We at Fleen interrupt this [American] holiday weekend of pie with news from Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, who has a tale of skullduggery. Take ‘er away, FSFCPL!

It all began with a semi-cryptic tweet from Becky, Maliki’s right-hand woman:

We just saved 800 collector copies of Hello Fucktopia. More details soon, but it ain’t pretty.

Hello Fucktopia is a one-shot in the Maliki universe released years back, even a few years before she would declare independence from traditional publishers, intended for older readers (16 and up); in fact, it’s different enough from Maliki’s usual fare that it is signed directly under the creator’s pseudonym Souillon rather than being attributed to her name.

As for the collector, it refers to a larger, black and white limited edition with a few improvements that was released one year later.

On Tuesday, we got the details, and they aren’t pretty indeed. But they also include numbers, and if there’s one thing we love at Fleen, it’s numbers.

One piece of context: in France, there is no direct market for comics, and in fact no channel dedicated to comics. Some of them, such as weekly or monthly anthologies and US comic book TPBs, are distributed to newsstands along with magazines and follow their rules. But all other kinds of comics are distributed to bookshops along with non-sequential-art books, there is no separate channel.

For instance, we can see in the sample summary (third panel) that 17 copies were destroyed in that sample half-year period; it likely corresponds to returns from bookshops (French-only, but you should get the drift). In that case, the copies had been unbundled and unwrapped, which means it’s not necessarily easy to get them back to another retail point in a presentable state¹.

But the 800 cannot correspond to anything but one or more pallets that had never left storage, with unsealed bundles.

Another piece of context: I am not aware of any French law against the publisher directly selling the 800 copies; rather, I believe the prohibition to be contractual: it could be the distributor who has an exclusive license, which means the transaction would have to go through them. Even if the books were still owned by the publisher and the distributor was only housing them.

However, it is by French law that the publisher sets the book retail price, and no retailer may deviate from it by more than 5%.

From the product page, we can therefore obtain the retail price: 19.90€ (±5%). 800 of them at 40% discount therefore amounts to 9552€ (±5%). The 10,000€ quote, then, likely includes a few additional items such as delivery to the far-away land of Brittany.

Finally, as anyone could determine, by the time they would be down to their 297 last copies, or about 37%, of the initial pile, they would have made up their initial investment and anything beyond that would be pure profit.

One last piece of context: as part of our interesting times, there is a paper shortage going on, and that has apparently affected the release schedule of some books, according to conversations this weekend in Colomiers (festival report forthcoming). Surely this sounds like an ideal time to treat paper like a disposable resource, right?

Many thanks to team Maliki for being forthcoming with the financial details of the transaction. We couldn’t have asked for more!

PS: By the end of the day, Tuesday, all 800 copies had been sold in that garage sale.

Our thanks as always to FSFCPL; if any further information comes to light regarding the mysterious very nearly complete loss of ten thousand Euro worth of comics, we’ll be sure to bring it to you.

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¹ Which doesn’t mean the industry shouldn’t try! At Colomiers, most publishers had a bin of discounted books designated as slightly less fresh or some such, sometimes explicitly telling they were philosophically opposed to stripping these books.