Last week, once the media frenzy around the death of Captain America died down and people started realizing that Steve Rogers would be returning in some form eventually, the topic of conversation turned towards Marvel’s retail strategy during the event — specifically why there weren’t enough copies of the comic available to meet demand.

Marvel was happy to let everyone know several times that hey, they warned stores to up their orders the week before. Store owners complained mightily that Marvel should have told them why and Marvel responded that if news had leaked out early, the whole surprise would be ruined and the media frenzy would have potentially occurred prematurely, potentially leaving increased orders sittng on the shelves. Damned if ya do, damned if ya don’t.

Augie commented on the situation in the latest Pipeline, noting among other things, the following:

It’s only a shame that the retailers didn’t listen to Marvel when they were told how big an issue this would be. Marvel can’t give out the full spoilers to impress upon retailers how big an issue this was going to be. Retailers don’t trust Marvel for various reasons. Marvel did as much as it probably could do, in overprinting the issue and giving as much warning as possible for weeks in advance.

The problem with this is that Marvel has a history of telling retailers to up their orders for what ultimately comes to be nothing. Historically this has amounted mostly to a starburst on the cover of some random issue declaring it to be the most momentous occassion in (insert team’s name/superhero’s name here) history. But in recent years Marvel’s shown a tendency to transfer that old school hype from comic covers to solicitations and talent interviews, and when you combine that fact with Marvel’s whole no-reprints, buy tons of everything now so you dont run out policy from just a year or two back, it’s no surprise that retailers have become increasingly jaded by this sort of proclamation.

On the other hand, Marvel did reportedly overprint the issue by something like 100,000 copies, so they obviously had faith that the comic was gonna sell big. So why didn’t they do more to ensure that the stores had these extras in hand for the media blitz? Retailers are insisting that Marvel should have let them know exacctly why they were being told to overorder #25, but that’s a pretty unreasonable demand. Still, the onus was on Marvel to make sure the book was able to make it’s way into customers’ hands, and they screwed up. They’d already overprinted, assuming they would sell, so why not offer retailers the chance to double their orders the week before with, say, a no-risk return policy? It’s been done before, so it’s not like it’s a totally insane concept.

The one thing I don’t understand is everyone blaming the direct market for the situation. Yes, something needs to be done to fix/destroy/rebuild the current situation with the Diamond Monopoly, but I fail to see how any other distribution infrastructure would have been able to handle this sort of unusual event any better.

Ultimately, the only place Marvel fell down in their handling of this situation was in actually getting those copies into retailer hands in time to properly capitalize on the media coverage. Even though the coverage was way bigger than anyone could have predicted, there’s no reason why they didn’t ensure retailers wouldn’t have some extra copies in hand.

Opportunity lost…

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