There's no free lunch but there is Free Comic Book Day (Sat May 6, 12-3PM)
Decades of economic orthodoxy overthrown!
It’s that time of year again…
Yes, it is the day when creators, publishers, distributors and local comic book shops put aside their differences and team up to make and deliver special free-edition comics to promote comic books and comic book shops with the primary message: we actually exist!
Everyone takes a haircut, and we stores end up paying about 25¢ plus shipping per book for what amounts to pretty effective advertising for the entire industry.
Now, you might wonder, given that the Free Comics do actually cost money to procure, and like the name says, they’re given out gratis, how do stores make money on Free Comic Book Day itself? In years past at our downtown megamart days, there would be snaking lines out the door, but unlike Record Store Day (which was ironically inspired by Free Comic Book Day), there wouldn’t be highly lucrative exclusives for sale. Do the people who pick up free comic books really end up buying more comic books than they would have on any other day?
Actually, yes! But for the first couple years at Fantastic Comics, we also spent quite a bit on prep and promotions, so much so that while revenues might be 40-50% more than on a regular Saturday, the take home profits ended up being a wash.
So we’ve wised up a little — in lieu of margin-killing sales of regular titles, we have…
A Yard Sale for the Glorious Benefit of Gizmo (Weather Permitting)
Bring cash (or Venmo, which I guess is what the kids call cash these days) and you can get half-priced books and other bargain titles that we normally don’t have the space to put out for our front sidewalk “yard” sale, and all of the proceeds will go directly to His Royal Gizness.
For post-cash folks, we can process credit card purchases through the store, and Gizmo will still get a cut, because let’s face it, Fantastic Comics is basically a tributary state in service to Emperor Giz.
Expect to see gems deep from the basement brought out for more convenient digging, as well as vintage (meaning they’ve been in storage for years) T-shirts!
All this is weather permitting, of course. Gizmo may be God Emperor of the Known Universe, but the Rains of May obey neither God, Man, nor Beast!
Lastly, we’ll be courting some dumb controversy with a tribute to Dumb Starbucks which we will cleverly call…
Even Dumber Starbucks!
Yes, inviting unwanted legal action from Starbucks is a danger, but perhaps Starbucks has other things on their mind at the moment.
Will we have actual DUMBER STARBUCKS coffee? It’s probably not a good idea to have hot brown fluid next to piles of comics, so we most likely won’t have coffee, save for whatever caffeinated courage Uel has brought for himself. We’ll make the plunge at making Fantastic Beverages a thing at some point, but rest assured, we have procured a stash of coffee candy to be rechristened DUMBER STARBUCKS COFFEE CANDY to give out on the most holiest of Free Comic Book Day.
In the vein of No Free Lunch…
Pandemics notwithstanding, so long as the comics industry exists, there will probably be a Free Comic Book Day every year in May, but for the most part, cool free things won’t be subsidized forever.
Last month showed a resurgence in handwringing about Substack prompted by a disastrous interview with its CEO. I say resurgence because this is a continuation of issues Tech Writer Annalee Newitz already raised a year back.
My take is that this kerfuffle is just a superficial symptom of a much deeper and more fundamental problem — there isn’t much to suggest Substack has a sustainable business model. For comic fans, we’ve most likely heard about Substack problems in the context of them poaching big name creators for exclusivity deals that they will definitely run out of money for. In other words, there’s a ticking clock as to how long we’ll be able to use it for our modest goals, which echo those of Newitz’s.
And so finally, last year, I started to consider Substack. Many writers I admire had started using it, and I thought: “Here’s a good way to send bulk email without getting caught in a spam filter.” That’s all I wanted -- a decent platform that wasn’t complicated like MailChimp, and didn’t charge high monthly rates to send more than 1,000 e-mails.
That’s just what we want, too! It’s a bit uncanny in that we actually were paying for MailChimp for awhile as well. It’s obviously a cost most businesses are willing to suffer for the outreach, and make no mistake, something as basic as email is not as easy to make free as it seems.
Substack has obviously put in a lot of work to make sure the posts get to where they’re going, which is less of a guarantee if we were to roll our own solution, but even with this privileged access, we’re probably still getting stuck in the spam filters of at least half the people who agreed to sign up for our mailing list. Or at least that’s what I flatter myself on thinking rather than our infrequent missives being just another email to be ignored.
In any case, this is what our outreach looks like when everything is working great. What happens when Substack can’t afford to keep the axles and gears properly greased? Last year, Substack laid off 13 of their 90 employees. We’ve already run into problems with Twitter breaking a lot of their APIs, and Instagram’s unpredictable feed behavior is no fun when we’re trying to let people know about timely events. Bizarrely, Tumblr, of all things, now seems to be the most stable and straightforward of platforms.
All this is to say that there are still Free Lunches in this world, but we can’t expect them to last, and we definitely shouldn’t make the mistake of taking them for granted.
And if there’s a group who doesn’t take things for granted…
Thank you, Patreon Supporters, Gizmo Gifters…
Last month, a reader offered to support this newsletter through Substack’s subscription payments. First of all, this is incredibly flattering and generous, but also a little awkward for me since much like Free Comic Book Day, this newsletter at its core is an advertisement for the store.
And it feels strange to have people support you for promoting a business1.
But with the passing of Eastwind Books, it’s clear that a lot of local businesses are also important cultural institutions, particularly in Berkeley, which absolutely make sense to support in ways beyond the “I sell a book, you buy a book” patronage. In economic terms these are positive externalities — the community, the promotion and education of the arts, and yes the free comics.
Similar to the tension that Substack faces in being both a utility-like email platform and also an editorial content merchant, Fantastic Comics is both a public good as a purveyor of comics culture and literacy, but also a for-profit business, and often the constraints of being one really hampers the other.
So in the long term, we’re thinking of ways to resolve this tension, exploring ideas of turning Fantastic Comics into a non-profit, and perhaps even a church. Why not a church? Our sacred texts are filled with the struggles of colorful gods, and most of our followers attend weekly services in the form of new comic book day.
But in the short term, thank our supporters who I’m going to assume are supporting Fantastic Comics the cultural gem of Berkeley, and not Fantastic Comics, the potentially lucrative but highly complicated tax shelter2. In a real sense, it is they who have made Free Comic Book Day possible.
To our Patreon and Gizmo-direct supporters, come on by — we have a pretty neat thank you gift we’d like to give to you in person, not least because mailing it out to you would be just one more thing we’d procrastinate on doing!
It’s not a tote bag. Though maybe we should make tote bags?
Also, if you’re thinking of joining our Patreon, here’s fair warning as Patreon also took part in layoffs last year, and as recently as 2019 didn’t think their business model was sustainable. I guess the worst thing that could happen, though, is they stop charging your card, and you’ll have to resort to manually sending Gizmo money instead.
Of course if the number of paid subscription offers start pouring in, I think we’ll get over this squeamishness. In any case, there’s zero plans to offer paywalls for our little newsletter. I mean, there’s barely any plans to even write the next issue!
So technically, our MLK location is just outside of this vaunted tax advantaged zone, but honestly, if you have the kind of resources to take advantage of this, you can put in enough capital so we can open up another location, perhaps even at our old spot on Shattuck, ha!