This news piece is for anyone that has been following the train wreck that has been the lead up to DC’s Villain Month, which I covered here; How to lose friends and alienate people. After numerous comic shop owners have gone to considerable lengths to ensure that their customers were informed about exactly what was going on and getting orders for what their customers wanted, specifically the much publicised 3D lenticular covers, now it turns out that DC isn’t going to be able to fulfil those orders.
‘Due to unprecedented demand for the September 3-D motion covers, DC Entertainment announces that orders on the 52 Villains Month issues will be allocated. These issues are now sold out at the publisher level.
The allocations will range from approximately 50% to nearly 100% on different titles. The allocations are based on an average of your orders of each Villains Month titles’ base title over the past few months.’
This means that comic shop owners are now having to choose which of their customers who ordered titles for Villain Month actually gets what they ordered and who is actually going to have to have the 2D version instead.
Below are some of their reactions, with Brian Gibb of Savage Critic being particularly scathing with his summary titled: The staggeringly epic incompetence of DC entertainment.
‘We put an enormous amount of effort into trying to educate customers about the 3-D covers, the importance of preordering them, and so on. You have to understand, as well, that a lot of folks weren’t at all happy about the idea of a line of $3.99 covers, and there was a certain amount of “talking people into” signing up for them. So, to find out just three weeks before shipping that there’s suddenly going to be a version of these comics without the stunts, for $1 less, well this is migraine inducing, at best.
See, if there had been ANY official and public information that this was going to happen, that there would be two versions, that these books could be allocated, the way I presented this to my customers for the last 8 weeks would have been ENTIRELY DIFFERENT.’
Jared Myland the owner of my comic shop OK Comics has this to say,
‘It was a lot of extra work, contacting people, creating order forms, setting up stock systems, processing the orders, but we got the job done.
– NOW DC have announced that they haven’t printed enough stock to fill all our orders. Shops wont get everything they need to fill their customers orders.
– Not only have DC taken away their continuity of service (one of the best things they have going for them) but they’ve created extra work for retailers who’ve previously supported the New52, only to have all this extra effort rewarded by unhappy, disgruntled customers.
– We’re now left with a situation where we have to decide which of our dedicated customers can’t have what they ordered. These are regulars and new customers who took the time to fill out forms in the shop, or email their request.
– Thanks DC. Thanks.’
Whether this will have any longterm effect remains to be seen but it’s clearly shown a fundamental inability to communicate on DC’s part and definitely won’t have gained them any goodwill from either their readers or the retailers who promote and sell their products.
