport device up his nose he's in for a real adventure. It is a fun book for all ages. There will be four issues in all, and three are already on the shelves at Neptune, with the final issue coming in another month or two.Support area creators and check out "Brandon's Little Problem." Next week we're going to have the guys from Workshed Studios, another Milwaukee based group of comic book creators, stop by, so check the Neptune Events page for details and if you're out and about stop in and say hi. Everyone did a great job supporting guys like Sean McKeever (before he was on a regular comic title) and "Atomika" Sal - so help us continue to support other local creators and foster a comic book community here in southeast Wisconsin.
4 comments:
The comic sounds inteesting
This isn't really related but sorta is. What's your take on the whole barcode junk that diamond is doing? They are being a huge pain with us because they still don't know the details are themselves so they can't fill us in on anything because they don't know it yet. All they know is that starting in January all products in diamond must have a barcode. ...so as a retailer I was just curious on your take on that.
p.s. this is sorta related because we are talking about indy books and its indy publishers that will be the most affected by this.
Ascula - it is a fun read. Fast and entertaining.
scott - when they announced the barcode thing I immediately wondered how it would impact indie publishers. Especially since many of them don't barcode now. I wondered if Diamond planed on selling them barcodes, or if it would be up to the indie publisher to make the investment.
I believe that part of this barcode thing is that Diamond is making their own comic book retail inventory management and Point of Sale software that they want to sell to store owners and they've realized how difficult inventory management is without barcodes. That could be part of why they are requiring it - it didn't mean much to them until they had their own software to support and want to make sure it works. There were a couple of other "changes" they announced that I was also fairly sure came out of the problems they found while testing their software.
Diamond primarily makes changes to benefit themselves - they have no competition so there is little need to make improvements to make retailers or publishers lives easier. That's why I believe the new barcode mandate, while it will be helpful to every store that uses a barcode scanner to receive and sell merchandise, was primarily done to help them. And financially it will be tough on small publishers. I think eventually small publishers will start to sell directly to stores much more actively and/or they will be able to find or create some kind of distribution channel other than Diamond that will distribute their comics.
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