This incident happened a while ago, back around January. I’m just now getting around to posting the story. Yes, I still have serious issues with procrastination and work avoidance. I’m working on it.
Anyway. I’ve been a fan of comic books since I learned to read, although I don’t buy any on a regular basis any more. I got older, my tastes changed, comics changed, comics got more and more expensive and I needed the money for groceries. I still keep up with what’s going on with Marvel and DC, and I’ve seen most of the movies from both companies. (On DVD from the library. Movies got too expensive years ago. Not to mention crappy.) Avengers: Endgame seemed like a good stopping point: it was everything the comics I grew up with used to be but aren’t any more. The last movie I saw in a theater was Spider-Man: No Way Home, and that was mostly for the nostalgia factor; Tobey Maguire will always be my movie Spider-Man. The first comic book I’ve bought in years is the topic of this blog.
For the non-fans, a quick catch-up: Marvel and DC aren’t the only two companies, just the biggest. These days Marvel (Spider-Man; the X-Men) is owned by Disney, while Time/Warner owns DC (Batman and Superman). Then we have Image, Dark Horse, IDW and a bunch of other smaller companies floating around the edges. Plus there are independent creators who use crowdfunding platforms like Indigogo to bankroll their publishing efforts. All of these involve physical print endeavors. There may be other creators whose work is solely available on the internet, but I’m not familiar with them.
And now we’ve got Eric July.
Like me and a lot of other long-time fans, July had stopped buying books from the Big Two because he wasn’t happy with the direction the companies had taken and the disrespect he felt was being shown his childhood heroes. So he decided to make his own comics. Except he didn’t stop at just that. Instead of going the crowdfunding route, he chose to eliminate all the middlemen and start his own comic book company, creating, writing, printing and distributing graphic novels starring his own creations in his own shared universe. He hired an artist, put the book together, created some merchandise (shirts and posters), promoted all this on his YouTube channel and, in July 2022, opened up shop with a 70+-day sales campaign. The comic was a 90-some page graphic novel on quality paper, priced at $35. July’s stated campaign goal was $100,000 in sales.
By the end of the campaign, he had earned $3.7 million. That’s million with a capital M, folks. Not bad for his first-ever comic book.
There’s more to his story—his second issue’s sales campaign is currently ongoing, and a lot of folks in the industry and on YouTube and Twitter are not at all pleased by his success. But that’s not what this story’s about. This is just the background. We now return to your regularly scheduled blog, already in progress.
I wasn’t part of the initial campaign. I came in when the mudslinging started. It made for entertaining viewing on July’s YouTube channel. I looked into his website and decided $35 was too much for my wallet at that point in time. However, my finances picked up after Christmas, so for my January birthday I decided to treat myself and support a fellow writer and former mainstream comics fan by buying a copy of his book.
This is where I ran afoul of the US Postal Service.
I had no trouble placing my order and paying for my purchase. Mr. July had no trouble accepting my money and shipping me my book. They even sent me an email letting me know the order had been filled, with a tracking number so I could follow its journey. (The new company is in Texas, while I’m in Pennsylvania.) I had fun checking in once or twice a day to see how things were going. Anticipation soared when I saw the book had arrived at the Lancaster distribution center and would probably be delivered at my house the following day.
Here’s where the system broke down.
The next morning I logged on and clicked the tracking info. The book was still in Lancaster. Then it was en route to Ephrata. Then it was in Ephrata. Then communication stopped. There was no information; the book had disappeared. Oh wait, there it was. For reasons known only to the postal gods, my package, which had made it all the way from Texas and safely arrived at the Ephrata Post Office, which is maybe a mile from where I live, had inexplicably been rerouted and delivered to the Christiana Post Office on the other side of the county. Uh, whut?
Time to take personal action. Armed with my tracking number, I drove over to the PO and asked them what happened. They didn’t know. They had no explanation. The best they could give me was that the package had somehow been mislabeled and sent to Christiana by mistake. How did it get mislabeled? Shrugs all around. It must have had the right label on it to start with or it wouldn’t have been sent to Ephrata. So the mislabeling had to have happened at the Ephrata Post Office. Why and by whom? Again, no concrete answers. It was probably a machine because we all know government employees never make mistakes. All they could do was have it sent back to the Lancaster distribution center and start over. All I could do was go home and wait.
Well, they did get it sorted out by that evening, as I saw on the tracking info. It was returned to the Ephrata PO by morning and I finally got it by noon. The book was in good shape. Nice quality product. The story and art wasn’t bad. Better than I’ve seen from a lot of offers out of the Big Two lately. If Mr. July can keep this up, he’s got a winner on his hands. Can’t say the same for the Post Office.
This may wind up becoming a continued story. Like I said, July’s currently running his second campaign for issue #2. This time I ordered early. He’s going to start shipping orders out at the end of this month, via UPS. UPS has announced it’s going on strike at the start of August. Here we go again. Well, I’ve still got all my old comic books stashed in the closet. At least I’ll have something to read.
