And he’s dodging some good, legitimate questions. When asked why retailers were only given 24 hour notice that Civil War #4 was going to be delayed by over a month, he stated:

We were trying to be responsible, believe it or not, and give retailers the whole picture of the ripple effect these changes would have to the entirety of the back end of “Civil War’s” shipping schedule. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for us to simply say that “Civil War” #4 was going to be a week late, and then two weeks late again a week later, and so on, but we wanted to give everybody as much ample warning as possible, especially retailers so that they could manage their cash flow.

How does this “answer” touch on absolutely anything that the previous question asks? In what reality is less than 24 hour’s notice sufficient time for any retailer to “manage their cash flow”?

Tom is also asked about the six-week lead time that Millar claims McNiven had on the first issue.

I’m not sure where the six weeks number came from. Steve takes about six weeks to pencil an average comic book, so maybe that’s it. So I can’t chart where it’s being calculated from as a starting point. What I can tell you for certain is that I received the first page of issue #1 on 1/3/06, and that was for a book that shipped to stores on 5/3/06, so that’s four months right there (although, to be fair, that first book was larger than normal, and you have to shave off a month of time for when the book actually has to go to the printer, approximately 4/3/06.)

So, either Millar is lying through his teeth for some unknown reason, or he just didn’t check in with Brevoort to coordinate their stories properly. Excellent work!


Brevoort also talks about how this shouldn’t really be more than an inconvenience for retailers, despite one of the most savvy retailers, Brian Hibbs, explaining otherwise.

…on the matter of the financial blow, one of the things that changes along with the revised shipping schedule is revised Final Order Cutoff dates. So any retailer who believes that these delays are going to decimate his readers’ interest in the project can immediately go to the Diamond site and cut back their orders. Or, if they need to reallocate funds for cash-flow reasons, they can reduce their CIVIL WAR numbers now, and re-up them in two weeks’ time. So other than the fact that they’re not going to be seeing “Civil War” dollars when they were expecting to, I don’t know how much damage this can really have on the smaller shops. I may be missing something, though.

I do know that this is the biggest pain in the ass for the retailers, and I’m sorry that they have to deal with all of this.

Wrong - it IS a financial blow, and anyone that’s ever worked in comic book retail realizes this. Retailers have limited financial resources that they plan around every month, and something like this can blow smaller stores right out of the water - this is exactly what happened during the Great Image Crash in the 90s, and even Diamond’s new policies won’t be able to do more than soften the hardship a number of stores will likely be dealing with in the next several months. Playing games with order numbers on this sort of scale is a scary proposition because it’s too easy for a clerical error to blow up in a store’s face, leaving them with too much or too little stock when the books are finally delivered. (Not to mention the fact that there’s no way to adjust orders for the week 24 hours before an item is due in store.)

No, the real answer to this situation (other than not soliciting the damn series until you were sure you could publish the thing on time) would have been to have given retailers a reasonable amount of notice. Not 24 hours, not a few days, but at a minimum, 2 weeks. There’s no way Marvel just woke up on Tuesday and realized what was happening. This is the sort of thing that editorial should have seen happening weeks in advance, if not more, allowing both Marvel and the retailers a fair and decent amount time to adjust.

Bottom line: Marvel screwed up, big time. Yes, some of the blame is probably on McNiven’s shoulders, but at this point Marvel (and DC) really need to figure out how to solict their big events while keeping the creators’ work habits/speed in mind. Hell, Millar’s claiming that you all knew that McNiven wasn’t going to be able to handle the schedule from the beginning, but that didn’t stop Marvel from soliciting the title as though a monthly schedule was in the bag. It’s not like this is a new phenomenon, and with a crossover that has as much riding on it for both Marvel and retailers as Civil War has, it’s completely ridiculous and unprofessional that things could get to this point.

Comics