One of my favorite KB Spangler¹ novels — and heck, it’s got a prequel so it’s really a series — is a galaxy-wide sweeping epic about the most important thing in the universe as humans expand and change both worlds and themselves as they see fit:

Supply chains.

Don’t laugh. The best scifi recognizes that all the stuff that makes the fictional worlds come alive has to come from somewhere; hell, one of the greatest cyberpunk novels of all time makes it all the way to page two before talking about making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel because that’s the only way the rest of the story can make sense.

Supply chains are why you have everything you have except maybe some of the sadder looking produce at the local farmer’s market and even that’s tied up in something cheap from Bulgaria like as not. The people who understand supply chains are to the modern economy what computer experts were from about 1972 to maybe 1988 — unseen, underappreciated, and absolutely vital². And it’s the topic of a particularly trenchant Twitterthread that was brought to me by graphic novelist and comics editor extraordinaire Ali Wilgus t’other day:

This is a fantastic thread about delays we’re currently dealing with in publishing, why they’re happening, and why they’re likely to get worse before they improve.

If you don’t have the time to read the thread — and it is very worth your time — Wilgus cuts to the chase:

A major takeaway: if you want to support your favorite authors and imprints, preorders are especially vital right now

The thread itself is the social media about of New Orleans indie bookstore Tubby & Coo’s, and it hits all the reasons that books — and that includes all forms of comics — are so damn hard to get hold of these days, where these days has for me been since roughly an hour into the pandemic as my preorders get repeatedly shit on by Diamond not that I have an axe to grind, nope not me.

Where was I? Oh yes, supply chains. T&C breaks it down into the highlights (each link jumps to a breakpoint in the thread that you can follow for several tweets on the topic): paper (there’s massive shortages of all forms of woodstock), printing (already a problem for smaller publishers/self-publishing as printers delayed small orders for big ones), warehouses (in which we should all resolve to never use the phrase unskilled labor again, as the lack of skilled warehouse workers is leading to both delays and fires), and shipping (everything from lack of dockworkers — skilled labor again — to lack of shipping containers).

Add it all up and there’s only one conclusion:

As you can see, literally every piece of the supply chain is disrupted in some way. This means major delays in getting books printed & shipped at both ends of the process, which affects pretty much any order.

If a store doesn’t have a book in stock/sells out, it could be 6-8 weeks before we can get more. If we have a book in stock that we can immediately ship out, delays will be less, but there will likely still be shipping delays, especially as we get closer to the holidays.

All this to say: PLEASE ORDER NOW for the holidays. And PLEASE do not get angry at or blame bookstores (especially indies) or bookstore workers. This is in no way our fault, and we are doing our absolute best. These delays are happening in ALL retail. Don’t be a dick.

And for anybody producing comics that wants to sell them? I would conservatively double the time you think that printing and shipping will take for the next while. It’ll be at least the end of the pandemic³ plus nine to twelve months before things get back to normal, whatever normal may have been. It’s been a while since any of us experienced normal.

So: order early, encourage others to do likewise, and be patient. It’s going to be frustrating for a good while yet, and there’s no point to making somebody else’s life more difficult than it already is.

Spam of the day:

I am Mrs. Dara, 70 years old, Dumb, and a widow.

Whoa there Sparky Spammer, there’s self-deprecation but that’s verging on clinical depression. Get yourself some help, maybe find a line of work that doesn’t make you so miserable?

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¹ AKA my buddy Otter. She’s rad.

² Since then the computer geeks have become no less vital but they will make sure they’re never unseen or underappreciated again if it kills them or preferably us.

³ Everywhere in the world, not just here, wherever here may be for you.