WAITING
FOR TOMMY
By
Richard Johnston
JOE
QUESADA: Best way to show comics are cool is have chicks
enjoy them. Guys follow the girls. Rock and Roll is cool because
of the p#$$y not the music and hair.
[Nick
planted in tongue firmly in his cheek (or was it Quesada's
cheek?) and ploughed on...]
NICK
BARRUCCI: How about Julie Strain holding up a comic featuring
a beautiful women, a big smile, and saying "Don't strain yourselves
over just the words - look at the pictures!"
Too obvious?
Comics!
The Best In Entertainment! *
*Unless
you go to a nudie bar! :-)
[Nick
then began a run down of the Got Milk campaign, and how that
lifted the product nationally over ten years. Which went on
for ages.]
JOE
QUESADA: Milk is available at every corner store so a
nationwide campaign makes absolute sense for them.
Most
Americans live hundreds of miles away from a place where they
can buy comics. Not everyone lives in the big city boys and
girls. National ad campaigns without national distribution
or ready availability is like taking your money, pissing on
it, drying it and then burning it for good measure.
We're
better off taking whatever money can be pooled together and
doing free sampling campaigns at national chains if we can
find a way to get them to take the product.
We are
a one distributor industry for the most part. We can blame
the boom, we can blame the speculator but for whatever reason
we overlook this huge problem.
National
ad campaigns will make us all feel better about ourselves,
but it isn't going to solve much. F#@%, Kevin Smith speaks
to more people about comics on a national level than we will
ever be able to. The problem is availability not exposure
at this point. I vote for fixing that problem before we fix
the perception.
Here's
the question to ask yourself. So, you make comics seem cool,
what happens then? How are these people going to get them?
They're going to look around, not find what they're looking
for, get frustrated and then leave. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WAS
SIGHTED AS A PROBLEM WITH MUCH OF THE MATERIAL OFFERED FOR
FCBD. Where can I get another Matrix comic? You think that's
a problem, take that and multiply it by millions of dollars
spent on TV or EW ads and by millions of peoples worth of
frustration.
Look,
I appreciate the energy here but we need to think with our
heads. This is like the argument I had with everyone over
FCBD being locked into May. I still feel it would have been
a better promotion to revolve around the upcoming Hulk, but
hey, I got outvoted. Of course next year we won't have a comic
book movie until July (Spider-Man) and I'll be damned if Marvel
is going to be interested in a FCBD in May with no movie behind
it. I doubt any publisher will because it'll be like throwing
our money away. And of course, why can't we lock FCBD to a
month regardless of Hollywood hype? Because we don't have
national chains to promote the event properly, it's all ground
level with cooperation as the sole coordination.
National
ads will look nice and make us feel like we're doing something
but they won't sell a single extra comic.
My vote
in this matter is give comics away for free to as many people
as you can.
And "F#@%
BOOKS!" says it all.
Pages:
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| 5 | 6
| 7 | 8
| 9 Continued
Here... |
