.....[Written the first week of April] I mentioned in a correspondence to someone in comics retail recently that this has been the worst April Fools' joke ever. I pointed out to him that I had also walked about a mile the morning after the 1997 blizzard, so there's your context.
.....If you're reading this in later years, I'm referring to the COVID-19 epidemic that has made it prudent for businesses involving high personal traffic to close in order to help stop the virus from spreading. That includes the largest comics distributor in the U.S., Diamond, which has chosen the first of April to be the first week in decades that it has shut down normal operations. They'll still restock stores with back catalog trade books, although I don't know where stores will still be open to the public. Savvy retailers are offering to ship merchandise to customers, but without new titles it's going to hard to maintain interest. So, we're at the point where I remember that I have a blog I can dust off and where you're bored enough to read it. The best place to start would be with an item I had been preparing for a post last year when a family issue took precedence.
.....[Flash forward a month] There still hasn't been any announcement from Diamond about resuming distribution, although their website has bizarrely continued to issue shipping updates every week. This must be someone perfunctorily passing on information from publishers. Ordinarily a retailer's decisions to order, reorder or cancel are informed by date changes (in theory), so rather than take the time to parse out whether or not the unprecedented shipless month makes that information irrelevant it would be quicker, easier and cheaper to just key in a page of information once a week and post it.
.....Speaking of keying in a page of information once a week and posting it...
.....The first two paragraphs were meant to introduce a new post, #68, which involved more than transposing memos to the screen but should never have taken a month to complete. Every time I sat down I wondered how the entry would read years from now when someone finds it through a term search for the post's topic. I've been fortunate enough that I've yet to hear about anyone I knew personally dying in the epidemic. I doubt that it would change the cavalier tone used above; it's my default writing voice, as well as a mechanism for functioning through grief. I'm less certain that the hypothetical reader will be so served by it. Yet, I wasn't certain that scrapping it and not mentioning the biggest elephant in comics' room at the moment was best either. The answer I should have come up with at the time was to split them into two posts, this being the first. It's always obvious in retrospect.
.....In post #68 it's back to the ephemera in my collection, and by way of a hint I'll just say that I hope the post results in high numbers.
.....If you're reading this in later years, I'm referring to the COVID-19 epidemic that has made it prudent for businesses involving high personal traffic to close in order to help stop the virus from spreading. That includes the largest comics distributor in the U.S., Diamond, which has chosen the first of April to be the first week in decades that it has shut down normal operations. They'll still restock stores with back catalog trade books, although I don't know where stores will still be open to the public. Savvy retailers are offering to ship merchandise to customers, but without new titles it's going to hard to maintain interest. So, we're at the point where I remember that I have a blog I can dust off and where you're bored enough to read it. The best place to start would be with an item I had been preparing for a post last year when a family issue took precedence.
.....[Flash forward a month] There still hasn't been any announcement from Diamond about resuming distribution, although their website has bizarrely continued to issue shipping updates every week. This must be someone perfunctorily passing on information from publishers. Ordinarily a retailer's decisions to order, reorder or cancel are informed by date changes (in theory), so rather than take the time to parse out whether or not the unprecedented shipless month makes that information irrelevant it would be quicker, easier and cheaper to just key in a page of information once a week and post it.
.....Speaking of keying in a page of information once a week and posting it...
.....The first two paragraphs were meant to introduce a new post, #68, which involved more than transposing memos to the screen but should never have taken a month to complete. Every time I sat down I wondered how the entry would read years from now when someone finds it through a term search for the post's topic. I've been fortunate enough that I've yet to hear about anyone I knew personally dying in the epidemic. I doubt that it would change the cavalier tone used above; it's my default writing voice, as well as a mechanism for functioning through grief. I'm less certain that the hypothetical reader will be so served by it. Yet, I wasn't certain that scrapping it and not mentioning the biggest elephant in comics' room at the moment was best either. The answer I should have come up with at the time was to split them into two posts, this being the first. It's always obvious in retrospect.
.....In post #68 it's back to the ephemera in my collection, and by way of a hint I'll just say that I hope the post results in high numbers.
