It's a real shame. Feels like the comic like the show has had a chance to grow into something rather fun and cool.
Perhaps they are selling to the wrong retailers. Here in uk i imagine comic book shops might have had it. But seeing as it is mainstream why not sell it in mainstream bookshops? I didn't go out my way to find this comic and it never appeared on my radar except on tfw. There is the uk rid magazine which is currently out that i saw on the weekend in a mainstream bookshop(wh smiths) but i dont think it has the comic story in it. Edit: it does have the comic story in it i think. Which is good because often i find the kids magazines have so little in them. I might be wrong but in the old days transformers from marvel were available from the corner shop.
Maybe series like that should be distributed to newsstands and bookstores with kid's books, as they're not really adressed at hardcore comic book fans. Disney comics are going this route. But then, it would also require TF cartoons being much more widely available than they're now... Specialised comic book shops are known to be a dead end since some time. The highest point for comic books was when they were available at newsstands and in corner shops, not when they're confined to shops for collectors. There's a distinct lack of the "Pop" in this pop-art these days and it's a problem not only with TF books.
Retailers are right in this case. It's just not necessary and the market likely doesn't support it. This has a show, and there are other comics. This is overkill.
I hope both the writer and artist continue to get some work in IDW. The writing in the second issue was kind of a little too light in content, but I really enjoyed 1 and 3 so kudos to Ball for that. Meanwhile I think Tramontano has been doing a great job with the art throughout the series initial run. I'm not sure what her less stylized TF take would be, but I'd love to see her at least as a fill-in artist on one of the other books. (Maybe Til All Are One?)
Retailers aren't the ones to arbitrarily decide. Plenty of franchises have both comic books and tv shows and it works. The supply and demand should be the sole test how needed something is. The problem with a comic book market is that it does exist in a state of pathology - many new books will never have a fair shot at even a chance to test itself magainst the supply and deemand because they can't pass through the retailer mafia.
So the whole rebranding of the original RID comic is now entirely pointless. I'm sorry but if the series was possibly gonna end this quickly they should have just given it a different name. Also can't say I'm all that surprised given how RID season 2 is seeming to be cut short. Selling RID to a majority of the older fans was an up hill battle in the first place so the comic not doing well doesn't surprise me.
A long time ago, manufacturers would take back unsold toys in order to encourage toy retailers to order in bulk and take more chances. But here you are, blaming the LITTLE GUY, the comic shop owner, for trying to protect his DYING BUSINESS. All I'm saying is that the publisher could offer an incentive, or a willingness to take back and reimburse for unsold stock, rather than passing the blame to the end retailer. You wanna blame the "retailer mafia", fine - but please consider everyone else's fault. This retailer blame nonsense seems like convenient scapegoating by a comic publisher who doesn't want to take the financial risk either.
I think people are just in denial. Most kids don't give a crap about comic books. Go in any comic book shop and what age are the majority of customers. 20+ This is a kids looking book so its a no wonder it gets put in the kids section. MTMTE & TF are pretty popular here on the board. How many of those readers also buy RID? I'd guess nowhere near as many. As for selling it on newsstands. What newsstands? Outside of comic shops, its rare to find comics sold anywhere. Most bookstores are gone leaving mainly Barnes & Knobles and some grocery stores. I've never seen IDW books sold outside comic shops. Most you can find are Marvel, DC, Dark Horse (at least when they had Star Wars), & whoever makes Simpsons. Recently they sell even less. They had 2 spinners but now they just get put on a shelf in with the magazines.
I've purchased every issue so far, but have yet to actually sit down and read any. I'm not really surprised though, like Matty said, the RID just isn't doing it, apparently... it is super weird how comic shops order and how sales work, because they're not true numbers. We see Marvel boast about selling 200k copies of something, but then you go into any shop and they've got 10 copies they can't get rid of, so it's not accurate in the slightest.
I don't really blame small comic shops, because it's normal that they will play on the safe side not taking unnecessary risk. But at the same time, I don't really care about them. Interests of readers, publishers and retailers aren't necessarily the same. It was mostly publishers who dug the industry in this place, not like there was any effort to influence retailers or to find other ways of distribution. Personally I think that comic book shops will die out eventually, it's unavoidable, and comics are a medium that should be moving to digital and motion book apps because this is modern equivalent of newsstands. Print's ok... for trades. Precisely because NuRiD was a kids book it could be marketed outside of comic book shops, like Disney and Titan magazines are. Except not as a comic book, but as a magazine for kids with comic strips inside. Funny, recently those strips were recycled into a kids magazine...
That's a shame because I was really enjoying the story and what it was building up to. I actually felt it was a much better story than the TV show.
