Following up on Ryan Estrada‘s spot-on comment yesterday (short version: the people answering the Hot Topic 800 number have nothing to do with the situation, and have probably never been in Hot Topic themselves, so be polite!), I received and email last night from Dave Kellett. He must have gotten the right person at the call center (or I got the wrong one), because he got us a better number:

I was told to call their “Buyer’s Team” at 626.839.4681.

Called that number, and got a hold of “Allison”, the buyer for women’s tops. Or rather, got her VM. Left her a detailed message with my phone number.

Doubt she’ll call back, but she might.

In any case, I thought I’d forward on the info about contacting the Buyer’s Team … might save folks time rather than calling their (clearly) Bangalore call center.

Remember the rules: be polite; state the situation clearly; ask them to follow up with you about how Hot Topic will be compensating Jess Fink and Threadless for the theft of the shirt design, and how they will prevent similar situations in the future.

It’s the happiest day of the year for a numbers nerd like me who is fond of being proved right. Start, if you will by taking a look at something we talked about last year, and in years before that. Those posts refer to the annual numbers that Brian Hibbs (hero LCS owner) compiles for Heidi Mac at The Beat on what graphic novels sell according to Bookscan’s numbers. Data, baby!

Obligatory reminder: Bookscan doesn’t reach into comic shops, libraries, or book fairs. That’ll be important later, as we remind ourselves of something else:

Raina Telgemeier remains the most important person in comics.

In calendar year 2017, when she did not have a new book, she sold (and this doesn’t count libraries, or comics shops, or school book fairs) at least US$11.6 million dollars worth of graphic novels, at least 487,000 copies of her original graphic novels, at least one million books when you include her Baby Sitters Club efforts.

Want to see something more impressive? I’m going to look at Sisters, because I kept numbers for 2014, and 2016 from those earlier posts. In 2014, when Sisters was new, she sold 176,197 copies (in four months, because it wasn’t released until the end of August). In 2016, when it was two years old, she sold 166,124 copies. In 2017, three years old, she sold 147,889 copies. That’s scarcely any taper off! Comics shop owners will tell you the drop from issue #1 of a series to issue #2 is minimum 40%. Over three years later, she’s selling fully 84% as much as when it was new!

Let’s look at the other numbers for her original work, 2014, 2016, 2017:

• Smile: 150K, 188K, 160K
• Drama: 94K, 213K, 178K
• Ghosts: (not released), 213K (four months only), 180K

I like that bump in Drama; new book means new readers who are discovering her older work. And should I mention that Smile was released in 2010? These books are never going to go out of print. Never.

This is why she broke the New York Times Best Seller List so hard that they stopped reporting on graphic novels rather than just rename it for her. This is why every neckbeard that whines about “diversity” ruining comics doesn’t know shit. Comics purchases are dominated by younger readers, all-ages topics, bound books. The first floppy comic book that shows up on the list for 2017 is Saga (which is great, mind you), and it sold … 45K. It’s in 29th place on the list¹.

It’s basically a rounding error in Raina’s sales because guess where Saga isn’t selling? The Scholastic book fairs held in elementary schools across the country. Guess where book fair coordinators are ordering Raina’s books by the case. And guess what’s not included in the Bookscan numbers.

This is why she owns six of the top twenty slots by dollar total. It’s why she owns eight of the top twenty slots by copies sold. It’s why the entire top twenty list is dominated by women, and why other top twenty books are Raina-alike stories (which is to say, following the same growing up travails stories that she pioneered in the GN space).

And this is why I whould like to humbly remind Raina that when she bestrides the worlds of comics publishing, YA publishing, and whatever the hell else she feels like bestriding, that some of us were behind her from the very beginning and would serve well in her new, benevolent regime.

All hail.

Spam of the day:

You probably don’t remember me, but I know you and have something to show you.

Somebody I don’t remember wants to give me secret information worth US$250,000! Is it because I’ve got an inside track on the new regime? I bet that’s why.

_______________
¹ And this is great: the anti-diversity CHUDs are very fond of claiming that Marvel’s sales are down because too many of their books feature characters that aren’t straight, white, manly mens, and first Marvel title on the list is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther, the first three volumes of which add up to a total of 55K copies sold. It’s a triple shot of schadenfreude — superheroes don’t sell, the best seller is as far from what the CHUDs want as you can get, and the numbers are from before the movie released and will only be higher next year.

It’s shameful to admit it, but I never read any Terry Pratchett. I know, I know — I’m a terrible nerd, but I’m afraid I have nothing to say on the man and his work¹ that would be meaningful in any way.

San Diego Comic Con remains — for good or ill — the premiere big show in the country. Much has been written about how each year it becomes less friendly to the average fan (as opposed to members of industry talking to other members of industry) and/or less focused on comics. Many creators will talk about the challenges they endure trying to keep SDCC as a profit center rather than an expense. If you’re there on somebody else’s expense account or primarily interested in networking/socializing it remains much as it ever was, but for the small creator or average attendee, the sheer size and scope (one might say success) of San Diego make it trickier to cope with each year.

And yesterday it got a little trickier. Assuming you got ticketed (passes all but sell out a year in advance) and find accommodation (the hotel lottery system remains Byzantine and fraught with hopes and dashed hopes), you could at least pre-purchase parking to assure that you wouldn’t be hoofing across half of San Diego to get to the convention center. Could, that is, until, oh, now-ish:

This year, according to Ace [Parking] to “provide the best experience possible and take the pain and pressure out of the process”, they’re moving to a lottery based system.

In order to be register, all you need to do is send an e-mail to cci2015@aceparking.com (one entry per e-mail address) between now and April 12. After that, a random drawing will be done to select the winners, who will then be e-mailed by April 15 with “details on how to purchase your permit at the location you were drawn for”. If you are chosen, you are guaranteed a spot. If you are chosen and choose not to purchase a permit, it will be forfeited.

Got that? If you were planning on pre-purchasing parking, you have to get your email out and hope you get the chance to buy at a facility that will be chosen for you, meaning that you may not get one that bears any relation to your hotel’s location or other physical needs. Lower-demand lots will now become more competitive, and I foresee an active after-market in trades (Hilton Garage here! I’ll trade for Horton Plaza!) unless Ace has contrived a way to disallow that. It’s not that parking (or even convenient parking) is a right for convention-goers, but it becomes one more item that’s left up to chance, meaning that it’s difficult to plan an end-to-end travel experience.

Speaking of which, I asked this on Twitter but now I’m asking here — did anybody in the comics press that’s required to submit for re-verification this year — you have to requalify for SDCC press badges every other year — get a response yet? I sent in my materials well in advance of the 12 December 2014 deadline (and have an automated reply from the same day), and was told to expect a response in six weeks. Following the directions, I sent a followup email to the address provided asking if I’d gotten in or not at the end of January, and again at the end of February. Each time I’ve gotten a duplicate of the original acknowledgement email (from November!) and still have no clue if I’ll be allowed past the doors.

It’s basically impossible to plan out flights or hotel, and I have no idea if I’ll be attending this year or not. I’ve been credentialed every year since 2006 and would hate to break the streak, but the decision appears to not be mine. Since nobody’s answering the press registration email, I figure asking in public like this can’t make things any worse.

Notspam of the day:

brb, gonna see if walmart.hiphop has been claimed yet …

This comment was too good to not share, and I sincerely hope that every single idiotic TLD has somebody willing to pony up (ha ha — horses, amiright?) twenty bucks to register a Walmart name and cause them a little annoyance. walmart.bar! walmart.ninja! walmart.church! walmart.dating! walmart.sexy! walmart.webcam! And please, please, please: walmart.moe!

_______________
¹ His solo work, I should say; based on Good Omens, I suspect I’ll like Pratchett’s writing very much.

It’s Day 2 of our Comixpedia Linkapalooza, as they release the 2006 edition of the People of Webcomics list; lotta movers, shakers, and Friends of Fleen over there, so be sure to read, digest, and commentate.

Speaking of traffic stats & business breakpoints (c.f.: last Friday’s post), an update:

I’ve gotten replies from more than a dozen creators either offering to participate or supplying information; that’s heartening, but it doesn’t get us to statistical significance. Given the wide range of experiences out there, we won’t really get any good numbers without a lot of responses, but I’m willing to allow for some wide variations in accuracy and run numbers with a modest-sized population, as long as we all acknowledge that smaller populations = less accurate results.

To that end, I’m setting 31 Jan 2007 as the deadline to decide if you want in on the survey or not. If you’re willing to participate, bug your fellow creators (it will be very helpful to get as many members of the pro- and semi-pro collectives as possible — I’m talking to you, Dumbrella, Blank Label, Dayfree, Keen*, Modern Tales family, and others too numerous to list). Email me (gary) at this website (that would be fleen dot com) to say if you want in.

If I have at least 100 respondents in the pool, I’ll send out the questions and give a week to ten days to respond. Right now, said questions are still in development, but they will include measures traffic (unique IPs per month, averaged over three months ending 2006, most likely), age of the webcomic, frequency of updates, income derived from subscription/donation/merchandise/ advertising/services, conversion rates, and anything else I can think of. Calculations will be done as quickly as possible.

All questions used will be disclosed here at Fleen, as will methods used, any assumptions that materially affect the outcome; raw data (minus identifying information) will be made available to anybody else that wants to run their own analyses. This is your chance to get a snapshot of what the business of webcomics looks like, but to get a lot you have to give a little. Think it over.

Well, it is late late on Friday night. Saturday morning, really.

Just getting in from your hot date? Decided to check your blog before you hop into bed? (Hopefully with your hot date?) That’s hot.

Dating is an all consuming topic on many levels. For teenagers, it is something that has to be navigated in very precise manner. For example, there is always the possibility that you’re hanging out with the wrong person and everyone else might decide that you’re gay.

Now, of course, you have your hot date. But others are not so lucky and have to worry about finally going on the date of the girl/boy of their dreams. Make sure they don’t see your blatant celebration. They may think you’re interested.

And then there’s the problem where if you are gay and then other people are uncomfortable it. Or aren’t uncomfortable with it, but have just had bad experiences involving it. Or are fundamentalist Christians and disown you.

Then again, your girlfriend may be exorcised and then blown up by old ladies who don’t want you to fall into sin. At least the best part about this is that when your good friend is nearly killed in a drive by shooting, she’ll be there to greet her in the underworld.

Keep this all in mind when you decide if you still like your hot date in the morning. Beer goggles are dangerous instruments.

This page has written before on the topic of webcomic advertising. You got your tightly targetted ads whereby producers looking to meet up with a certain demographic craft campaigns with loving detail. You got creators who will offer up their own characters — within limits — for your message (or possibly even themed strips to carry that message). In a form of sorta-advertising, you can do product placement in the form of your own self. And then there’s Google’s various programs, including the rotation that you see on many webcomics.

These work by selecting keywords from text that appears on the page, serving up ads that are (presumably) of interest to the page’s audience. Sometimes, this means that ads contrary to your message sneak through … Scott Kurtz has written several times about how Google ads for gold farmers have snuck through, even though he’s opposed to them and their ilk.

But forget all that. I just want to know what combination of words on this page resulted in this ad showing up this morning. If nothing else, it’s given me an idea for how to choose new writers for Fleen in the future.

It was a bit more than 24 hours ago when Jess Fink let us know what was going on:

Oh it’s cool you guys it’s Just that FUCKING FUCKWAD TODD GOLDMAN RIPPING ME OFF AGAIN http://tinyurl.com/5v5h7du

For those not familiar with Fink’s reaction, she has a history of getting her designs (particularly those she did for Threadless, which incidentally requires artists to own the designs they submit) getting ripped off, with one particular appropriator seemingly recurring at regular intervals:

David+Goliath Threadless rips http://tinyurl.com/5vev53j @ToddGoldman legacy of rips http://tinyurl.com/4586lfh new rip http://is.gd/7CUa7U

One may note that the middle link of the three in that last batch is a mirror of a site that reported on a prior iteration of art thievery (some four years back) and received a lawyerly communication as a result. Curiously, in conjunction with yet another accusation of Todd Goldman lifting Jess Fink’s work (in May of 2010), I attempted to communicate with those same lawyers for comment, but didn’t get a reply; it’s possible that they no longer represent Goldman. In any event, the C&Ds are flying in the other direction today:

Thanks for all the help and kind words yesterday everyone! I have contacted Lawyers and sent cease and desists and boy are my arms tired.

Which makes me wonder — how many times do we go through this? We have a serial offender who — depending on how charitable you’re feeling — either:

• Knowingly and purposely steals designs from a variety of creators and one in particular:
  

  @Taiomatic he [Goldman] asked me to work for him then ripped my designs instead, plus others. I think my complaints are legitimate. Blockin you! :D

, or:

• Hires designers who do the stealing and passing along, sometimes the same design more than once, and does not vet their work sufficiently.

I have my opinion on the matter, and invite you to draw your own. On top of that, persons discussing said incidents have been subjected to lawyering (passim) that could be as either a SLAPP or plain ol’ bullying (if you’re not). Again, depends on how forgiving a person you are.

Since it seems pointless to go through this again and again, it serves only to aggravate legitimate creators and enrich the appropriators (keep in mind that commercial operations that have bought stolen designs have already paid for them, and probably won’t get their money back if they have to stop selling), there has to be another way. Here is where I must draw upon the Hive Mind: If you know of a company that sells this kind of stuff (your Hot Topics, your Forever 21s, that sort of place), perhaps one of you knows (or knows somebody that knows) one of their buyers?

I want to talk to that person. I want to ask what these retail operations do to limit their own liability (in both the legal and dammit we can’t sell this stock we paid for senses) in dealing with their vendors. Do they require good behavior from their suppliers? Are they to the point where they’re sick of having to deal with these situations? At what point does it prove a good business decision to cease doing business with a vendor who has a history of bad behavior?

I just want to ask one of them these questions, because I’m betting that the buyers for these sorts of retailers are actually like, say, independent comics creators — a relatively small community that knows each other and talks. It may well be that they’ve never considered the moral, legal, and financial implications of their vendor choice, and just need to work out some best practices on their own.

And if that meant that mall operations across the country decided they weren’t going to do business with a repeat ripoff artiste, that would be just awful.

Whew, I think I’ve finally caught up with everything that should have run yesterday. Onwards to things that didn’t crop up over the weekend tomorrow.

• Now available for your purchasing pleasure — Spacetrawler originals at the low, low price of $80, which is a damn bargain, especially considering that the originals are sepia-toned, not just black and white.
• Still running in Portland: Trek in the Park 2; while waiting for Khaaaaaan!! to overact, please enjoy some fanart from the always-interesting Bill Mudron and Mike Russell
• The good folks at the Cartoon Art Musuem wish to remind you that they will be at San Diego Comic Con, booth 1930 (Master List o’ Webcomickers amended to include this fact), and will be running the Fourth Annual CAM Sketch-a-thon Thursday, July 22 through Sunday, July 25, 2010. There’s a huge-ass list of highly skilled cartooners who will be taking part (including more than a few who make regular appearances on this page); for a $10 suggested donation, they will do their absolute best for YOU.
• The Dallas Webcomics Expo is back for a second year of fun come August (God willin’ an the creek don’t rise), and this year they’re adding a charitable component. To benefit the Texas Scottish Rite Hosptial for Children and Bryan’s House, DWEX will be conducting an art auction, and all are welcome to contribute originals within the show guidelines (at least 8″ x 10″, nothing R-rated, pleased). Submission form here, [PDF], and they’d like to physically receive the art by the 12th of next month (or bring it with you if you’re attending).
• Speaking of art auctions, as of time-of-writing, the Web-Comics Auction for the Gulf is sitting at a total of $3031.95, with a little less than two days to go on the first batch of art. Far be it from me to drive The Wedge of Envy between artists, but I am forced to note that at this time, Anthony Clark‘s contribution is currently out-pacing that of Christopher Hastings by fifteen dollars.

  Clark, of course, is the colorist of Dr McNinja, which sort of makes Hastings his boss. Will keeping these bid amounts where they are affect their working relationship? It could! It could destroy their sense of mutual respect and a beloved webcomic at the same time. Somebody better start a bidding war if Dr McNinja is to continue!

• Below the cut is a list of SDCC programming sessions that may be of interest to those working (or seeking to) in webcomickry. Actually, everything tagged webcomics is available here, including some things that are only marginally related to Our Interests. What’s called out are sessions that either weren’t tagged as webcomics-related, or were and I wanted to make sure you saw them.

(more…)

For those that didn’t see Tim Tylor’s comment in yesterday’s post, there’s an arguably happy ending to the Hot Topic/Kawaii Not dust-up:

About Hot Topic: All Kawaii Not merchandise there is OFFICIAL – and is good news for me and Kawaii Not. Turns out there was a miscommunication issue between me and my licensing company, but that has all been settled. So the bottom line? If you buy Kawaii Not at Hot Topic, you support me and the craziness! Hooray!

Yay for Megan Murphy; I still say that Hot Topic needs to clean its procurement process the hell up.

• It’s specifically for days like this that I don’t require people who make things I like (or people I know personally, for that matter) to get along with each other — I can like them separately just fine. If Gabe & Tycho’s take is that Jesse Thorn is likely a serial killer, I can live with that. Heck, Rene Engström can’t stand Radio Lab (although I don’t think she’d accuse Jad & Robert of having heads in their fridge). I can be the one guy that likes webcomics and public radio, that’s cool. In fairness, Jesse’s take on the PA situation is here.
• Overdue public thanks: the fine people (mostly, Gina Gagliano) at :01 have put me on their review copies distribution list, and I am being presented with more fine graphic novels than I can keep up with. Recurring themes: plucky teen girls, World War II, awesome cover designs by Colleen AF Venable, and a number of webcomics-related artists doing fantastic work. Proper reviews to be worked up.
• Know what just turned five years old? The Daily Grind Ironman Challenge; five years on, and seven webcomickers are still in the running for more than a thousand bucks. Literal updating machines have been out of the running for more than four years, and the last challenger to fall by the wayside did so more than ten months ago. How long can they last? How long can this madness continue?
• As long as we’re acknowledging longevity, congrats to David Malki ! on 600 installments of Wondermark, with one of those optical illusion deals that never works for me. DAMMIT.

Neatest thing I came across over the weekend: a collection of various [web]comickers, what they actually look like, and how they draw themselves. There are a couple of notable absences, particularly my favorite — the always-jolly Jon Rosenberg and his somewhat angry avatar. Then again, you get the likes of Rene Engström, Hurricane Erika, James Kochalka, and Meredith Gran. The best real-person likenesses ever aren’t there, but that’s because I’m not a cartoonist, I just get drawn by them occasionally. Be sure to read through the comments for KC Green, the Penny Arcade guys, Mitch Clem, John Allison, and more!

• Happy birthday wishes goin’ out today to Superosity (the strip, not creator Chris Crosby, which is eleven years old today) and Howard Tayler (the creator of Schlock Mercenary, not the strip, who’s 10 1/2, given that he was born on 29 February 1968 and the 29th hasn’t yet occurred eleven times since). Superosity has missed like one update out of 4000+, and as far as I know, Howard’s gotten up every day since he was born, which is a pretty amazing unbroken string of updates, matched only by every other early-middle-age dude out there (“Hi”). By the same token, happy 400th stripperversary to Twisted Musings, and sorry that you had to get mentioned the same day as Superosity, which makes everything else look new by comparison.
• No new word on the latest Hot Topic situation, but it’s getting some pretty wide press — The Consumerist is now reporting on the Kawaii Not button case. Seriously, it’s time to hold their feet to the fire and demand better sourcing practices from these bozos. Feel free to let them know how much they suck.
• Finally, a quick bookmark update for y’all — Dirk Tiede’s Paradigm Shift has just launched a new website, so if you’re in the habit of checking WebcomicsNation for it, you’ll want to follow the new link. Particularly if you want into on Tiede’s new book announcement this spring.